Circles of support: A restorative justice initiative

This paper addresses the increasing difficulties faced in community-based management of sexual offenders in Canada. Those offenders at particularly high-risk to re-offend (e.g., sadistic rapists and serial child molesters) often receive indeterminate sentences, and are rarely released to the community prior to death or incapacitating illness. However, many other high-risk offenders are released from custody at the end of a determinate sentence, often without the benefit of adequate supervision or treatment. In a restorative justice initiative managed by the Mennonite Central Committee of Ontario, 30 high-risk sexual offenders released at sentence completion were provided with community support in the form of Circles of Support and Accountability. A brief overview of the Canadian penal system and its handling of sexual offenders is given to provide the social and political framework in which many current restorative justice projects have been undertaken. It is ar-gued that traditional punitive measures have done little to address risk to the community and that effective interventions in the community must not be limited to time under warrant. The Circles of Support initiative focuses on the need to engage the community in the offender reintegration process. Data are provided regarding recidivism rates in comparison to actuarial projections determined from STATIC-99 (Hanson & Thornton, 1999) survival curves. Recidivism across 30 high-risk offenders, with a mean follow-up time of 36 months, currently stands at less than 40% of that predicted by STATIC-99.