Conflict Resolution Interventions and Violence Prevention Among Non-Intimates: A Modified Systematic Review

Background

While U.S. gun violence in general has been declining since 1993, 467,321 persons were victims of a crime committed with a firearm in 2011 and the Federal Bureau of Investigation reports that 68% of homicides are committed with guns. Despite application of several hundred US conflict resolution and restorative justice programs to the problem of violence, very little quantitative intervention research has been conducted on the capacity of these programs to reduce violence, violent crime, and criminal recidivism.

Methods

The scientific literature pertaining to the association of conflict resolution interventions with violence prevention are systematically identified, screened, and sorted. Study design, sampling, measurement, and analyses are assessed using objective standards, and are synthesized with findings and limitations. Particular focus is placed on cataloguing and critically appraising the measurement of non-intimate violence. Neighborhood, individual, and conflict factors used as covariates are catalogued and compared. Implications and research gaps in the scholarly literature on conflict resolution services and violence are also discussed.

Seven health, human services, legal, and criminal justice databases were searched for empirical research on the impact of conflict resolution and restorative justice services on non-intimate violence and criminal recidivism, from 1970 to the present.

Outcomes measuring individual criminal recidivism are converted to odds ratios, and effect sizes are plotted and compared by study and by recidivism type. Studies of neighborhood gun violence are charted and effects compared across 15 sites in four cities.

Main results

In the ten included studies, conflict resolution interventions appear to be related to modest reductions in individual criminal recidivism for participants, when compared with standard criminal justice system treatment. Conflict interruption shows mixed results in its association with reductions in neighborhood gun violence, with most districts measured showing a decrease, even when holding constant for area crime trends, neighborhood factors, and other police interventions. Some iatrogenic effects were found in one city where conflict interruptions least often performed, and the most striking reductions were found where the most conflict mediations occurred. When intervention variables like dosage or fidelity are included in the analysis, they are shown to further reduce individual criminal recidivism and neighborhood gun violence. Application of conflict resolution or restorative justice interventions at the stage of community prevention, court diversion, in prison, or at re-entry, appears to reduce negative outcomes to a similar degree, when compared with standard criminal justice interventions like policing, prosecution, and corrections.

Conclusions & Implications

Five key tasks are needed to address the challenges inherent in research on conflict resolution and violence: mitigate selection bias, consistently control for possibly confounding individual and neighborhood factors, carefully operationalize all intervention components, select the correct units of analyses, and link “what works” outcome data to “how it works” intervention data. Further, four key gaps need to be filled: measuring self-reported violence, including victimization, studying adults, and examining “upstream” interventions.