What Future for "Public Safety" and "Restorative Justice" in Community Corrections?

Restorative justice and public safety principals are reshaping community corrections around the country. As paradigms, they have much in common, but there are distinctions that could lead the pursuit of one to undermine achievement of the other. Pursuing public safety requires community corrections to take a more proactive approach, to come from behind the desk into the community, yet thrusting corrections into the community may disrupt its social fabric. This National Institute of Justice Research In Brief (NCJ 187773) delineates these challenges and such others as balancing victim and offender needs; gaining the cooperation of the offender to acknowledge his or her responsibility and make amends; and reconciling "what works" strategies that focus on the individual offender with a restorative justice and public safety emphasis on the offender as one strand in a web of community interdependency.