After the Crime: The Power of Restorative Justice Dialogues Between Victims and Violent Offenders – Susan L. Miller
Too often, the criminal justice system silences victims, which leaves them frustrated, angry, and with many unanswered questions. Despite their rage and pain, many victims want the opportunity to confront their offenders and find resolution. After the Crime explores a victim-offender dialogue program that offers victims of severe violence an opportunity to meet face-to-face with their incarcerated offenders. Using rich in-depth interview data, the book follows the harrowing stories of crimes of stranger rape, domestic violence, marital rape, incest, child sexual abuse, murder, and drunk driving, ultimately moving beyond story-telling to provide an accessible scholarly analysis of restorative justice. Author Susan Miller argues that the program has significantly helped the victims who chose to face their offenders in very concrete, transformative ways. Likewise, the offenders have also experienced positive changes in their lives in terms of creating greater accountability and greater victim empathy. After the Crime explores their transformative experiences with restorative justice, vividly illustrating how one program has worked in conjunction with the criminal justice system in order to strengthen victim empowerment.
Healing from Sexual Violence: The Case for Vicarious Restorative Justice – Alissa R. Ackerman and Jill S. Levenson
Vicarious restorative justice (VRJ) is a practice that allows individuals who have experienced sexual harm to sit face to face with individuals who have perpetrated it. The concept of VRJ is not new, but it has not been utilized for healing from sexual trauma until recently. Healing from Sexual Violence explains what vicarious restorative justice is and how it promotes healing without re-traumatizing people. It provides a solid framework for incorporating VRJ into
clinical practices and communities with material on using trauma-informed approaches. The authors include real-life examples of the power of VRJ, including their own personal stories. This is a book that is both visionary and practical.
Heart of Hope: A Guide for Using Peacemaking Circles to Develop Emotional Literacy, Promote Healing, and Build Healthy Relationships – Carolyn Boyes-Watson and Kay Pranis
Heart of Hope provides specific formats for conducting effective Circles around developing emotional literacy and building healthy relationships. The book is being used extensively in schools by teachers and administrators as well as in health care facilities and elder abuse programs.
The Big Book of Restorative Justice: Four Classic Justice & Peacebuilding Books in One Volume – Howard Zehr, Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz, Allan MacRae, and Kay Pranis
Restorative justice, with its emphasis on identifying the justice needs of everyone involved in a crime, is a worldwide movement of growing influence that is helping victims and communities heal while holding criminals accountable for their actions. This is not a soft-on-crime, feel-good philosophy, but rather a concrete effort to bring justice and healing to everyone involved in a crime. Circle processes draw from the Native American tradition of gathering in a circle to solve problems as a community. Peacemaking circles are used in neighborhoods, in schools, in the workplace, and in social services to support victims of all kinds, resolve behavior problems, and create positive climates.
Each book is written by a scholar at the forefront of these movements, making this important reading for classrooms, community leaders, and anyone involved with conflict resolution. This volume includes four classic justice and peacebuilding books:
- The Little Book of Restorative Justice: Revised and Updated
- The Little Book of Victim Offender Conferencing
- The Little Book of Family Group Conferences
- The Little Book of Circle Processes
The Little Book of Circle Processes: A New/Old Approach to Peacemaking – Kay Pranis
This book explores the peacemaking potential of circle processes, a storytelling practice drawn from various Indigenous traditions. Circle processes offer a way of bringing people together to understand one another, strengthen bonds, and solve community problems—a necessity in an era of division, polarized politics, and angry debate. Peacemaking circles are used in neighborhoods to provide support for those harmed by crime and to decide sentences for those who commit crime, in schools to create positive classroom climates and resolve behavior problems, in the workplace to deal with conflict, and in social services to develop more organic support systems for people struggling to get their lives together. The circle process hinges on storytelling. It is an effort bringing astonishing results around the country.
The Little Book of Family Group Conferences: New Zealand Style – Allan MacRae and Howard Zehr
Family Group Conferences (FGCs) are the primary forum in New Zealand for dealing with juvenile crime as well as child welfare issues. This third volume in The Little Books of Justice and Peacebuilding Series is about the juvenile justice system that is built around these conferences.
Since their introduction in New Zealand, Family Group Conferences have been adopted and adapted in many places throughout the world. They have been applied in many arenas including child welfare, school discipline, and criminal justice, both juvenile and adult. In fact, FGCs have emerged as one of the most promising models of restorative justice. This Little Book describes the basics and rationale for this approach to juvenile justice, as well as how an FGC is conducted.
The Little Book of Restorative Justice for Sexual Abuse: Hope Through Trauma – Judah Oudshoorn, Michelle Jackett, and Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz
Restorative justice is gaining acceptance for addressing harm and crime. Interventions have been developed for a wide range of wrongdoing. This book considers the use of restorative justice in response to sexual abuse. Rather than a blueprint or detailing a specific set of programs, it is more about mapping possibilities. It allows people to carefully consider its use in responding to violent crimes such as sexual abuse. This book also describes impacts of sexual abuse and demonstrates how restorative justice can create hope through trauma.
The Little Book of Strategic Peacebuilding: A Vision and Framework for Peace with Justice – Lisa Schirch
So we’d all like a more peaceful world—no wars, no poverty, no more racism, no community disputes, no office tensions, no marital skirmishes. Lisa Schirch sets forth paths to such realities. In fact, she points a way to more than the absence of conflict. She foresees just peace—a sustainable state of affairs because it is a peace which insists on justice. Schirch singles out four critical actions that must be undertaken if peace is to take root at any level: waging conflict nonviolently, reducing direct violence, transforming relationships; and building capacity.
The Little Book of Transformative Community Conferencing: A Hopeful, Practical Approach to Dialogue – David Anderson Hooker
In The Little Book of Transformative Community Conferencing, David Anderson Hooker offers a hopeful, accessible approach to dialogue that:
- Integrates several practice approaches including restorative justice, peacebuilding, and arts
- Creates welcoming, non-divisive spaces for dialogue
- Names and maps complex conflicts, such as racial tensions, religious divisions, environmental issues, and community development as it narrates simple stories
- Builds relationships and foundations for trust needed to support long-term community transformation projects
- And results in the crafting of hopeful, future-oriented visions of community that can transform relationships, resource allocation, and structures in service of communities’ preferred narratives.
Hooker presents an important, stand-alone process, an excellent addition to the study and practice of strategic peacebuilding, restorative justice, conflict transformation, trauma healing, and community organizing.
This book recognizes the complexity of conflict, choosing long-term solutions over inadequate quick fixes. The Transformative Community Conferencing model emerges from the author’s thirty years of practice in contexts as diverse as South Sudan; Mississippi; Greensboro, North Carolina; Oakland, California; and Nassau, Bahamas.