Social Work Now, Issue 27, pages 6-12
In 1989, new legislation resulted in a new youth justice system for New Zealand that is now recognised as the first formal adoption by the legal system in any country of a system of justice based on restorative principles and practice. It also introduced the family group conference (FGC), which has since become the prototype for restorative conferencing processes, used as an alternative to sentencing in the criminal courts. From 1990 to 1991, Allison Morris and I were fortunate enough to be able to evaluate the effectiveness of the new system and the results of that research were published in 1993 (Maxwell & Morris, 1993). At that time, the focus of our research was primarily on the extent to which the new Act achieved its objectives and it was too soon to collect data on the longer-term outcomes for those children and young people who became involved with it.
In 1999 we obtained funding for a new study on achieving effective outcomes (AEO, Maxwell et al, 2003) that was designed to provide more reliable answers to questions about the impact of the key new restorative youth justice processes and the factors involved in best practice. This research is reported here. The goals of this study have included examining the extent to which the goals of the youth justice legislation are being met, and a summary of these findings is presented in the first part of this two-part article. Other goals included determining the extent to which restorative aspects of process are achieved and identifying best practice by determining practice factors associated with reoffending and the factors related to achieving positive outcomes. It is these goals that will be presented in part two of the paper.
Methodology
A sample of 24 youth justice coordinators was selected who varied with respect to age, ethnicity, sex and practice. Another group of 1,003 young people who were at least 15 years and 9 months old around 1998, at the time they had a FGC facilitated by the selected coordinators, was drawn from the files of Child, Youth and Family to provide a retrospective sample. Around a third were Mäori, 15 per cent of them were female and 15 per cent were Pacific Island young people.
The prospective study
A sample of 115 FGCs was obtained in 2001/02. These comprise a prospective sample that will be followed up in 2003/04. These conferences were facilitated by 18 of the same 24 coordinators whose cases made up the retrospective sample or by an additional Pacific coordinator especially recruited for the prospective study. Interviews were conducted with at least 100 young people, families and victims after the conclusion of the conference and Youth Court proceedings. Second follow up interviews with victims were also conducted when any actions that the young person had promised to perform for the victim should have been completed.
Police Youth Diversion study
Other data come from a study of 1,794 cases involving young people apprehended by the police in 2000/01 and from Child, Youth and Family files on the entire 6,309 cases referred for a FGC in 1998. An initial report describing the processes operated by the New Zealand Police has already been published (Maxwell et al, 2002), and further work is currently underway to relate experiences of diversion to reoffending data.
Additional sources
The New Zealand Police, the Ministry of Justice, Department of Child, Youth and Family Services and Department for Courts have all supplied additional relevant data from 1987 to the present time on young people who have offended.