Oakland Victim–Offender Reconciliation Program

The Victim–Offender Reconciliation Program in Oakland, Calif., serves the Bay Area east of San Francisco. It was initiated in 1987 by the Office for Prisoner and Community Justice of Catholic Charities/Oakland Diocese. The program is designed to provide victims with the opportunity to meet their offenders in a safe and structured setting for dialog, negotiation, and problem solving. It serves both Alameda and Contra Costa Counties, which together represent a large urban multicultural jurisdiction with a population of nearly 2 million. The program handles some 500 cases a year.

The goal of this program is to foster dialog, negotiation, and problem solving between offenders and victims in Oakland.

The evaluation findings demonstrate that victim–offender mediation at each site resulted in juvenile offenders committing considerably fewer additional crimes during the 1-year follow-up period than similar offenders in the court-administered restitution program. They also tended to commit crimes that were less serious than the offense of referral. It should be noted, however, that this finding is not statistically significant. Thus the possibility that this effect can occur by chance cannot be ruled out. The evaluation also found high levels of client satisfaction (90 percent of victims and 91 percent of offenders) and perceptions of fairness (83 percent of victims and 89 percent of offenders). Moreover, victims who participated in the mediation process were significantly more likely to view the system as fair than similar victims who did not participate in mediation. The mediation process also had a strong impact on the likelihood of offenders’ successfully completing their restitution obligation to their victims.