In emphasizing offender correction and restoration to the community, law enforcement authorities in Japan have learned that encouraging confession, remorse, victim compensation, and victim pardon is essential to correcting socially deviant behaviol: US. experience with victim-oflender mediation in the context of a broad program of commonly bused reintegrative efforts suggests that the Japanese approach is at least partly transferable. Thus, anywhere victim-offender mediation is to become more than a victim assistance program, its expansion in concert with other reintegrative, community-bused programs should be a high priority.In the United States, the first experiments with structured programs for mediation in criminal cases apparently began in the late 1960s in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and in Hartford, Connecticut, under American Arbitration Association sponsorship with funding from the Ford Foundation (Kole, 1973;Hoff, 1974). Referred to somewhat misleadingly-for mediation became their primary emphasis-as 4-A Projects (Arbitration as an Alternative), those early efforts were followed in the 1970s by a variety of other projects (see, for example, Beer, 1986;Rice, 1977;Snyder, 1978;Stulberg, 1975). Prominent among these were victim-offender reconciliation programs (VORPs) organized as voluntary private nonprofit agencies with strong support from religious communities (see Umbreit, 1985). Other efforts, exemplified by victim-offender mediation through community dispute resolution centers, reflected an extension to criminal cases of civic efforts that had begun as informal extrajudicial alternatives for settlement of neighborhood disputes. A few states, notably New York, expanded these early experiments into state-funded mediation centers operating under the auspices of formal law enforcement authorities and victim-assistance programs. A quarter of a century later, hundreds of victimoffender mediation projects and programs were operating throughout the United States and Canada and an increasing number of similar programs had