PHILADELPHIA A high-ranking British judge has approved a University of Pennsylvania-led randomized controlled test comparing different sentencing procedures.

Lawrence Sherman, director of Penn's Jerry Lee Center of Criminology, said the decision appears to be the first time a chief justice in any nation has specifically approved such testing. The endorsement was revealed in a recent advisory letter to crown court judges from Harry Woolf, the lord chief justice of England and Wales, in response to questions raised by a judge planning to participate in the experiment.

"The importance of the project," Woolf wrote, "is that it may reveal that restorative justice can make a useful contribution to the justice system."

"Restorative justice" in the impending London experiment is a procedure in which crime victims, offenders and their friends and families meet under the guidance of a specially trained Scotland Yard police officer after a guilty plea but before a sentencing decision. They discuss the harm the crime has caused and agree on ways the offender may try to repair that harm. The agreement is submitted to the judge, who may decide to impose less prison time in consideration of the voluntary agreement.

Sherman, the Albert M. Greenfield Professor of Human Relations in Penn Department of Sociology and director of the Fels Center of Government at Penn, said that the question put to the chief justice was whether the research design created too much inconsistency in sentencing conditions. The research design calls for half of the eligible cases with consenting victims and offenders to be assigned by a random-numbers formula to undergo the restorative justice procedure.

Woolf wrote that, "while consistency in sentencing is highly desirable, in practice it can never be achieved totally. Even if it was possible to achieve consistency, one prisoner will pass his sentence in much better conditions than another prisoner sentenced to the same sentence for exactly the same offense."

Sherman and his colleagues were selected to design and conduct the experiments after their controlled experiments with the Australian Federal Police revealed that restorative justice reduced repeat offenses by 38% among those charged with violent crimes.

The London experiments will conduct separate tests for offenders charged with robbery, burglary, assault and property crime.

The full text of letters by Woolf and Sherman are posted at the Jerry Lee Center's Web site, www.crim.upenn.edu/jrc, along with other information about the $3.5 million project funded by the British government.

Additional information is available by contacting Jon Atacik at 215-898-9216 or Atacik@sas.upenn.edu.