RJ in the post-sentencing stage

• In Event: Restorative Justice in Europe – the European landscape in the context of the International Encyclopaedia of Restorative Justice

Abstract

One of the rather new developments is the implementation of restorative justice measures in the post-sentencing stage. The CoE Recommentaion (2018) 8 emphasises the importance to introduce restorative elements in the post-sentencing stage, in particular in prison settings. On the one hand this means providing victim-offender encounters (not necessarily with the individual victim, but with victim’s representatives, which can be seen as part of victim awareness programmes) or efforts to mediation or compensation in favour of victims by the offender. A second pillar is the conflict resolution within prisons in cases of e.g. violence between prisoners and/or between staff members and prisoners. The present comparative analysis of restorative justice approaches in the prison system revealed that 28 of the 48 countries (= 58.3 per cent) in 2025 had legal requirements or corresponding projects which may be characterised as ‘restorative’ in the framework of resocialisation measures, victim-offender encounters, restorative services or dispute resolution within the prison system. The paper will present some examples of these RJ-approaches.

Author

• Frieder Dunkel, Professor, Greifswald University