Restorative Practice Resources Tagged With: New Zealand

Sara Templeton wants to meet her online bully face to face.

The Christchurch city councillor wants to go through a restorative justice process with an online troll.

She has had experience with these processes in the past and knows how useful they can be for both parties.

Templeton is also calling for a review of the Harmful Digital Communications Act after receiving a number of messages from people who have had mixed success with the act.

Each day, during International Restorative Justice Week —17–24 November 2019 — @Restorative City Whanganui will share a restorative message. Here is the message for Day 2:

'Mr Gordon Ramsay MLA, will learn and share experiences with New Zealand counterparts as he continues the push to establish Canberra as a restorative city and gathers insights from Rotorua’s Dementia-Friendly city initiative.'

'ABSTRACT Restorative justice is regarded in modern criminal justice systems as one approach to address inadequacies in the conventional justice model. New Zealand has become a leader in implementing legislatively mandated restorative procedures. This reputation is due in part to a handful of supportive statutes: the Sentencing Act 2002, the Victims’ Rights Act 2002, the Parole Act 2002, the Corrections Act 2004 and subsequent amendments to those acts. In this article, I evaluate the practices bolstered by these acts and how effectively they operate, accounting for how legislative design may contribute to achievements and shortcomings in New Zealand's restorative justice programmes. I supplement the results by comparing New Zealand's efforts to those in Vermont, a U.S. state similarly well-regarded for its restorative policies. The evaluation of each jurisdiction's restorative justice programme is based on metrics for restorative success from Bazemore and Schiff (2005. Juvenile justice reform and restorative justice: building theory and policy from practice. Cullompton: Willan Publishing). I employ qualitative and quantitative data, surveying existing evaluations of restorative justice in New Zealand and Vermont, collecting longitudinal statistics, and conducting interviews with restorative justice practitioners. Overall, this analysis reveals that the design of restorative justice programmes requires negotiation; it is difficult to balance the dimensions of effective restorative justice with the needs of modern justice systems.'

'He tries to remind society that we are called to "stand in awe of what these people have to carry, instead of judgment in how they carry it". His world view grates against the ongoing commentary about gangs, whether in the US, New Zealand, or pretty much anywhere. Just in the past month, Simon Bridges blamed Labour for being soft on crime, which he claimed led to an increase in gangs who "peddle misery". He later walked back his comments by saying he believed in "redemption", but there still needed to be a crackdown on criminals. '

' Using the index in this study, Walton says the panels reduce harm by 22.25 per cent compared to the control group. The study concludes iwi panels are therefore an effective alternative justice resolution process, because they reduce the harm caused by reoffending. "By doing the iwi panel we don't take away all of the risk," says Walton. "By evaluating it from the perspective of harm we get a different result than if we just looked at raw counts of crime.'