"‘We just want to be treated with respect!’: Using restorative approaches and the dramatic arts to build positive relationships between the police and young people"

This article explores the application of an ambitious arts-based restorative intervention that has been applied in a direct response to perceived issues with procedural justice, legitimacy and community relations between police and young people. The research focuses on a series of Youth Forums that took place in the West of England, employed as an attempt to improve strained relationships between both parties. It reports on detailed ethnographic research of the Forum processes and procedures presenting this primary evidence in light of the existing literature on police legitimacy and procedural justice in police-youth encounters. The findings suggest that community-based arts programmes can be a powerful and effective tool for challenging entrenched views with the potential to improve future encounters between police and young people; and that the relevance and effectiveness of arts-based interventions can be increased by combining with restorative justice principles

Democratic localism and the implementation of the Community Remedy in England and Wales

This article assesses the development and implementation of the Community Remedy anti-social behaviour policy by Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) in England and Wales. The Community Remedy, introduced by the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act (2014), allows victims of ‘low-level’ anti-social behaviour to select an informal action for their offender from a list designed by their local PCC via consultation with the public. This article reports the results of a benchmarking exercise that investigates how PCCs have translated this policy into practice by examining: public consultation procedures; the contents of the Community Remedy documents; and police usage. The findings indicate an uneven implementation across regions with variable levels of engagement from PCCs, police forces and members of the public. We assess the enactment and adoption of this new power alongside its potential to stimulate democratic localism

Morality tales: young women's narratives on offending, self-worth and desistance

This article emerges from a study of female offenders’ participation in police-facilitated restorative justice in one county in England. The qualitative study, presented here, is based on life history interviews with twelve women and focuses on three morality tales that emerged through narrative analysis: ‘offending as play,’ ‘the strong woman’ and ‘work and a normal life.’ The women used these tales to protect self-worth and justify ‘bad’ behavior in order to counter professional responses which they viewed as stigmatising. The paper concludes with implications for practice with girls and women who offend, which may benefit police, probation and social workers

Exploring recent developments in restorative policing in England and Wales

The evolution of the policing role over the last decade has led to 33 police forces in England and Wales integrating restorative justice practices, in one form or another, into their responses to minor crime committed for the first time by both youths and adults. Most recently, this reform dynamic has been used in response to more serious offences committed by persistent offenders and expanded to include all stages of the criminal justice process. Despite the significant positive rhetoric that surrounds the adoption and use of restorative justice, there are a number of procedural and cultural challenges that pose a threat to the extent to which restorative justice may become embedded within the policing response. This article explores these developments and highlights where potential problems for implementation may arise as well as some strategies to overcome them

Desistance from crime and restorative justice

Over the last twenty years, research on desistance from crime and on restorative justice has grown rapidly and both have emerged as exciting, vibrant, and dynamic areas of contemporary criminological interest. While the implementation of restorative justice practices in Europe has been essentially victim-oriented, there has always also been an emphasis on including the moral and social rehabilitation of the offender. This more offender-centred approach to restorative justice and its practices is not limited to the evaluation of its ability to reduce crime, but is to be seen within the connection between reparation, resettlement (reintegration into the community after sentence), and desistance from crime. This article examines, from a broad perspective, but including some preliminary data from ongoing research on victim-offender mediation in prison, the capacity of restorative justice interventions to impact positively on offenders’ likelihood of stopping committing criminal offences

A Large Specific Deterrent Effect of Arrest for Patronizing a Prostitute

BACKGROUND: Prior research suggests that arrest, compared with no police detection, of some types of offenders does not decrease the chances they will reoffend. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We assessed the specific deterrent effect of arrest for patronizing a street prostitute in Colorado Springs by comparing the incidence of arrest for clients of prostitutes first detected through public health surveillance with the incidence of rearrest for clients first detected by police arrest. Although these sets of clients were demographically and behaviorally similar, arrest reduced the likelihood of a subsequent arrest by approximately 70%. In other areas of the United States, arrest did not appear to displace a client's patronizing. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Our results suggest that apprehending clients decreases their patronizing behavior substantially

Developing Single-Molecule TPM Experiments for Direct Observation of Successful RecA-Mediated Strand Exchange Reaction

RecA recombinases play a central role in homologous recombination. Once assembled on single-stranded (ss) DNA, RecA nucleoprotein filaments mediate the pairing of homologous DNA sequences and strand exchange processes. We have designed two experiments based on tethered particle motion (TPM) to investigate the fates of the invading and the outgoing strands during E. coli RecA-mediated pairing and strand exchange at the single-molecule level in the absence of force. TPM experiments measure the tethered bead Brownian motion indicative of the DNA tether length change resulting from RecA binding and dissociation. Experiments with beads labeled on either the invading strand or the outgoing strand showed that DNA pairing and strand exchange occurs successfully in the presence of either ATP or its non-hydrolyzable analog, ATPγS. The strand exchange rates and efficiencies are similar under both ATP and ATPγS conditions. In addition, the Brownian motion time-courses suggest that the strand exchange process progresses uni-directionally in the 5′-to-3′ fashion, using a synapse segment with a wide and continuous size distribution

Optimizing the Design of Oligonucleotides for Homology Directed Gene Targeting

BACKGROUND: Gene targeting depends on the ability of cells to use homologous recombination to integrate exogenous DNA into their own genome. A robust mechanistic model of homologous recombination is necessary to fully exploit gene targeting for therapeutic benefit. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: In this work, our recently developed numerical simulation model for homology search is employed to develop rules for the design of oligonucleotides used in gene targeting. A Metropolis Monte-Carlo algorithm is used to predict the pairing dynamics of an oligonucleotide with the target double-stranded DNA. The model calculates the base-alignment between a long, target double-stranded DNA and a probe nucleoprotein filament comprised of homologous recombination proteins (Rad51 or RecA) polymerized on a single strand DNA. In this study, we considered different sizes of oligonucleotides containing 1 or 3 base heterologies with the target; different positions on the probe were tested to investigate the effect of the mismatch position on the pairing dynamics and stability. We show that the optimal design is a compromise between the mean time to reach a perfect alignment between the two molecules and the stability of the complex. CONCLUSION AND SIGNIFICANCE: A single heterology can be placed anywhere without significantly affecting the stability of the triplex. In the case of three consecutive heterologies, our modeling recommends using long oligonucleotides (at least 35 bases) in which the heterologous sequences are positioned at an intermediate position. Oligonucleotides should not contain more than 10% consecutive heterologies to guarantee a stable pairing with the target dsDNA. Theoretical modeling cannot replace experiments, but we believe that our model can considerably accelerate optimization of oligonucleotides for gene therapy by predicting their pairing dynamics with the target dsDNA