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Advantages
- real-life application - The Smith Institute concluded that although there is no "magic wand" that can cure crime, restorative justice and anger management can substantially reduce repeat offending and its related costs for a large portion of offenders.
- victim helping - Sherman and Strang (2007) found that restorative justice can lessen a victims desire for revenge through the development of sympathy and understanding that leads to forgiveness, thus preventing more crime in the future.
- economic implications - crime costs british taxpayers billions each year. RJC claims that for every £1 spent on restorative justice, £8 is saved on law enforcement and recovery.
- comparison to punishments - can be argued that RJ and AM treat causes of criminality more than traditional punishments (eg. prison, community service) as they give the offender a chance to work through anger that may stem from social factors (starts a discussion that may lead to solving these issues)
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Disadvantages
- research lacks generalisability - research into restorative justice is hampered by the fact that it is done on a strictly voluntary bases. 1) neither offender nor victim can be forced to attend 2) research suffers from selection bias and thus cannot be generalised
- practitioner flaws - although trained, practitioners of anger management and restorative justice are not necessarily mental health experts/oriented. this means that there is little follow up to check the effectiveness of treatment and any psychological harm caused may go unrecorded and untreated.
- does not treat cause - restorative justice and anger management do not treat social causes for crime that mean it is committed out of necessity (unemployment, poverty) or ignorance (education, childhood) rather than hate or anger (BUT - see advantage 4)
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