Dr. Ian D. Marder:

I thank the Deputy. The system they have in Northern Ireland is that the court is required to make a referral for all cases, apart from those that would result in a mandatory life sentence, so not for murder or terrorism. For all other cases, the court is required to refer to restorative justice, in between conviction and sentencing, where the child consents to that. That does not mean restorative justice takes place in every case but it does mean there is a requirement to explore whether restorative justice is possible in that case. As I mentioned, that has correlated with a very significant reduction in the use of imprisonment for children in Northern Ireland.

This means that children and their families can be involved in deciding what needs to happen next in order to prevent it from happening again. It also means the victim is enabled to participate in that process. Victims gain very high levels of satisfaction from restorative justice. The North has published some evaluations and annual statistics. The evaluation of its system found that victim participation was very high at 69%. They included personal victims and also people representing those victims. They found victim satisfaction was above 75% each year. The point of having it before the criminal procedure is completed is that the judge is permitted, not required, to take it into account. What we find in Northern Ireland is that a very high number of judges effectively sign off on the restorative justice agreement as the sentence. The evaluation found 67% of agreements were ratified by the court in their original form. The judge can choose to add things to them or not ratify them all. More recently, a 2015 review found ratification rates rose to between 76% and 78%. This means that, even though the judge is permitted to vary what happens and to sentence as they wish to sentence, the agreements reached at restorative justice stage have very high rates of legitimacy among the Judiciary whereby those agreements are deemed to be appropriate in terms of being part of the sentence.

There are also very high rates of compliance with these agreements. A 2019 review of cases referred by the prosecution service found that there were 560 diversionary conferences completed every year between 2015 and 2018, with an average of only 15 returned to prosecutors for non-compliance. That is an enormous rate of compliance with those agreements among the young the people. This helps to explain why there is lower reoffending among the young people who participate in those conferences. A 2014 review of the Northern Irish work found that reoffending after a youth conference order was at 54% compared with 63% for young people who received a probation or supervision order.