Something called “restorative justice” is now being meted out by coppers. Which sounds a tad Biblical. But as Assistant Chief Constable Garry Shewan explains, it is just a matter of giving the victims what they want.

Anyone who read details of the scheme in Monday’s M.E.N should perhaps think of it as a heartening outbreak of common sense on the crime and punishment front.

It works like this. A 12-year-old tearaway who threw a bottle at an elderly couple’s window in Salford was made to say sorry and forced, by his mum, to use his birthday money to buy the couple flowers.

Two drunken vandals who did £250 worth of damage to a Ford Fiesta were called upon to apologise, while the father of one of them, who owns a garage, provided the victim with a replacement car.

A man who hurled racist abuse at the owner of a Chinese restaurant offered to work there free to make amends, though the owner settled for a handshake and apology.

When two boys aged 10 and 11 posted a racist insult to an Indian family, they and their parents were brought together with their victims in a police station, whereupon the kids burst into tears and said sorry.

This is all part of a pilot scheme, operated in Salford and Tameside and now due to be extended across the Greater Manchester force.

These are stories with relatively happy endings, in which lessons are learned by offenders, restitution made to victims. The alternative would be to put the offender through the system for a minor infraction and hope he emerges from it contrite rather than just better at being a criminal.

We have need of imaginative ways of dispensing justice. We are entering a period when swingeing spending cuts will, says TUC general secretary Brendan Barber, make Britain “a darker, brutish, more frightening place”. An increasing number of have-nots will cast an envious eye in the direction of a smaller and more conspicuous number of haves. And there will inevitably be fewer coppers to deal with more crime.

We have known times before now when poverty has fed crime. I recall the recession of the early Eighties, when every time I parked my rusty Cortina, some ne-’er-do-well tried to steal it.

We go into this new era of brutishness with a prison population already twice that in the early Eighties. Unless we wish to build many more prisons and see an ever-greater proportion of the population stuck in a revolving door, going in and out of the penal system, we need new ideas.

Justice Secretary Ken Clarke is right (and brave, considering the timing) to herald a “rehabilitation revolution” in which community orders replace shorter jail sentences.

This “restorative justice” chimes nicely with such an aim. And it’s hardly new.

It is the same kind of thing TV’s Dixon Of Dock Green would have dispensed in between nuggets of wisdom and life-enhancing clips around the ear.

But then George Dixon did not do his coppering in the days of performance indicators and target-driven workplace culture.

In truth, “restorative justice” is probably what we had before we had any system of justice at all.

When Saxon man discovered that his neighbour’s pig had eaten his turnips, there was, no doubt, a lively discussion which ended with apologies and compensatory turnips changing hands.

It’s a funny old game . . .

Football finance fact no 1: Nobby Stiles is putting his cherished World Cup and European Cup winner’s medals up for auction to provide for his family.

Football finance fact no 2: Wayne Rooney can afford to pay £200 for a packet of cigarettes.

Discuss.

Tweet