Contemporary scholarly literature is full of references to the crisis of the criminal justice system. The general public seems to increasingly lose confidence in the criminal justice system and its actors. In this article we look into the potential manners in which restorative justice practices can enhance the legitimacy of the criminal justice system. Our analysis is based on the observation that by actively engaging victims and defendants in the resolution of their conflict, restorative practices seem to accommodate a necessary condition of procedural fairness. Since research on procedural justice and legitimacy in turn suggests that the legitimacy of the criminal justice system is based largely upon its perceived procedural fairness, we investigate whether participation in restorative practices improves perceptions of the legitimacy of the criminal justice system. To that end we describe the results of a qualitative study on the experiences of victims and defendants who participated in victim-offender mediation in Belgium. Relating their experiences to the antecedents of procedural justice as described in the literature, we find that restorative practices in different ways enhance perceptions of procedural fairness. Yet these perceptions do not necessarily reflect on the criminal justice system. Our analysis suggests that the degree to which the perceptions of procedural fairness resulting from participation in a restorative practice influence an individual’s perceptions of the legitimacy of the criminal justice system depends on whether the restorative practice is seen as an integral part of the criminal proceedings. We found, for example, that this is more likely to be the case if the judge at trial formally acknowledges the parties’ participation in mediation. We conclude that more research on the degree to which people perceive the restorative practice to be a part of the criminal proceedings is needed in order to further flesh out this issue.

On a yearly basis between 4.000 and 4.500 underage suspects in Flanders accept the offer of Restorative Justice. A many cited definition of Restorative Justice has been developed by Lode Walgrave: ‘Restorative Justice is every action that is primarily oriented toward doing justice by repairing the harm that has been caused by the crime’.
Commissioned by the Flemish Minister of Welfare, Public Health and Family an evaluation of Restorative Justice for minors was conducted by Bureau Beke. In the article the authors reflect on Restorative Justice in Flanders and describe the most important findings of their research. The process of Restorative Justice, the satisfaction of the parties involved and its results are considered. The authors offer organizations several suggestions related to developing established procedures and practices. Furthermore results show that suspects and victims are satisfied with Restorative Justice, which yields several benefits for the parties involved: Reparation for victims and learning effects and reduced contacts with counseling agencies for suspects. An important overall conclusion is that face-to-face contact between victim and suspects is beneficial for the mediation process and subsequently repairing the harm.

The theme of governing anti-social behaviour and incivilities in the public space became more important on the policy and research agenda over the last twenty years. This article describes the law on incivilities in Belgium, namely the ‘administrative communal sanctions’ (GAS). This law is studied in a broader context of contemporary crime control and its organizing patterns. The development of the politics of behaviour can be explained by different characteristics of the period referred to as the late modernity. In the dissertation ‘A culture of control?’ (Devroe 2012) we studied the application and the concrete strategies behind the governance of incivilities on a national and on a city level. The incivility law broadened the competences of the Mayor and the city council especially in the completion of anti social behaviour and public disorder problems in his/her municipality. Instead of being dealt with on a traditional judicial way by the police magistrate, the Mayor can, by this law; himself lay on fines until maximum 250 euro. We mention ‘city republics’ as this punitive sanction became a locally assigned matter, which means that one municipality differs from another in their ‘incivility policy’. Due to the split up of competences of the Belgian state arrangements of 1988, each municipality finds itself framed in different political and organisational executive realities. In this view, Mayors can be called ‘presidents’ of their own municipality, keeping and controlling the process of tackling incivilities as their main responsibility and determining what behaviour had to be controlled and punished and what behaviour can be considered as normal decent behaviour in the public space. Problems of creating a ‘culture of control’, creating inequality for the poor, the beggars and the socially ‘unwanted’ can arise, especially in big cities.

During the last decade the phenomenon of citizen watches has become a common and meaningful element in citizen participation that aims to improve local public safety. Citizen watches make a great case for examining the tension between the need for the Dutch government to maintain control over local safety issues and the strivings of citizens to contribute to local solutions in a more or less autonomous way. This paper examines the question to what extent citizen watches can contribute to the governance of local safety in a meaningful way. The Dutch government has been appealing strongly for more citizen involvement in public matters for some time, but is unclear about how municipalities and the police should respond to active citizens. The paper describes two different ways in which citizens can realize such an involvement i.e. either in a predominantly top-down fashion, in which the municipality and the police take a strongly directive approach towards citizen watches or in a more bottom-up oriented way, in which citizen watches are well embedded in local systems of informal social control. The paper argues and explains that both approaches have advantages as well as disadvantages regarding the way they support new forms of governance and cooperation between citizens and the state. It suggests that formal authorities can contribute to the self-reliance and collective efficacy of neighbourhood residents with regard to local public safety if they make a better effort of combining the pros of both approaches.