Victims of crime in central Hawke's Bay: towards a better deal

Abstract

I joined the Probation Service in June 1985, which coincided with the introduction of the Criminal Justice Art 1985. One component of the Act which was new, was reparation, which gave Probation Officers the role of mediating between the victim and offender in property offences, to gain agreement on the amount of loss and damage, and how it was to be paid for. The inclusion of reparation in the act was based on recommendations by Burt Galloway (and others) who published in 1984, Public Acceptance of Restitution as an alternative to imprisonment for property offenders, a survey. The research that was undertaken showed that victims of property offences were more interested in being recompensed for the losses they had suffered, than in punishing the offender. The first few weeks of my training at Probation entailed reading a large number of books, articles, acts and reports. I remembered reading Galloway's report at that time as it was the only one that dealt in any way with the victims of crime. The training for the implementation of reparation was carried out by Dr Ian Brooks, who taught a mediation model. The training and the implications of that training, which was to work with victims of crime to help them resolve their feeling and thoughts relating to the crime, leading to a possible face to face meeting between the offender and victim, was challenging and interesting. However when the probation work load formula was set, the time allowed to prepare reparation reports was set at two hours, so few face to face mediation meetings were carried out or encouraged and more reparation agreements were arrived at via the telephone.