Today’s risk based criminal justice policy leaves but little room to tune sentencing decisions to the individual offender’s mental capacities. As a result, sanctioning has become one-sided, being directed towards retribution. However, in the long run such a non-reciprocal concept of sanctioning, implying a denial of the need to facilitate rehabilitation, weakens the social fabric. Moreover, it holds a denial of citizenship towards (mentally ill) offenders. For the past decades, restorative justice has offered alternative solutions to deal with delinquency. Using informal procedures, taking into account peculiarities of the case, including the offender’s mental capacities, offenders are invited to take accountability for wrongful acts. A similar approach has been introduced within the field of mental health services, including the sector of the forensic mental health care. In response to the popular social biological model, a model of restorative treatment has been introduced, implying treatment to be directed towards reintegration, requiring active participation of the patient/offender. Bearing in mind the communalities between both models, we explore the potential of such a restorative citizenship based approach to better the integration of mentally disturbed offenders.

Following the evaluation regarding the judicial error in the Schiedam park murder (‘Schiedammer parkmoord’), the Public Prosecutor, Police and the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) have drawn up an enhancement program to prevent future errors. Part of this program is to fill 20% of the posts within the police investigation process with those who have completed a higher education study of ‘criminal investigation’ and have obtained the Master of Criminal Investigation (MCI) title. One of the MCI’s tasks is to act as counterparties within the investigation research, to reduce the tunnel vision that develops within these investigations. In this way, more attention can be paid to alternative scenarios, so that judicial errors are less likely to occur.