engleski

Croatia / Croatian pilot projects

The concept of restorative justice is relatively new in the criminal legal theory and practice in Croatia. Yet the concept is in its original form very old and goes back to the very beginnings of the social system of human communities. Different forms of restorative justice are present in almost all pre-modern societies, or more precisely, in tribal communities (Bottoms, 2003 ; Knezevic, 2008). In a process called restorative justice one of the central concepts is that of empathy for the victim of the crime. Empathy should not be simply translated as compassion for victims of crime, but it is probably better to take this relationship to the victim of a criminal offense if it is defined as a situation where somehow „show favor feelings of another, resulting in sharing these feelings“ (Strayer, 1990: 218 ). When it comes to offenders, empathy in literature defines as a protective factor that reduces the likelihood of committing the crime and lack of empathy increases that probability (Jolliffe and Farrington, 2004: 443). In addition to this view, there are in the literature a number of other attempts to define empathy, but this is nothing new. In the academic community there are very different opinions about many concepts. What is common to many approaches, or at least to a large extent similar is as follows: a) empathy is different from person to person and in this sense it can be seen as a factor of individual differences ; b) it can be measured in some way with appropriate instruments ; c) it is a construct that has an impact on people's behavior (Jolliffe and Farrington, 2004: 442). This is why most projects focused on offenders, especially those who find themselves in different types of penal institutions focused mainly on three objectives: 1. A sense of guilt for the event which caused the suffering of the victim ; 2) sense of shame because of their participation in it and ; 3.Empathy to the victims of crime. All this in the belief that this would contribute to the realization of the most important targets the criminal justice system, which is the maintenance of the legal order (Henderson, 1985).

social problems ; prisons ; prisoners

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