I'm going to pin my colours to the mast now and admit that I listen to the BBC Radio 4 Today programme in the morning whilst getting ready for work.  The last item on todays programme was a piece about a letter that was written by a convicted burglar that was supposed to be sent to his victim.  In short he told them it was their own fault and outlined some measures they could have taken that would have reduced the chances of being targeted.  Needless to say the police didn't forwarded the letter to the victims.

The piece on the Today programme pitched Peter Hitchens, a columnist, against Lizzie Nelson, director of the Restorative Justice Council.  The permise of the debate was whether you can force a sense of remorse in a criminal.  Obviously starting with the above letter it appears you can. Nelson retorted with references to statistics that proved that it did work.  They discussed the case of a collaboration between a school and police in which people stopped for speeding outside the school were offered the choice between taking the points on their licence or going up in front of a panel of children from the school to explain their actions - I'll return to this later.

One point raised by Hitchens, and pretty much ignore by the Today programme presenter and Nelson, was that if you compare a moderately effectual system (the Restorative Justice paradigm) against an ineffectual system (the current criminal justice system in the UK) then the moderately effectual system will appear to provide good results.  I really wish they had time to explore this more as this is, I think, critical to planning the future of crime management.

Let me make an analogy.  Lets compare the current justice system to an old rust bucket of a car, the clutch has gone, the exhaust is hanging off, the heaters broken and if it's rained in the last week the headlights wont come on.  Now, I could go and find the cheapest, road worthy, replacement I can find for a hundred pounds.  Yes, it would get me on the roads again and it would get me from A to B but for how long?  The chances are that in six months I'll need to find myself another car.  In my opinion that's what Restorative Justice is, yes it may look like it's making a difference in the short term but what is the real long-term outlook?  Personally I'd rather pay a bit more and get a proper upgrade that's going to last.

So coming back to the speeders vs. school children experiment.  Will that sort of justice really work?  No!  My guess is that anyone that has exceeded the speed limit past a school is aware that they're doing it.  Those people that went before the children may have been remorseful at the time but give it a month or two and as they're rushing to get to a meeting they're running late for they'll have forgotten all about it.  This experiment was no more effective that bringing the stocks back to town squares so that criminals could have rotten fruit thrown at them.

On a final note, I'm going to prefix this with a sarcasm warning for those without a sense of humour, the only system that has proven a 100% success rate in eliminating re-offending by criminals is capital punishment.  Maybe we should propose re-introducing that?  It would elimininate re-offending and reduce the numbers of criminals in our prisions at the same time - who could argue with that?!