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Restorative Justice for Victims, Offenders and the Community
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About victim-offender mediation and reconciliation...
Victim-Offender Mediation Programs (VOMP), also known as Victim-Offender Reconciliation Programs (VORP) is a restorative justice approach that bring offenders face-to-face with the victims of their crimes with the assistance of a trained mediator, usually a community volunteer. Crime is personalized as offenders learn the human consequences of their actions, and victims (who may be ignored by the criminal justice system) have the opportunity to speak their minds and their feelings to the one who most ought to hear them, contributing to the healing process of the victim.
Offenders take meaningful responsibility for their actions by mediating a restitution agreement with the victim, to restore the victims' losses, in whatever ways that may be possible. Restitution may be monetary or symbolic; it may consist of work for the victim, community service or anything else that creates a sense of justice between the victim and the offender.
Victim-Offender Mediation Programs have been mediating meaningful justice between crime victims and offenders for over twenty years; there are now thousands of such programs worldwide. Remarkably consistent statistics from a cross-section of the North American programs show that about two-thirds of the cases referred resulted in a face-to-face mediation meeting; over 95% of the cases mediated resulted in a written restitution agreement; over 90% of those restitution agreements are completed within one year. On the other hand, the actual rate of payment of court-ordered restitution (nationally) is typically only from 20-30%.
Why is there such a huge difference in restitution compliance? Offenders seldom experience court-ordered restitution as a moral obligation. It seems like just one more fine being levied against them by an impersonal court system. When the restitution obligation is reached voluntarily and face-to-face, offenders experience it in a very different way. Perhaps most important, after facing the victims of their crimes, offenders commit fewer and less serious offenses than similar offenders who are processed by the traditional juvenile or criminal justice system.
The Victim-Offender Reconciliation Program (VORP) Information and Resource Center provides:
Blogs from India:
Restorative Justice Project in India: Life, Justice, Injustice and TransformationDepression, Crime and Restorative Justice in India Restorative Justice/Victim-Offender Mediation Video (Now Also Available With Spanish Subtitles!)
Dispute Resolution Magazine, Published by the American Bar Association, Fall 2001
View article on Restorative Justice in Mexico.Our mission is to bring restorative justice reform to our criminal and juvenile justice systems, to empower victims, offenders and communities to heal the effects of crime, to curb recidivism and to offer our society a more effective and humanistic alternative to the growing outcry for more prisons and more punishment.
Our associates include mediators and trainers with backgrounds in psychotherapy, education, public administration and law. The Center serves non-profit organizations, governmental agencies and individuals.
For more about victim-offender mediation and reconciliation, generally, see the article Crime and Punishment: Can Mediation Produce Restorative Justice for Victims and Offenders?
About the Mediation of Drunk Driving Deaths and Other Severely Violent Crimes Articles: About victim-offender mediation, generally, and specialized articles:
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