Probation Pilot Project

“It went good, good for us both to leave on mutual ground ... It’s good to clear your mind and helps to hear the other side of things.”

We are working alongside the Oxfordshire Probation Delivery Unit (PDU) to pilot embedding restorative justice and restorative practice in their way of working. We’re taking a small number of cases to explore the feasibility of scaling restorative cases.

Results so far include two face to face restorative meetings involving a person on probation and those harmed by their offence and several expressions of remorse. Attention also focused on how restorative practice can feed into sentence planning.

Cases do not always end in a facilitated meeting between the victim and person on probation. This isn’t always what the parties involved desire. However, the restorative process means that all affected parties get a voice and have the opportunity to share their story and find a way forward. Results have included facilitated meetings, restorative supervisions within PDU, restorative sentence planning, letter writing between the victim and person on probation, etc. 

We are measuring the impact on everyone involved, including the PDU, victims, people on probation, and the facilitators involved. We’re also measuring the change in victim empathy and using a model of qualitative, storied evaluation to better understand the impact from the participants’ perspectives.