News & Announcements
David F. Piperato, principal, Palisades High School and Joseph J. Roy, principal, Springfield Township High School, Pennsylvania, USA, speak about how to develop a positive, collaborative school culture that supports the school’s educational goals, based on a commitment to establishing relationships among students and staff rooted in mutual caring and respect. The paper was presented at "Dreaming of a New Reality," the Third International Conference on Conferencing, Circles and other Restorative Practices, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, August 8-10, 2002.
Article from "Dreaming of a New Reality" conference program book by Paul McCold, director of research, and Ted Wachtel, president, of the IIRP. The article reports on the results of a 3-year evaluation of the use of a restorative practices milieu in the Community Service Foundation schools in southeastern Pennsylvania.
Tim Newell, governor (retired) of Grendon Prison, U.K., explores the organizational paradigm of prison culture, to shed light on how the very different and potentially valuable restorative justice paradigm can be implemented in prisons. Newell oversaw the successful implementation of restorative justice practices in prisons, involving prisoners in taking personal responsibility for their offending and seeking to make reparation. The paper was presented at "Dreaming of a New Reality," the Third International Conference on Conferencing, Circles and other Restorative Practices, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, August 8-10, 2002.
Elizabeth Quinnett, Program Manager, County of San Diego, California, USA Health and Human Services Agency, Children''s Services, talks about how the Family Unity Meeting process has been implemented in San Diego County, explains the process in detail and discusses the program''s success. The paper was presented at "Dreaming of a New Reality," the Third International Conference on Conferencing, Circles and other Restorative Practices, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, August 8-10, 2002.
Heino Lilles, Territorial Judge, Whitehorse, Canada, discusses his experiences as a judge working with circle sentencing: a restorative justice process that aims to recognize victims''needs and identify offenders''rehabilitative needs, engaging the community and the formal justice system as partners, and to a lesser extent victims and offenders, in the resolution of criminal justice-based disputes. The paper was presented at "Dreaming of a New Reality," the Third International Conference on Conferencing, Circles and other Restorative Practices, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, August 8-10, 2002.
When she was a psychologist working with troubled youth in Hungary, Videa Negrea, now director of Community Service Foundation Hungary, saw that punishments and removing children from their families didn''t help. An internship at the International Institute for Restorative Practices inspired her to bring restorative practices to Hungary. The paper was presented at "Dreaming of a New Reality," the Third International Conference on Conferencing, Circles and other Restorative Practices, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, August 8-10, 2002.
Ted Wachtel, president of the International Institute for Restorative Practices, speaks on the philosophy and history of restorative practices. From family group conferencing to restorative circles, the practices have migrated beyond the field of criminal justice to schools and workplaces, where they have proven useful in resolving wrongdoing and conflicts. The paper was presented at "Dreaming of a New Reality," the Third International Conference on Conferencing, Circles and other Restorative Practices, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, August 8-10, 2002.
All of us who attend a conference like this are probably dreamers. We are likely to be people who see the possibility for a future that is different from the present. Each of us in our own fields of endeavor—whether we are developing new models of practice, or evaluating them, or writing about them, or making films about them, or learning about them, or simply using them—are playing a role in bringing about a new reality.
In 1977, my wife, Susan, and I set out to create a new reality when we founded our first school for troubled youth, establishing a non-profit organization we called the Community Service Foundation. The name, although seemingly generic, was based on a quotation from a speech on education by Albert Einstein. He said that “the aim [of education] must be the training of independently acting and thinking individuals, who, however, see in the service of the community their highest life problem.” Maintaining balance between individual and community has served as a guiding principle for our endeavors. That balance manifests itself in how we define our underlying methodology, which we now call “restorative practices.”
In the social discipline window we contrast “punitive” and “authoritarian” approaches to social discipline, which rely on a lot of control but little support, and “permissive” and “paternalistic” approaches, which are high on support but low on control, with what we call “restorative” or “authoritative” strategies in which we employ both high control and high support. When we fail to respond to the need for social discipline we have neither control nor support and are therefore “neglectful” or “irresponsible.” When we are being restorative we try to engage everyone affected by wrongdoing or conflict in the process of resolution. Expressed another way, restorative practices do things with people, rather than to them or for them.
The pioneering prototypes of restorative justice, such as victim-offender mediation, brought together the primary individuals involved in a criminal offense to try to repair the harm. Since the advent of family group conferencing in New Zealand in 1989, however, the perception of what constitutes a restorative process has widened to embrace more of the community. When Terry O’Connell, an Australian police officer, developed the scripted model of conferencing in the early 1990s, he deliberately included the victims’ and offenders’ friends and family. Sentencing circles and healing circles similarly widen the range of participants.
Conferences and circles do more than increase the number of participants in the process. They also reduce reliance on the individual mediator or expert and place greater responsibility on the community itself. A good facilitator organizes the event and sets a cooperative tone, but then trusts in the community to maintain decorum. The likelihood that professionals would dictate rather than allow the extended family to formulate its own solutions resulted in New Zealand legislation which mandates that both youth justice and child protection conferences exclude the professionals from the room during the time that the family meets to create a plan.
Restorative processes, as we define them, are also consistent with Silvan Tomkins’ assertion that the best environment for human beings is one in which there is free expression of emotion, minimizing the negative and maximizing the positive. Conferences and circles provide a safe framework for that free expression to occur. Negative emotions, once expressed, tend to decrease in intensity. They also give way to positive emotions so that the participants, resonating with each others’ expressed feelings, move together toward resolution.
Conferences and circles have migrated beyond the field of criminal justice to schools and workplaces where they have proven useful in resolving not just wrongdoing, but other kinds of conflicts. The New Zealand child protection conference, although sometimes modified or renamed, has been widely adopted in social work. All of these processes shift decision-making from the professional to the family and community and create a safe container for the free expression of emotion.
When I met Terry O’Connell in 1994 our Community Service Foundation and its sister non-profit, Buxmont Academy, had grown substantially and were operating schools, group homes and other programs for delinquent and at-risk youth in four Pennsylvania counties. I was deeply moved by his emotional stories about conferencing, so I decided to create Real Justice, a program to promote conferencing. We invited O’Connell and his colleagues to provide the initial trainings. When he visited and pointed out that our schools were running informal restorative conferences all day long, we started to recognize the limitations of a vision that included only the formal restorative justice processes. In 1999 we articulated the concept of “Restorative Justice in Everyday Life“ and soon began using the broader and more flexible term, “restorative practices.”
By 2000 our efforts led to the founding of the International Institute for Restorative Practices, a non-profit educational organization dedicated to fostering restorative practices in education, youth counseling, criminal justice, social work, organizational leadership and other applied social disciplines. Our annual conferences, which for the foreseeable future will alternate between North America and Europe, provide a forum for anyone who shares the dream of a new reality based on restorative practices.
So to all you dreamers out there, welcome to the Third International Conference on Conferencing, Circles and other Restorative Practices.
ABSTRACT
This article presents the findings of a retrospective study of 70 family group conferences (FGC) conducted in Washington State. These 70 FGCs addressed the well-being of 138 children. The families within the evaluation were primarily referred by foster care units rather than investigative units and involved cases that had been in the child welfare system for over 90 days. Families were invited to participate in the decision-making process, engaging both the maternal and paternal sides of the family with greater success than standard case planning approaches. Children who had a conference experienced high rates of reunification or kinship placement, and low rates of re-referral to CPS. These findings generally remained stable as long as two years post-conference. This study, the largest long-term follow-up study of FGC published to date, suggests that FGCs can be an effective planning approach for families involved with the public child welfare agency, resulting in safe, permanent plans for children at risk.
INTRODUCTION
Child welfare policy and practice in the United States have been described in terms of a pendulum, swinging between child safety and family preservation. The landmark Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 (P.L. 96-272) represented a swing towards family preservation where policies promoted efforts to keep families intact and prevent the placement of children into foster care (Cole, 1995). As the country struggled with rising foster care placements and a number of high profile child deaths in the eighties and nineties, public opinion began to blame this focus on family preservation, and called for renewed attention to child safety.
By Paul McCold and Ted Wachtel. Executive summary of paper presented at the Fourth International Conference on Restorative Justice for Juveniles, Tübingen, Germany, October 1-4, 2000.
Paper by John Howard Society, Moncton, New Brunswick, presented at the "2nd International Conference on Conferencing and Circles", August 10-12, 2000, Toronto, Canada.
Restorative Works Year in Review 2025 (PDF)
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