Restorative Justice for the Young Offenders

RestorativeThinking Limited is set-up to specialise in a wide range of restorative justice programmes to help those in prisons, children’s centres, and schools. In conjunction with Odd Arts a variety of arts are relied on to help with transforming, inspired, and challenging the lives of the more excluded and vulnerable people. 

This company has been able to create a complete restorative justice intervention and prevention toolkit which was developed with the youth in mind and is presented to the target audience by the trained members of the Youth Offender Service. 

A restorative toolkit is design to cover all aspect of this process in the criminal justice system, and identifying how the young people can most beneficially use this process to assist in resolving their personal crimes or offence. A further quality of relying on this approach is to pass on the understanding, knowledge, and skills from this process which are helpful in the future to mange conflicts or daily challenges, and become more effective at solving problems without confrontation. 

Depending on the circumstances, a restorative programme is delivered in a one on one environment or small group of 5 to 8 young offenders. An introduction to the more specialist arts comes from Odd Arts who are know to offer some of the most effective courses in this area for the community and criminal justice settings. 

Beyond creating the actual kits for the restorative service, they are able to assist in several different areas, from training the probation staff, prison staff, and YOS staff to providing a parenting programme. 

In order to effectively use the toolkit in the various different services, it is first necessary to make certain the ideal level of training is provided. By providing a complete training course it will be much easier to use this type of service as part of the arsenal in the rehabilitation process. A desired outcome of this type of teaching and programme is that the offender has a better appreciation of restorative justice, manage day-to-day issues using this process, and likely to have better victim awareness. 

A further area covered relates to a parenting programme which is designed to help the families start to reconnect in the hope of provide a more loving and supportive living environment in the future. By getting involved with the support networks it comes much easier to understand the behaviour of the children and learn the more productive steps for helping in the future. 

Restorative Thinking was established in 2012 by director Lesley Parkinson to work with teachers, school leaders, advisers and consultants in order to better achieve its aims.