First Advisor

Charles Tracy

Term of Graduation

Fall 2000

Date of Publication

11-3-2000

Document Type

Thesis

Department

Criminology and Criminal Justice

Language

English

Subjects

Recidivism -- Oregon -- Portland Metropolitan Area, Mediation -- Oregon -- Portland Metropolitan Area, Victims of crimes -- Oregon -- Portland Metropolitan Area, Reparation (Criminal justice) -- Oregon -- Portland Metropolitan Area

DOI

10.15760/etd.2288

Physical Description

1 online resource (2, 55 pages)

Abstract

Victim-offender mediation, a component of restorative justice, has been a valuable tool for rehabilitating juvenile offenders since the late 1970s. Victim offender mediation brings crime victims and offenders together to reach agreements for restitution and community healing. Resolutions Northwest, a non-profit organization in Multnomah County, offers a victim-offender mediation program to juvenile offenders and their victims.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the recidivism rates for juvenile offenders who went through Resolutions Northwest's victim-offender mediation program as opposed to offenders who went through the traditional justice system. It was hypothesized that the participants in this program would have lower recidivism rates than the juvenile offenders who were not given this restorative justice option.

Records on juvenile offenders who successfully completed the victim-offender mediation program were collected from Resolutions Northwest. These records were then compared to a secondary data set. This secondary data was from the Tri-County Juvenile Information System database, supplied by the Multnomah County Department of Adult and Community Justice to Professor William Feyerherm as part of the Casey Foundation supported Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative.

It was found that 41.6% of the Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative group reoffended within one year of their original arrest. In comparison, only 20.3% of the Resolutions Northwest group reoffended within a year of their victim-offender mediation program completion. It was also investigated as to whether the juveniles in both groups reoffended a second, third or even fourth time within a one year period. The explorations into second, third and fourth reoffenses yielded similar results in that the juveniles from Resolutions Northwest had significantly lower recidivism rates than those from the Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative group.

Rights

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

Comments

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Administration of Justice.

If you are the rightful copyright holder of this dissertation or thesis and wish to have it removed from the Open Access Collection, please submit a request to pdxscholar@pdx.edu and include clear identification of the work, preferably with URL.

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/15421

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