Justice

MEREPS – Mediation and Restorative Justice in Prison Settings – was a three-year project funded by the EU. Their final publication (edited by Barabás, T.,  Fellegi, B. & Windt, Sz.) is now freely downloadable here.

The pilot project tested the applicability of the restorative justice (RJ) approach in the Hungarian prison system. It focused on two key practical questions:

• How can practices representing restorative principles be introduced in prison settings?
• What are the institutional, legal and personal conditions that serve as supportive circumstances, and what are the specific challenging

Flickr Creative Commons © Jerry BunkersHere's a letter to the editor in the Des Moines Register which concisely articulates the essence of restorative justice and restorative practices:

In his story of restorative justice (“Growing Past Hate”, April 22) Fred Van Liew shares a poignant example of how

Here's a clip from an article by Martin Howard that appeared at Restorative Justice Online's blog. The Sycamore Tree Project connects victims of crime with offenders in prisons.

"I've never seen a program change people like this one." 

I've heard this from a prison psychologist and a prison manager, who are more familiar with the failures of the typical group therapy sessions. What they notice during STP is a change in the empathy level of the inmates. And they are stunned by the positive chemistry that is created within the group.

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Sticking with the theme of anecdotes, here's one from last week's eForum article by IIRP graduate student Tamam Moncur about her experience adapting restorative practices for use within the context of a weekly church soup kitchen.

from dash24.comEveryone loves a good story, and I'm no exception – especially a good anecdote about an instance of restorative justice or some other more informal restorative interaction. These anecdotes, more than anything, can often cut through a person's doubt and questions about how RJ works.

So here's a story from the UK's 24dash.com by Julien Tremblin, dated November 17, 2011 but posted today on twitter by Theo Gavrielides:

Bill sponsor, Roger GoodmanOn March 30, 2012 Washington State Governor Chris Gregoire signed into law legislation that makes restorative justice available to youth offenders. The bill, co-sponsored by state Reps. Roger Goodman and Ruth Kagi passed unanimously in both the house and the

Mark Finnis, of Hull Centre for Restorative Practice, an IIRP affiliateAccording to the netnewsledger.com, on March 26, 2012, Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada hosted:

...a conference on restorative practices [that] brought together community leaders from education, enforcement, health, justice and youth services. Participants learned about what it means to be restorative and how to build a positive culture in our

Jo Berry, from Lisa Rea interview at Restorative Justice OnlineJean Schmitz, director of IIRP Latin America, sent me a link to this piece he found at RJOnline (originally posted last May). It's a lengthy interview by Lisa Rea of Jo Berry, the daughter of Sir Anthony Berry, a member of parliament in the Thatcher government, who was one of five people killed by IRA bomber Patrick

This Saturday, April 1, 2012, will see a world-first event, bringing a corporate CEO face to face with the victims of their crimes against the Earth through restorative justice. 

The two fictional CEOs, Robin Bannerman and John Tench, who were found guilty of committing ecocide last year in the UK Supreme Court will be sentenced, in a process involving top experts, including Lawrence Kershen QC, chair of the Restorative Justice Council.

This is a trial run for a new offense of ecocide (much like genocide, but against the Earth and its resources) ahead of trying to get the UN to adopt the offense internationally. You can watch this event free online, Saturday April 1 at 10:30 a.m. U.K. time....

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Illustration of the CenterI've been saving this news for a rainy day, and here it is. This article, "Tribal Justice Center First of Its Kind" by Lisa Kopochinski for Correctional News last September discusses the process the Department of Indian Affairs used to work with Oglala Sioux tribal leaders to develop a new justice and public safety complex on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Architects and builders are

Miguel Tello, director of IIRP Central America, appeared on a radio podcast - This Is Wisdom - based, I believe in Canada.  Miguel is very articulate and talks about his own restorative journey, hitting on many key players who influenced his work and thinking. To hear the 30-minute program, click here.

The IIRP eForum provides short, hopeful emails that include brief summaries and links to significant articles, research reports and other information about the growing field of restorative practices. On February 24 the eForum posted this book review, "Commitments to Reconciliation: A Review of Reconciliation and Architectures of Commitment: Sequencing Peace in Bougainville" by IIRP professor and founding faculty member Frida Rundell. Rundell reviews book 2 of 3 published to date by the Peacebuilding Compared Project (http://peacebuilding.anu.edu.au) of the Centre for International Governance &

Here's a truly lovely video of restorative justice pioneer Mark Yantzi of Canada speaking about the inspiration for some of the first victim-offender meetings as a way of resolving a series of crimes - the notorious Elmira case. Yantzi is director of Community Justice Initiatives.

I love Yantzi saying at the very end of this 8-minute talk, "Crime is something that harms people, but if in the addressing of crime we can make things better for everyone, we've really been restorative in what we do."

photo by AlecSchueler at Flickr Creative CommonsAn article from the Irish Times discusses the use of restorative justice as one solution to making an impact in terms of dealing with anti-social behavior, and criticizes the use of prisons and the negative impact they can have on offenders.

The lord mayor [of Dublin, Ireland said] there must be “consequences” for how

Aboriginal Children in a Canadian Residential SchoolFrom the 1870s to the 1990s, more than 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children were taken from their families and placed in government-funded, church-run Residential Schools. Aboriginal children were punished for speaking their own language or following traditional cultural practices and suffered emotional, physical and/or sexual abuse; some died. Their unresolved trauma, passed from generation to generation, has had a profoundly negative effect on

Have you read this book? Leave a comment below.

Introduction

Reconciliation and Architectures of Commitment: Sequencing Peace in Bougainville, published September 2010, is a publication of the Peacebuilding Compared Project (http://peacebuilding.anu.edu.au) of the Centre for International Governance & Justice (CICJ) of the Australian National University (ANU), Canberra. The book is the second of three published so far. The first, Anomie and Violence: Non-truth and Reconciliation in Indonesian Peacebuilding, was published in March 2010; the third, Pillars and Shadows: Statebuilding as Peacebuilding in Solomon Islands, was published in November 2010. Links to free downloads of all three books are available at: ...

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Coos Bay Bridge. Photo by Too Far North (Karyn Christner) via Flickr Creative CommonsHere's a story about a restorative justice program embedded in the court system on a tribal reservation in Oregon.

[The] system is known as the Peacegiving Court. [Judge Donald] Costello was part of a team that invented it in Deschutes County, and now it's part of the judicial systems for both the Coquille Indian Tribe and the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and

Representatives from the Flanker Peace and Justice Centre in Montego BayHere are links to two more articles from Jamaica regarding Restorative Justice Week (Feb. 5 - 11, 2012).

The first – Gov't Committed to Achieving Safe and Harmonious Society – includes photos from the opening of Granville Restorative Justice Centre, one of four new neighborhood centers that opened last

In this piece, "Less Prison, better prevention of crime,"Australian criminologist John Braithwaite argues that the evidence shows in so many areas that restorative rather than punitive responses, and also evidence-based responses to preventing crime, provide a better return on government investment by reducing crime and serving the needs of victims.

Braithwaite discusses prisons, policing, restorative justice, remorse, forgiveness, anti-bullying programs, fraudulent shifting of corporate profits to off shore tax havens and the US housing crisis in this terse and powerful

MEREPS – Mediation and Restorative Justice in Prison Settings – was a three-year project funded by the EU.  According to the now freely available PDF Handbook on Using Restorative Justice in Prisons, "The primary objective of the MEREPS project is to identify ways to apply mediation and restorative practices in prison settings, with special regard to providing support to victims and enabling offenders to take responsibility. It also aims to facilitate the resolution of conflicts resulting from a crime between the victim and the offender, and the offender and their environment, including other inmates, with a view to facilitating the reintegration of offenders following their release."

This project involved