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How did restorative justice get onto the government agenda, and why does its implementation differ? A multiple streams approach: Restorative justice has resulted from a paradigm shift in the way criminal conflicts are dealt with. It involves achieving the pacification of the conflict while meeting the needs of victims, offenders and society, through dialogue. This article applies the multiple streams framework (MSF) to analyse how and why restorative justice got onto the government agenda in Western European countries. It also applies the novel theoretical adaptation of the MSF to analyse why restorative justice implementation is uneven across Western European countries and even within countries. The study shows that the generalised dissatisfaction of citizens with the traditional criminal justice system, their empowerment and the performance of policy entrepreneurs constituted a favourable context for restorative justice to get onto the government agenda. The findings underline that the MSF provides a useful lens through which to examine the complexity and dynamics of restorative justice policymaking and implementation processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The restorative justice (RJ) paradigm requires coherence among legal, justice, and educational systems to promote a culture of restorative dialogue with victims of violence and to reintegrate aggressors into the community. The objective of this study, from an evolutionary social perspective, was to examine criminal mediation files in the archives of the Murcia Intrajudicial Criminal Mediation Service (UMIM), Spain, to see which variables are associated with which types of violence and understand the contents and adoption of agreements. In this study the sociodemographic, procedural, and interpersonal variables of 216 people who used criminal mediation were analysed. The results showed statistically significant differences concerning age, the procedural moment of referral, and the participants' relationship. The main conclusions are that the youngest group had a more significant number of encounters with physical violence; most agreements occurred in the initial phase of a judicial procedure; and the majority of agreements had moral content regardless of the age of the parties involved. These factors are of interest to the establishment of judicial and educational restorative models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]