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In 2004 the Brazilian Ministry of Justice received a small UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) grant to launch the country’s first official restorative justice (RJ) pilot projects. Recognizing the unique social context of urban violence in Brazil, the projects brought together school administrators, judges, court workers, prison authorities, social service agencies and local community leaders to create a broad restorative response to the most challenging breakdowns in community safety. While justly known for their creative celebration of life, Brazilians also live with glaring wealth imbalances and the normalization of violence: Murder is the principle cause of death for people under 25.
In Rio de Janeiro, 20 percent of the population lives in crowded favela shantytowns — improvised communities of cramped, shoddy, multi-story houses. Drug gangs are the city’s largest youth employer. Education, family life and social cohesion are all hugely impacted by fear, improvised martial law and the struggle to make ends meet.
In the mid-1990s, Dominic Barter began working with favela residents, including drug gang members, to help them strengthen nonviolent options for working with young people. “I saw violence as a monologue,” said Barter. “All the state and gang responses to violence were more of the same. I wanted to create a dialogue.” In early 2005 he helped organize the country’s first public presentation on restorative practices, at the Brazil-based annual World Social Forum. The Ministry of Justice heard Barter’s presentation and hired him to develop a conferencing model and train facilitators for two of three new pilot projects, in São Paulo and Porto Alegre.
Marie-Isabelle Pautz is a One-Year FastTrack Master’s Degree candidate in Restorative Practices and Youth Counseling at the International Institute for Restorative Practices (IIRP). For her YC/ED 510, Professional Learning Group (PLG) Seminar: Restorative Project, she is implementing restorative practices in a preschool. Before attending the IIRP, Marie-Isabelle worked with Turning Point Partners in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, introducing restorative practices to schools, youth court and juvenile detention centers. She also facilitated restorative conferences in schools and codirected a homeless shelter in Rochester, New York, USA. The following are excerpts from her IIRP PLG report.
I am a part-time assistant teacher at a preschool in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA. I’m instituting restorative practices with our 13-pupil class of four-year-olds. “Restorative” means participation by everyone affected by decisions, widening the circle, building social capital, separating the deed from the doer, and a focus on responsibilities and effects of actions, rather than blaming and labeling (Zehr, 1990; Wachtel & McCold, 2000).
We have a very healthy school with a few problems, such as disputes about sharing, turns to lead or speak and place in line, as well as exclusion, class disruption, complaining, arguing, running indoors, throwing, pushing and unsafe behavior. Assets include low pupil-teacher ratio and small class and school size.
Hull, UK, led by the Hull Centre for Restorative Practices (HCRP) and the International Institute for Restorative Practices (IIRP), is endeavoring to become a “restorative city.” The goal is for everyone who works with children and youth in Hull, one of England’s most economically and socially deprived cities, to employ restorative practices.
Nigel Richardson, Hull’s director of Children and Young People’s Services, is leading the restorative initiative. Hull- — population 250,000, with 57,000 children — had a thriving fishing industry that disappeared several generations ago, and the city failed to regenerate itself economically, said Richardson, resulting in “low aspirations and self-esteem, and a high proportion of people living below the poverty line.” Hull invested heavily to rebuild housing, the city center and secondary schools. But, said Richardson, “There’s no point in physical regeneration without social regeneration.” His strategy is to “invest disproportionately in children and young people now,” with restorative practices (RP) at the core.
Hull’s RP scheme officially began in August 2007. Participants are committed to implementing “an explicit means of managing relationships and building social connection and responsibility while providing a forum for repairing harm when relationships break down.”
In July 2008 criminologists at the University of Sheffield, UK, issued their fourth and final report on a major research initiative launched in 2001 by the British Home Office to examine the effects of restorative justice (RJ) for adults and youth. The report marks the culmination of more than seven years of planning and work involving the collaboration of government, academia, social service agencies, and police and criminal justice institutions, including probation, courts and prisons.
(The University of Sheffield has also published three previous reports on different aspects of these research studies: Implementing restorative justice schemes, 2004, http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs04/rdsolr3204.pdf; Restorative justice in practice, 2006, http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs06/r274.pdf; and Restorative justice: the views of victims and offenders, 2007, http://www.justice.gov.uk/docs/Restorative-Justice.pdf.)
The findings of the fourth report, Does restorative justice affect reconviction?, 2008, http://www.justice.gov.uk/restorative-justice-report_06-08.pdf, show that face-to-face RJ conferences both reduce crime and provide a cost saving to government. The report “focuses on one of the key original aims of the Home Office funding, whether restorative justice ‘works,’ in the sense of reducing the likelihood of re-offending and for whom it ‘works’ in this way. It also covers whether the schemes were value for money, measured as whether the cost of running the scheme was balanced or outweighed by the benefit of less re-offending” (Shapland et al., 2008, p. i).
This paper by Lorenn Walker and Leslie A. Hayashi describes a program in Hawai''i that provides three different restorative justice practices, combined with a "solution-focused approach." The program was conceived and has been implemented by the nonprofit Hawai''i Friends of Civic and Law Related Education, in collaboration with the District Court of the First Circuit in Honolulu, Hawai''i.
View papers from the 11th IIRP World Conference, held October 22-24, 2008 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Terry O’Connell, director of Real Justice Australia, a division of the International Institute for Restorative Practices (IIRP), was awarded an honorary doctorate by Australian Catholic University at its October 2008 graduation ceremony. O’Connell, a retired 30-year veteran with the New South Wales Police Service, is well known as the “cop from Wagga Wagga” who developed what is now the IIRP’s Real Justice restorative conference model.
Restorative Justice Pioneer Terry O'Connell Awarded Honorary Doctorate: Offers Reflections in Speech
Terry O’Connell, director of Real Justice Australia, a division of the International Institute for Restorative Practices (IIRP), was awarded an honorary doctorate by Australian Catholic University at its October 2008 graduation ceremony. O’Connell, a retired 30-year veteran with the New South Wales Police Service, is well known as the “cop from Wagga Wagga” who developed what is now the IIRP’s Real Justice restorative conference model.
IIRP president Ted Wachtel first heard O’Connell speak in 1994 in Pennsylvania, and was so taken with O’Connell’s work adapting the New Zealand model of family group conferencing that he founded Real Justice, now the IIRP’s restorative justice program. The IIRP has promoted the use of O’Connell’s restorative conference process based on his “restorative questions,” which foster empathy and shared understanding among offenders, victims, and their respective friends and family members.
Since retiring from the police service, O’Connell has headed up the IIRP’s office in Australia. While he has been a major influence in spreading restorative justice throughout the world, in recent years he has been especially effective in bringing restorative practices to schools.
Paper (PDF) by Dominic Barter, presented in a plenary session at "Restoring Community in a Disconnected World," the IIRP''s 11th International Institute for Restorative Practices World Conference, October 22-24, 2008, Toronto, Canada.
Paper (PDF) by Bruce Schenk, Helen Fox, Rusty Hick, Lynn Zammit, presented in a plenary session at "Restoring Community in a Disconnected World," the IIRP''s 11th International Institute for Restorative Practices World Conference, October 22-24, 2008, Toronto, Canada.
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