On a yearly basis between 4.000 and 4.500 underage suspects in Flanders accept the offer of Restorative Justice. A many cited definition of Restorative Justice has been developed by Lode Walgrave: ‘Restorative Justice is every action that is primarily oriented toward doing justice by repairing the harm that has been caused by the crime’.
Commissioned by the Flemish Minister of Welfare, Public Health and Family an evaluation of Restorative Justice for minors was conducted by Bureau Beke. In the article the authors reflect on Restorative Justice in Flanders and describe the most important findings of their research. The process of Restorative Justice, the satisfaction of the parties involved and its results are considered. The authors offer organizations several suggestions related to developing established procedures and practices. Furthermore results show that suspects and victims are satisfied with Restorative Justice, which yields several benefits for the parties involved: Reparation for victims and learning effects and reduced contacts with counseling agencies for suspects. An important overall conclusion is that face-to-face contact between victim and suspects is beneficial for the mediation process and subsequently repairing the harm.

Contemporary scholarly literature is full of references to the crisis of the criminal justice system. The general public seems to increasingly lose confidence in the criminal justice system and its actors. In this article we look into the potential manners in which restorative justice practices can enhance the legitimacy of the criminal justice system. Our analysis is based on the observation that by actively engaging victims and defendants in the resolution of their conflict, restorative practices seem to accommodate a necessary condition of procedural fairness. Since research on procedural justice and legitimacy in turn suggests that the legitimacy of the criminal justice system is based largely upon its perceived procedural fairness, we investigate whether participation in restorative practices improves perceptions of the legitimacy of the criminal justice system. To that end we describe the results of a qualitative study on the experiences of victims and defendants who participated in victim-offender mediation in Belgium. Relating their experiences to the antecedents of procedural justice as described in the literature, we find that restorative practices in different ways enhance perceptions of procedural fairness. Yet these perceptions do not necessarily reflect on the criminal justice system. Our analysis suggests that the degree to which the perceptions of procedural fairness resulting from participation in a restorative practice influence an individual’s perceptions of the legitimacy of the criminal justice system depends on whether the restorative practice is seen as an integral part of the criminal proceedings. We found, for example, that this is more likely to be the case if the judge at trial formally acknowledges the parties’ participation in mediation. We conclude that more research on the degree to which people perceive the restorative practice to be a part of the criminal proceedings is needed in order to further flesh out this issue.

Since 2001, the Netherlands have broadened their array of antiterrorism legislation and policies. However, there is hardly any insight into the level of public support for them. This article assesses the Dutch public opinion on four measures that were recently made effective: enhanced possibilities for stop-and-search, broadening of possibilities for special investigative resources, increased obligations for identification, and body scans in airports. Two randomly selected, comparable groups were asked different questions about these issues: attitudes or willingness to pay. The results show that respondents have positive attitudes towards newly introduced antiterrorism measures, yet simultaneously, they have low willingness to pay. Both groups were also asked how they would allocate an imaginary fixed budget to various criminal justice policies and tax rebate. These results show similar relations for both attitudes and willingness to pay, suggesting they both measure the relative importance assigned to antiterrorism policies. A right political orientation predicts both positive attitudes and high willingness to pay. Furthermore, people with high income have higher willingness to pay. The results underline the necessity to pay attention to the subtleties underlying public opinion on crime control.

Public safety governance has been characterised in many ways. Literature mentions traditional sanctions for purposes of repression, policy programs aiming for prevention, as well as cooperation of public, private and hybrid organizations in addressing public safety problems. Very recently, a so called culture of precaution, in which problems of public safety are to be addressed at a very early – premature – stage, would have entered the scene. This potential culture of precaution is topic of this article. The article aims to indicate the empirical manifestations of a culture of precaution, as mentioned in literature, in contemporary public safety governance. The central question is as follows: to what extent and in what way is contemporary public safety governance on municipality level characterised by the precautionary principle? Five municipalities within the police region of Utrecht, varying in size from 40.000 to 300.000 citizens, have been studied; Amersfoort, Bunschoten, Utrecht, Woerden and Zeist. In total 153 measures addressing problems of public safety have been analyzed for characteristics of precaution. In order to do so, a model has been developed which locates precaution next to traditional strategies for addressing public safety. It will be demonstrated that a culture of precaution is not empirically present in public safety governance on municipality level. However, contemporary public safety governance does appear to posses some minor characteristics of the precaution paradigm.