Prevention of Recurrence of Delinquency Based On Police Mediation

The emergence of restorative justice is a result of developments in approaches toward criminal justice and the thoughts regarding crimes in the past two decades. Restorative justice is a balanced and comprehensive approach to crime conditions; via instruments such as mediation, it attempts to not only maintain the interests of all victims of the crime, but also to provide grounds for rehabilitation and re-socialization of offenders. The goal of this study was to evaluate the role of mediation and social work departments in police stations in the prevention of recurrence of crimes. Present study is practical in purposes and has a descriptive-analytical nature, using library, documents, and fieldwork studying two groups of offenders. Since referring to the researches done in this field is the best and most effective way to attain theoretical bases regarding restorative justice and the role of police in prevention of crime recurrence, this study has used the library method, documents, statistics and analysis of the performance of counseling and social work departments police stations in a five year period of time to try to portray a clear image of the opinions of researches in this field and to analyze the current situation of counseling and social work departments, aiming to provide practical solutions for prevention of crime recurrence based on police mediation. Results indicate that police mediation with a process-based approach and using local community’s capacities, affecting the personal and social conditions of the offender, would decrease the offender’s tendency to repeat the crime. In other words the more the police tends to have a process-based mediation role, the chances of recurrent crimes would decrease; on the contrary, the more the police tends to aim for decrease of cases in a dismissive manner, the chances of offender’s recurrent delinquency would decrease.