Community involvement in restorative justice: lessons from an English and Welsh case study on youth offender panels

Restorativists have always promoted (and, indeed, fiercely defended) the involvement of the community in restorative justice programmes. Nevertheless, in order to justify community participation in restorative processes, they have often relied on assumptions that have not yet been empirically verified. The research on which this article is based was aimed at confronting such assumptions. A case study approach was adopted to examine the involvement of the community in one selected practice of restorative justice, namely youth offender panels in England and Wales. Data collection comprised interviews with key stakeholders involved in the process, as well as observation of panel meetings and examination of related documents. Through a qualitative analysis of the data, an attempt to understand the meaning and impact of ‘community involvement’ in youth offender panels was made. This article summarises the main findings and reflects on the implications of the English and Welsh experience for the development of a more coherent framework when operationalising community involvement in restorative justice programmes.