Restorative Justice Practices in Forensic Mental Health Settings – A Scoping Review

Abstract

Restorative justice has long been considered an important alternative lens to approach illegal and harmful behavior compared to traditional criminal justice approaches. Despite this widespread and successful application, efforts to use this approach within forensic mental health settings have seemingly been minimal. This review aimed to synthesize the available information on the application, evidence for use, and barriers or unique considerations for restorative justice practices within forensic mental health settings. The PRISMA extension for scoping reviews checklist guided our reporting of the results. After conducting an extensive review of the literature, six peer-reviewed articles and five gray literature documents were included. Our results demonstrate that restorative justice approaches in forensic mental health settings are being used by a small number of committed individuals and are not broadly accepted or part of typical care services. The evidence for use of this approach is extremely sparse but do suggest that these interventions could be appropriate in forensic mental health settings as reports for positive impacts are available on three levels, with patients, victims, and organizations. Information about the unique considerations that should be made and how restorative justice in forensic mental health differs from use in other populations is discussed.