Introduction | Table of Contents | About the Authors
Critical Issues in Restorative Justice
Howard Zehr and Barb Toews, editorsAbout the Authors
Mary Achilles is the Governor's Victim Advocate for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Appointed by the governor and confirmed by the legislature in 1995, she is the first to hold such a state-wide position in Pennsylvania and in the U.S. Under her leadership, the Office of the Victim Advocate has gained national recognition for its pioneering work for victims. This includes the Mediation Program for Victims of Violent Crime established under her leadership.
Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz is Director of the Mennonite Central Committee US Office on Crime and Justice. She has provided technical assistance, training and consulting for numerous communities throughout the U.S. and has worked in the victim offender field since 1984 when she began working in Elkhart, Indiana, the site of the first Victim Offender Reconciliation Program in the U.S. She is co-author (with Howard Zehr) of Victim Offender Conferencing in PA's Juvenile Justice System. For seven years Lorraine served on the international Victim Offender Mediation Association (VOMA) Board. She received her B.S. in Social Work from Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, VA (where she was awarded the Distinguished Service Award for 2002) and her Master's in Social Work from Marywood University, Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Mike Batley obtained his B.A. in social work in 1985. After working as a social worker for several years, he served as a probation officer, then a probation manager, in Pretoria, South Africa. In 2001 he co-founded the Restorative Justice Centre in Pretoria and serves as its executive director. He also is a member of the steering committee of the Restorative Justice Initiative, a network of non-government organizations implementing restorative justice.
Gordon Bazemore is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice and Director of the Community Justice Institute at Florida Atlantic University. An active researcher and trainer in restorative justice, his publications appear in many journals. He has completed two books, Restorative Juvenile Justice: Repairing the Harm of Youth Crime (co-edited with Lode Walgrave) and Restorative and Community Justice: Cultivating Common Ground for Victims, Communities and Offenders (co-edited with Mara Schiff), and is currently completing a national study of restorative justice conferencing in the U.S and an evaluation of Vermont's restorative justice programs for juveniles.
Dee Bell is the Administrator of the Community Justice Institute at Florida Atlantic University that includes restorative justice within its training agenda. Prior to this she worked for 28 years in community corrections in Georgia and Florida. She received her education at Clemson and Emory Universities. She has completed numerous evaluations and has authored and co-authored a number of articles and curricula.
Helen Bowen has been a youth advocate (appointed under the Children, Young Persons and Their Families Act 1989) in New Zealand since 1989 and in this role has attended many restorative justice conferences for youth and adult offenders. She has been a trainer and an ongoing supervisor of facilitators for the government-sponsored restorative justice court-referred pilot project in 2001. She co-authored the New Zealand Restorative Justice Practice Manual (with Jim Boyack) and Restorative Justice: Contemporary Themes and Practice (with Jim Consedine).
Jim Boyack is a New Zealand criminal lawyer, a youth advocate (appointed under the Children, Young Persons and Their Families Act 1989) and a long time advocate for restorative justice processes in the criminal law context. He is a trustee of the Restorative Justice Trust and co-author of the New Zealand Restorative Justice Practice Manual (with Helen Bowen). He has written frequently on the topic of restorative justice and, together with Helen Bowen, was chosen by the Department for Courts to train facilitators taking part in the four-year government restorative justice pilot project.
Carolyn Boyes-Watson is Associate Professor of Sociology and founding Director of the Center for Restorative Justice at Suffolk University. She has published in the fields of restorative justice, juvenile justice, and criminal justice policy; a recent book is Crime and Justice: A Casebook Approach. She currently serves as President of the board for Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, the prisoners' legal advocacy organization for the state of Massachusetts.
Chris Cunneen is Associate Professor and Director of the Institute of Criminology at the University of Sydney Law School, Australia. He has worked with a number of Australian Royal Commissions and Inquiries and the federal Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. He is also Chairperson of the Juvenile Justice Advisory Council. He has published widely in the area of juvenile justice, policing, and indigenous issues. His books include Juvenile Justice, Youth and Crime in Australia; Conflict, Politics and Crime; and Indigenous People and the Law in Australia.
Dave Dyck has been working and studying in restorative justice and conflict resolution for more than 15 years. He worked with Mediation Services of Winnipeg from 1991-97 and continues to train and work with their volunteers. He conducts a variety of training and consulting in restorative justice and conflict resolution throughout North America and also teaches at both the University of Prince Edward Island and Eastern Mennonite University's Summer Peacebuilding Institute. He holds a Master of Arts degree in Conflict Transformation from Eastern Mennonite University and a Diploma in Mediation Skills.
Carsten Erbe is a former Project Coordinator/Research Associate with the Community Justice Institute at Florida Atlantic University and in this capacity has worked on several national restorative justice studies. Prior to this he worked in the Yukon Territory with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and a community-based mediation group in a circle peacekeeping process. His Masters degree is in Cross-Cultural Studies from Queensland University of Technology in Australia. For this he evaluated a small Aborigine community's attempt to implement restorative justice practices amongst their people. He currently lives in Canada.
Cheryl Frank obtained a Bachelor of Social Science degree in 1992 at the University of Natal, South Africa, and an MBA at the Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town. She worked for four years at NICRO, a non-government organization working with ex-offenders, then joined the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cape Town as Senior Researcher in Juvenile Justice. She is currently the Director of the Criminal Justice Initiative at the Open Society Foundation of South Africa, and specializes in crime prevention.
Dave Gustafson is Co-Director and founding director of Fraser Region Community Justice Initiatives Association in Langley, British Columbia. CJI specializes in training, program development, conferencing and victim offender mediation across the spectrum from minor schools conflicts to the most serious offences. He is Adjunct Professor in the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University and also maintains a small psychotherapeutic private practice specializing in trauma recovery. He is currently a doctoral candidate at the Katholic University of Leuven, Belgium, where his dissertation will focus on the clinical implications of facilitated encounter between trauma survivors and those responsible for the harms.
Matt Hakiaha is a New Zealand Parole Board Member. He is a former youth justice coordinator and more recently has served as a facilitator for the adult conferencing pilot project in New Zealand. He is also a trustee with Te Whanau o Waipareira Trust, the largest Urban Maori Organisation in New Zealand, and is Chairperson for Te Runanga o te Kareti Paipera o Aotearoa. (Maori Advisory Council for the Bible College of New Zealand).
Susan Herman is Executive Director of the National Center for Victims of Crime in Washington, DC. She has also served as the Director of Community Services at The Enterprise Foundation, as Director of the Domestic Violence Division of Victim Services (now Safe Horizon) in New York City, as Special Counsel to the Police Commissioner of the New York City Police Department, and as Director of Mediation Services at the Institute for Mediation and Conflict Resolution. She has also served as an attorney at the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund and as an instructor at New York University's School of Law and its Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. She is a graduate of the Antioch School of Law.
Russ Immarigeon, MSW, is editor of Women, Girls & Criminal Justice, Offender Programs Report, and VOMA Connections, the newsletter of the Victim-Offender Mediation Association. He contributes regularly to national newsletters on crime victims, community corrections, probation and correctional management. With Shadd Maruna, he co-edited After Crime and Punishment, a volume of original articles on crime desistance and offender reintegration. He was recently elected to a term as Town Justice in Hillsdale, New York.
Vernon E. Jantzi, Professor of Sociology at Eastern Mennonite University, has been involved in international development practice, research and teaching for many years. Within the past five years he has given special attention to the relationship between restorative justice and civil society. He helped found Eastern Mennonite University's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding and served as director from 1996 through 2002. He has lived and worked in a number of Latin American countries and New Zealand has been involved in numerous short-term projects in Africa and South Asia. Professor Jantzi holds a doctorate in the sociology of development from Cornell University.
Morris Jenkins received his JD from Stetson University College of Law and his Ph.D. from Northeastern University. He has been involved with many community-based organizations, and has taught and trained students and practitioners at every level, including elementary school and law and graduate students, in law-related education (LRE), conflict resolution, and mediation. In addition, he has provided multicultural/diversity training to many police departments, probation departments and corrections staff. A current research interest is the effectiveness of Eurocentric, enculturated, multicultural and Afrocentric programs that deal with at-risk youth in the Black community as well as the cultural foundations of gang and non-gang youth.
Gerry Johnstone is Professor of Law at the University of Hull, United Kingdom. His recent books include Restorative Justice: Ideas, Values, Debates and A Restorative Justice Reader: Texts, Sources, Context. He is currently co-editing an international handbook of restorative justice.
Jackie Katounas is an ex-offender who, after 138 criminal convictions and 12 years' imprisonment, turned her life around after an encounter with a victim from one of her crimes. She is a founding member of Hawkes Bay Restorative Justice Inc in New Zealand and went on to successfully pilot the first restorative justice program in a New Zealand prison. She is now the Restorative Justice Project Manager for Prison Fellowhip New Zealand and is taking restorative justice programs into other jails throughout the country.
Bonnie Price Lofton is Director of Development for the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University. She formerly worked as a reporter for the Montreal Gazette and several other newspapers and as a writer/editor for the University of Virginia and for private publishers. She is a candidate for a master's degree in Conflict Transformation at EMU.
Chris Marshall teaches New Testament at the Tyndale Graduate School of Theology in New Zealand and is a facilitator and trustee of the Waitakere Restorative Justice Community Group in West Auckland. His publications include Beyond Retribution: A New Testament Vision for Crime, Justice and Punishment. He received his Ph.D. from the University of London.
Guy Masters is currently Referral Order Coordinator for Wandsworth Youth Offending Team in London, United Kingdom, working with young offenders, victims and community volunteers. He has been involved in the restorative justice field since 1993 as a practitioner, researcher and consultant and has written widely on practice. His key area of interest is the mainstreaming of effective restorative practice.
Gabrielle Maxwell is a psychologist and criminologist working as an Associate of the Crime and Justice Research Centre at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. In recent years, much of her research has focussed on restorative justice and the New Zealand youth justice system in particular. Her most recent book (co-edited with Allison Morris) is Restorative Justice for Juveniles: Conferencing, Mediation and Circles. She has just completed a major study, "Achieving effective outcomes in youth justice in New Zealand." Other recent work has focussed on family violence, crime prevention and children's rights.
Paul McCold is a research criminologist and the Director of Research for the International Institute for Restorative Practices in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA. Paul received his Ph.D. from the University of Albany and for ten years was a Research Scientist with the New York State Division For Youth. He has taught at Old Dominion and Temple Universities and was principal investigator on the Bethlehem Restorative Policing Experiment. He has been actively involved with the UN Alliance of NGOs on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice (NY) since 1995. He is the author of numerous articles on restorative justice and family group conferencing as well as the Restorative Justice Handbook and Restorative Justice: An Annotated Bibliography.
Allison Morris was, until 2001, Professor of Criminology at Victoria University of Wellington, and has many publications in the restorative justice field. She is now a freelance researcher and is involved in an evaluation of restorative justice conferences for adult offenders.
Val Napoleon is is of Cree-Saulteaux-Dunne Zah heritage and is also an adopted member of the Gitanyow (Gitxsan) House of Luuxhon, Ganeda (Frog) clan. She worked as a community activist and consultant in northwestern British Columbia, Canada, for over 25 years and she has served on a number of provincial, regional, and local boards. She received her LL.B. from the University of Victoria in 2001, articled with the Victoria law firm Arvay Finlay, and was called to the bar in 2002. She is currently completing an interdisciplinary Ph.D. (law and history) at the University of Victoria.
George Pavlich is Professor in the Department of Sociology and an Associate Dean in the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. His journal articles have dealt with critical criminological theory, restorative justice, governmental research, social theory, and socio-legal studies. He is the author of Justice Fragmented: Mediating Community Disputes Under Postmodern Conditions; and Critique and Radical Discourses on Crime; co-editor of Rethinking Law, Society and Governance (with G Wickham); and co-editor of Sociology for the Asking (with M Hird; forthcoming). He is currently working on book analyzing the paradoxes of restorative justice governance.
Barbara Raye is Executive Director of the Center for Policy, Planning and Performance, a nonprofit consulting and training organization working with organizations committed to social justice. She is also Executive Administrator for the Victim Offender Mediation Association (VOMA). Among other assignments, she has served as Director of Victim Services for the Minnesota Department of Corrections and has established shelters for battered women and their children, a violent partner program and a family re-integration program. She helped form the Indiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence and was an early member of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. She received her MBA from the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota, and is a frequent trainer and consultant in restorative justice and related areas.
Susan Sharpe, Ph.D., is best known as the author of Restorative Justice: A Vision for Healing and Change. Formerly of Edmonton, Alberta, she now lives in Seattle, Washington, while continuing to work on restorative justice projects in Canada. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Denver in Colorado.
Ann Skelton obtained her LLB degree in 1985 and was admitted as an Advocate of the High Court of South Africa in 1988. She was employed by Lawyers for Human Rights for 11 years and has been at the forefront of efforts to bring about changes to the system for children charged with crimes in South Africa for many years. In 1997 she was appointed by the South African Minister of Justice to lead a project of the South African Law Commission to develop a comprehensive new statute regarding children accused of crimes. From 1999 to 2003 she was the national coordinator of the Child Justice Project, a UN technical assistance project based in the Department of Justice in Pretoria. She has recently joined the Centre for Child Law at the University of Pretoria where she is the coordinator of a Children's Litigation Project.
Dr Heather Strang is a criminologist and Director of the Centre for Restorative Justice at the Australian National University. Since 1995 she has been involved in studies investigating the effectiveness of restorative justice as an alternative, or in addition, to normal criminal justice processing of offenders. She has particularly focused on the emotional harm experienced by victims and the potential for emotional restoration offered by restorative justice. This has recently resulted in a book, Repair or Revenge: Victims and Restorative Justice. She is currently co-directing a series of experiments in the United Kingdom to test the impact of restorative justice on serious adult violent and property offenders and their victims.
Dennis Sullivan and Larry Tifft have been collaborating on writing and activist projects about justice since they first taught together at the University of Illinois-Chicago in 1972. In 1980, their The Struggle To Be Human: Crime, Criminology, and Anarchism was published in the Orkney Islands, the first pacifist-anarchist treatise to appear on crime, punishment, and justice. This was followed by Dennis' The Mask of Love: Corrections In America; Toward a Mutual Aid Alternative and Larry's Battering of Women: The Failure of Intervention and the Case for Prevention and Dennis' The Punishment of Crime in Colonial New York: The Dutch Experience in Albany During the Seventeenth Century. They are authors of the recent Restorative Justice: Healing the Foundations of Our Everyday Lives. Dennis and Larry also founded and currently serve as editors of the Contemporary Justice Review. They were also instrumental in establishing the Justice Studies Association, an association of scholars, practitioners, and activists committed to restorative and social justice. Larry teaches at Central Michigan University and Dennis is an Adjunct Professor of Criminal Justice at the University at Albany.
Barb Toews has worked in the restorative justice field since 1992 when she began working in Fresno, California, at the Victim Offender Reconciliation Program of the Central Valley. Following this experience, she was the founding director of the Lancaster Area Victim Offender Reconciliation Program in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Currently working with the Pennsylvania Prison Society, Barb explores the application of restorative justice in prison and facilitates programs that provide restorative opportunities for incarcerated men and women. She also facilitates educational forums and skills training in restorative justice and victim offender mediation in Pennsylvania and around the U.S. She has written or co-written a number of articles in the area of restorative justice. Barb holds a Masters degree in Conflict Transformation from Eastern Mennonite University.
Lode Walgrave is emeritus professor in Criminology at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, where he is director of the Research Group of Youth Criminology. He has been founding member and the first coordinator of the International Network for Research on Restorative Justice for Juveniles. In recent years, he has published many articles and book chapters on restorative justice, especially on its normative aspects. Among the books he has edited recently is Restorative Justice and the Law.
Annie Warner Roberts is Outreach Director at the Center for Restorative Justice and Peacemaking, University of Minnesota, School of Social Work, providing technical assistance and consulting. She is also a practitioner, mediating/facilitating minor to serious and violent criminal justice cases. She is current Co-chair of the Board of Directors of the Victim Offender Mediation Association (VOMA). Additionally, she is a practitioner trainer, both nationally and internationally, for the National Restorative Justice Training Institute, the Victim Offender Mediation Association (VOMA), the National Institute of Corrections (NIC) and Balanced and Restorative Justice (BARJ).
Wonshé served as midwife to numerous rural and urban communities throughout the US for more than 13 years. During that time, she founded and directed the Traditional Midwifery and Womancraft School offering community-based education and apprenticeship to aspiring midwives. Throughout these years she researched historical midwifery practices, violence in contemporary birthing practices, and nonviolent alternatives. She received her BA in Expressive Arts for Conflict Transformation at Hollins University (Virginia) and is currently completing her Master in Conflict Transformation, with a concentration in restorative justice at Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia.
Howard Zehr is Professor of Restorative Justice and Co-Director of the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, Eastern Mennonite University, Virginia. He directed the first Victim Offender Reconciliation Program in the U.S. and for 17 years served as Director of the Mennonite Central Committee U.S. Office on Crime and Justice. He has lectured, trained and consulted in many countries and in 2003 was the first recipient of Prison Fellowship International's Restorative Justice Prize. His publications include Changing Lenses: A New Focus for Crime and Justice, Doing Life: Reflections of Men and Women Serving Life Sentences, and Transcending: Reflections of Crime Victims. He is editor of the series The Little Books of Justice and Peacebuilding and has authored or co-authored several in the series. He received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University.
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