Juvenile courts have increasingly been interested in using restitution as a sanction for juvenile offenders, but until recently very little information has been available on the effects of restitution. To assess the impact of restitution on recidivism rates of juveniles, a series of experiments was undertaken as part of a national evaluation of the Juvenile Restitution Initiative, which was funded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP). This study reports on the results from one of those experiments. The findings from the Clayton County, Georgia, experiment indicate that youths required to make restitution to their victims either through community service or monetary payments generally had lower recidivism rates than those given more traditional juvenile court dispositions. Furthermore, the results clearly suggest that restitution works quite well on its own and does not need to be combined with mental health counseling. In contrast with many other types of delinquency programs, the restitution intervention not only had a positive impact when contrasted with traditional dispositions, but actually slowed the delinquency rate of the group. The overall offense rate of the restitution-only group, for example, dropped from approximately one offense per youth, per year, to .74 offenses, per youth for a one-year time period.
Judges frequently require that offenders, as a condition of probation, make restitution to their victims. Less frequently, restitution is ordered as a sole sanction, with no additional penalties or requirements. This paper, based on data from more than 10,000 juvenile court cases involving restitution, com pares the outcomes of cases in which offenders were sentenced to restitution as a condition of probation with those in which offenders were ordered to make restitution as a sole sanction. The data indicate that youths receiving restitu tion as a sole sanction are more likely to complete the order successfully and less likely to commit new offenses while under the jurisdiction of the restitution project.
Programmatic" and "ad hoc" approaches to restitution can be distinguished by the fact that the former usually involves a full-fledged restitution program with counselors or case workers who are responsible for liaison with victims, documentation of victim losses, development of restitution recommendations as part of the pre-sentence investigation, and implementation and monitoring of the restitution requirements. In an "ad hoc" approach, restitution is ordered on a relatively infrequent basis and, when ordered, it tends to be viewed as a relatively minor part of the probationary requirements, with little or no assistance given to either victims or offenders.The findings in this study show, first, that a programmatic, as compared to an ad hoc, approach to restitution in Dane County, Wisconsin clearly increased the likelihood that juveniles would repay victims and increased the amount of restitution. The second finding is that juveniles who completed their restitution requirements were less likely to reoffend than were youths who did not complete their restitution. A multiple regression analysis indicated that this effect was probably independent of other factors.***
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