RESTORATIVE JUSTICE BEST PRACTICE GUIDELINES TOOLKIT

This toolkit project grew out of a multi-year collaboration between restorative justice practitioners, teachers, and scholars affiliated with the National Association of Community and Restorative Justice (NACRJ) and the National Center on Restorative Justice (NCORJ). Members of this project team studied guidelines supporting restorative justice practice, mainly focusing on examples from the United States, but including a few international frameworks as well. We created this toolkit out of deep appreciation for the diversity and complexity of restorative justice practices and the ways it is supported locally, regionally, and nationally. Practicing restorative justice is both transformative and complex. Resources meant to support practice, such as standards and guidelines, can give practitioners both practical tools and frameworks to think about.

Guidelines are often written documents that can range from formal standards to tips for practice, categorized by fundamental content and practice components. Facilitators may use these guideline documents to encourage and guide their own growth as practitioners and as a checkpoint to ensure they are practicing in a way that upholds core principles and does not cause further harm. Additionally, some restorative justice communities may use these guidelines as a resource for clients to know that the restorative justice practitioner(s) they are engaging with are upholding a specific standard and as a resource in cases of poor facilitation.

There are many guidelines and handbooks for supporting restorative justice practice, containing both consistent guidance for cultivating core elements and approaches to restorative justice, and also varied and nuanced support responsive to specific contexts. While there are widely recognized components of restorative justice that are universal across contexts, guidance for practice is often deeply personal to the communities that use it. This toolkit is designed to support people, organizations, and communities in creating practice guidelines for their own communities that balance the needs of unique contexts with consistency of restorative justice principles and practices.

A special thanks to the collaborative working group, led by Dr. Nastasia Lawton-Sticklor and consisting of Dr. Lindsey Pointer, Dr. David Karp, Sheryl R. Wilson, Dr. Gregory Paul, Joel Friesz, Amanda Mitchell, and DeMointé Wesley, whose planning, feedback, and revision were invaluable to the creation of this toolkit. Thank you to Kathleen McGoey, Rami El Gharib (Restorative Rainbow Alliance), Dan Kahn, and J Thompson (Florida Restorative Justice Association) for their deep wisdom and vital contributions.

How to Use This Toolkit

This toolkit is divided into four core sections: Designing a Process, Foundational Components, Defining and Communicating Values, and Ongoing Growth and Sharing. Each of these sections contains an introduction, guiding questions to think about, and resources that can be downloaded and used throughout the guidelines creation process.

The first three core sections, Designing a Process, Foundational Components, and Defining and Communicating Values, contain resources and activities for thinking intentionally about how to structure your guidelines creation process, what content you want to center in your document, and what values and lenses you want to include.

While these sections are distinct, they are also deeply connected. For example, the values and commitments that contributors prioritize affect not only the content of your guidelines, but your process as well. Likewise, the process that you set will impact what content is prioritized and how values are communicated. We invite you to start with the Designing a Process section, but encourage you to engage with each of these sections cyclically, going back to resources and activities in each section at various points throughout your guidelines creation process.

Explore the Toolkit

New to Restorative Justice?

Designing a Process for Creating Guidelines

Foundational Content and Components

Defining and Communicating Values

Ongoing Growth and Sharing

New to Restorative Justice?

The resources in this toolkit are specific to creating guidelines and do not provide a foundation of knowledge on restorative justice. If you are brand new to restorative justice, we suggest engaging with resources that can provide a foundation to the histories, principles, and practices of restorative justice before using this toolkit. There are many valuable resources on Restorative Justice. The following linked resources do not constitute an exhaustive list, but can provide some insight and foundations into Restorative Justice.

Designing a Process for Creating Guidelines

Introduction

For anyone embarking on creating a significant resource, such as guidelines, it can be tempting to jump into the content right away. However, setting an intentional process that takes into account how guidelines are created can help to make the best use of time and resources, prioritize equitable and collaborative relationships, and avoid unnecessary conflicts over decision-making, ultimately leading to more useful and effective content.

In this section, you'll find resources to help you determine a process for creating guidelines. These resources speak directly to many aspects of a creation process: who is participating, what roles are needed, how decisions are made, how to resolve disagreements or conflicts, etc.

Guidelines are often co-created by multiple key players in a restorative justice community, including practitioners, people who have participated in a restorative justice process, community organizers, legislators, and researchers. A collaborative process has a lot of moving parts: multiple perspectives and priorities, different levels of engagement and urgency, and many logistical and capacity considerations.

Another important consideration for designing a process for creating guidelines is determining the scope and purpose of the guidelines. Determining who the intended users of guidelines are and what role guidelines will play in their practice can help in designing a process that aligns with these goals.

We invite you to move through this section, starting with the guiding questions and the Charrette template for designing a process. You may find all or just some of the guiding questions relevant, and you may want to generate a few of your own.

Guiding Questions

What experiences and voices need to be centered during the process of creating guidelines?
How does your design group plan on making decisions? What might be the benefits/drawbacks to different processes such as consensus-building, democratic majority, leadership decision-making, etc.?
How does your design team want to approach disagreement or conflict between participants? Will the approach be different according to types of conflicts (e.g. content or process-related, interpersonal, etc.)?
How does your design group want to balance structured goal-setting and emergent idea-generation?
What is your timeframe for creating and publishing guidelines? Who can hold logistics, including timelines, follow-up, scheduling, etc., during the process?
What support might participants or community members need in order to participate in the guidelines creation process?

Resources and Templates

Tricky Issues Videos

Additional Readings and Links

Foundational Content and Components

Introduction

While restorative justice practice is responsive to myriad different settings and community contexts, there are foundational components and values that ground practice and are consistently included in guidelines. While these components are central to restorative justice practice, they also contain nuance and complexity that creators of guidelines grapple with. Different terms or phrases to describe foundational components may carry different priorities or emphases. It is important to craft descriptive language that best fits your context and community.

How foundational components of restorative justice practice are framed in guidelines impacts how practitioners utilize them in their work. Some guidelines present these foundational components as mandates or standards that practitioners must follow with fidelity. Other guidelines present them as guidance with the intention that practitioners will build their own skills and practices relating to these core components. Much of how guidelines convey their intentions for grounding practice with these foundational components depends on the context in which guidelines are being created.

In this section, you’ll see examples of the different ways that these foundational components are framed in different guidelines. For example, some guidelines aim to reach restorative justice practitioners in a wide range of settings. In these cases, it can be helpful to use less detailed or contextual language to describe foundational components to make guidelines more applicable to different contexts. In other cases, guidelines strive to support practitioners in particular settings or with specific lenses for practice. These guidelines use more detailed and nuanced language to provide more comprehensive support for their audience.

It may be helpful to build on the work of the previous section, particularly the ideas and materials created to address the scope and purpose of your guidelines, to ground your work in this section. How foundational elements of restorative justice practice are presented, described, and framed will likely depend on the communities of practice that guidelines are designed to support.

Guiding Questions

What is the scope of the audience your toolkit intends to support? Do people within this scope practice in many different contexts or just one? Is there diversity of needs and goals?
What are the contexts, needs, and goals of the audience your guidelines are intended to support, and how might you address these in the framing and language of core elements?
What are your goals and priorities in terms of presenting these elements as broad and universal to reach more diverse contexts, or specific and nuanced to reach a specific context in more depth? What are the implications of your priorities?
How might you go about checking your guidelines’ language describing core elements for accessibility and understanding?
How might you order the core elements included in your guidelines? Will your guidelines imply a hierarchy of importance between core elements (for example, listing the ones you feel are most important first), or will you communicate equal importance of all core elements?
Will your guidelines contain a level of accountability in using core elements in practice? For example, will guidelines mandate certain types of practices within core elements? Or communicate guidance for exploring core elements?

Resources and Templates

Tricky Issues Videos

Additional Readings and Links

Defining and Communicating Values

Introduction

“Restorative justice risks losing relevance if we, as practitioners, do not become more skillful at identifying, navigating, and transforming racial harm… Given the nation’s changing demographics and persistent, if not deepening, racial disparities, a restorative justice approach that ignores these inequities will be perceived as uninformed and uncaring, if not irrelevant and racist.” - Fania Davis, The Little Book of Race and Restorative Justice

“Practicing Restorative Justice calls us to remain curious and committed to growth that expands inclusion and equity to best honor each participant in the RJ process and within our communities.” - Restorative Rainbow Alliance

As suggested in other sections, restorative justice practices and service provision are nuanced and don’t exist within a vacuum. They are informed by a community’s specific circumstances and needs, by commonly held values, and broader historical, structural, and systemic realities. They are also informed by “who is at the table” and the various identities and positionalities that they possess. Likewise, your guidelines will exist in and may need to respond to these contexts. You and your collaborators may find it important to explicitly address the values, lenses, or stances that you bring to restorative justice service provision and that informed the creation of your guidelines.

Restorative justice guidelines hold many goals for supporting practice in a variety of spaces. Creators of guidelines are often faced with difficult choices concerning how to write documents that unequivocally communicate their stances on justice, while building bridges to connect with spaces that may be more mainstream, or less focused on social justice. Guidelines users who are impacted by inequity may not feel connected – or safe – if guidelines are vague or ambivalent about their stances on racial, gender, and other forms of justice. However guidelines designed to be used in traditional settings such as courts may not meet their goal of increasing “buy-in” to restorative justice and decreasing harm caused in criminal legal settings if their language around social justice is inaccessible to traditional spaces.

The resources in this section invite creators of guidelines to dive into the personal and collective work of unpacking our socializations, pushing the limitations of how we imagine justice, and standing firmly in solidarity. Many of these resources can support creating content, as well as setting an equitable and relational process of creating guidelines.

Guiding Questions

Are there particular lenses, stances, or lived experiences that inform how we approach restorative justice in our community?
What values are guiding our restorative justice work, and how are those values defined by or rooted in our specific community context?
How do we remain accountable to the values we’ve named in our ongoing practice?
How will we revisit or revise our values as our work or community evolves?
How do cultural, spiritual, or historical teachings influence our understanding of harm, accountability, and healing?
In what ways are we centering those most impacted by harm or systems of oppression in defining our values?
What are we choosing to uplift or move away from in our approach to RJ? Why?
What does it look like when our values are in action? What does it look like when they’re not?
Are there community or cultural protocols we should follow in the development and sharing of these guidelines?
How do we hold space for multiple truths and experiences when naming our values? Who do we still need to bring in?
How are we avoiding replicating dominant or colonial frameworks?
What perspectives (e.g. elders, youth, impacted persons) are missing from value-definition conversations?
Are our values and practices trauma-informed and culturally responsive?

Resources and Templates

Tricky Issues Videos

Additional Readings and Links

Podcasts:

Books & Articles:

Videos/Films:

Justice Through a Queer Lens: The Criminal Legal System, Restorative Justice & Liberation UC Law San Francisco
13th

Websites:

White Supremacy Culture

Ongoing Growth and Sharing

Introduction

After guidelines are created, the work isn’t complete. It is worthwhile to consider early in the drafting process how the guidelines will be shared and promoted, to increase awareness of this important resource and the use of the guidelines by practitioners. You may also want to establish a process and specific commitments for continuing to update the guidelines based on feedback received or as the needs of the restorative justice community continue to evolve.

This conversation will likely involve some more complex considerations as well, such as how authors or organizations should be credited for the creation of the guidelines, boundaries around use and recreation of the guidelines, and who will hold responsibility for considering and incorporating feedback moving forward. It is also helpful to consider at this point what information you want to collect about how practitioners and programs are using the guidelines in facilitation, training, policy, advocacy, and more, and how that information can be collected.

In this section, you will see examples of how guidelines have been shared and promoted in wider communities. When there is a “living document” commitment to continuing to update guidelines, you will see examples of how feedback is collected to inform future revisions.

Guiding Questions

Examples

Tricky Issues Videos

Feedback is a gift. This toolkit is the product of many voices, and experiences. We recognize however, that even when intentionality is prioritized and input and accountability is invited, no resource can escape the limitations of the folks who create it. We wholeheartedly invite your feedback and reactions to the resources in this toolkit, both ways in which it is helpful, and the ways in which it will surely fall short. The most effective resources are cultivated to grow and evolve over time, and your feedback will help our continued commitment to learning and growth.

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