Over the past three decades, the criminal justice field has witnessed an astounding proliferation of statutory enhancements benefiting people who are most directly and intimately affected by crime. As of 2000, all states had passed some form of legislation to benefit victims. In addition, 32 states have recognized the supreme importance of fundamental and express rights for crime victims by raising those protections to the constitutional level.

Of course, the nature, scope, and enforcement of victims’ rights vary from state to state, and it is a complex and often frustrating matter for victims to determine what those rights mean for them.To help victims, victim advocates, and victim service providers understand the relevance of the myriad laws and constitutional guarantees, the Office for Victims of Crime awarded funding to the National Center for Victims of Crime to produce a series of bulletins addressing salient legal issues affecting crime victims.

Restitution: Making It Work, the fifth in the series, provides an overview of state legislation and current issues related to the collection of court-ordered restitution to crime victims. Although every state has enacted legislation on this issue, many crime victims who are awarded restitution never receive any money or receive only a small portion of what the court has ordered the defendant to pay.This bulletin and the others in the Legal Series highlight various circumstances in which relevant laws are applied, emphasizing their successful implementation.

We hope that victims, victim advocates, victim service providers, criminal justice professionals, and policymakers in states across the Nation will find the bulletins in this series helpful in making sense of the criminal justice process and in identifying areas in which rights could be strengthened or more clearly defined.We encourage you to use these bulletins not simply as informational resources but as tools to support victims in their involvement with the criminal justice system.