Restorative Policing Experiment: The Bethlehem Pennsylvania Police Family Group Conferencing Project

The Bethlehem Police Family Group Conferencing Experiment was the first randomized trial of restorative justice in the United States. Moderately serious juvenile offenses were randomly assigned either to court or to a diversionary restorative policing process called family group conferencing. Police-based family group conferencing used trained police officers to facilitate a meeting attended by juvenile offenders, their victims, and their respective family and friends. This group would discuss the harm caused by the offender’s actions and develop an agreement to repair the harm. The effect of the program was measured through surveys of victims, offenders, offender’s parents, and police officers, and also by examining the outcomes of conferences and formal adjudication. The book contains an extended appendix that presents these outcome-based statistics for this seminal program. At a time when research for new restorative justice programs in the 1990s was just beginning to surface, this study provides a valuable picture of the successes of the family conferencing model in its early formation.