Compensating Victims of Crime: Individual Responsibility and Governmental Compensation Plans

During the last decade, legal scholars, criminologists, and sociologists have extensively discussed proposals for the compensation of injured victims of crime. The scholarly debate will, in all likelihood, soon come to fruition in the form of comprehensive federal legislation designed to provide an orderly and uniform governmental remedy for persons suffering losses as a result of criminally inflicted personal injury. The years following the widespread adoption of compensation programs will be crucial in the development of an effective and therapeutic system of criminal justice. As criminal sanctions are directed more toward reformation than punishment, and as compensation to victims is made more available by the society, the concept of individual responsibility for restitution to those injured by criminal conduct may become unimportant in the criminal justice system. This Comment therefore suggests that procedural approaches to compensation should emphasize an individual responsibility to provide restitution, supplemented by a more comprehensive compensation plan. The French partie civile procedure is examined for the purpose of illustrating an alternative procedural approach to compensation policies which emphasizes the individual restitutionary and therapeutic aspects of the criminal process. It is argued that certain aspects of the partie civile system might provide the foundation of an experimental procedure designed to complement existing and proposed compensation programs.