What is Restorative Justice?

A slide from the webinar this week.

Restorative justice is a set of values and principles that guide our work together.

Next week, I’m very excited to participate in a webinar produced by the American Friends Service Committee as part of a Community Safety Beyond Policing series. This series is on restorative justice, and my program provides an introduction to restorative justice. I am especially excited because I’ve convinced some incredible people I’ve worked with during 2022 to bring restorative justice to their work. Teresa McCune, public defender for the 30th Judicial Circuit in West Virginia, Nicole Bailey, a community volunteer with Grace Recovery in West Virginia, and Charles Eimers, a staff member at the WWRC vocational training facility, will assist me in moderating the discussion. Our session will present the principles and values of restorative justice and provide some examples of their real-world application from the projects we’ve been working on this year. I’ll then have a short scenario with a discussion that involves the different questions restorative justice asks compared to retributive justice. I often hear the question: What is Restorative Justice? In preparation for this session, I have drafted a short paper (and spoiler alert: you know it when you see it!) Download the paper here: What is Restorative Justice?