Fascinating research by Amy Cuddy, social psychologist at Harvard Business School, has important implications for restorative justice interventions and for healing. Professor Cuddy and her colleagues have demonstrated how we simply hold our bodies can affect how we feel, think, behave, and even our hormones. Feeling powerful enough that we believe we can cope with […]

> Bruce Feiler’s March 17, 2013 New York Times article about happy families and how they influence individual family member’s health and happiness, supports our restorative justice and solution focused work http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/fashion/the-family-stories-that-bind-us-this-life.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 Feiler discusses how one night he pondered: “What is the secret sauce that holds a family together? What are the ingredients that make […]

March 16 – 18, 2011, Rochester, New York, Lorenn Walker & Rebecca Greening, will provide a comprehensive training on the innovative reentry and transition planning circle process developed in Hawai’i for imprisoned people and their loved ones. Also discussed on the VERA Institute of Justice website: http://www.vera.org/node/4629 Reentry & Transition Planning Circles are based on […]

Since 2005 we have been piloting a facilitated group reentry and transition planning process, Huikahi Restorative Circles in Hawai’i for incarcerated people and their loved ones. The Circles use solution-focused brief therapy language and restorative justice to address the needs of individual incarcerated people for desisting from crime and drug use. The Circle process is […]

Most people have heard that they can look at situations anyway they want, that we don’t have to suffer by adverse situations. “We cannot escape pain, but suffering is optional,” but how exactly do you do this? It’s one thing to know something, but how to actually apply what we know and live it is […]

While a lot of “lawyer dissing” goes on, some of it easily understandable, many lawyers and judges (who are also lawyers) should be recognized for promoting restorative justice and therapeutic jurisprudence. Judge Gordon McConnell was instrumental in the first modern restorative justice case. John Braithwaite, in Restorative Justice and Responsive Regulation, cites a paper by […]

The Columbia Heights/Shaw Family Collaborative (CHSFC) is a community based organization dedicated to improving the quality of life for people in Washington D.C. It uses restorative justice interventions and provides three basic levels of programs for the community: family group conferencing, youth violence prevention, and work training and jobs for adults. Solution-focused brief therapy principles […]

The  Solution-Focused Judging Bench Book was written primarily by Michael King, an Australian law professor and former judge, and was published by The Australasian Institute of Judicial Administration.  The book describes how courts can apply therapeutic jurisprudence principals, which “concentrates on the law’s impact on emotional life and psychological well-being” in court hearings. Bench books […]

In October 2009 Ben Furman, a psychiatrist from Finland, and the author of numerous books including the brilliant Solution Talk: Hosting Threaputic Conversations, with his colleague Ahola Tapani, and I, developed and made available, a free web site program: www.apologyletter.org. The simple program combines solution-focused brief therapy and restorative justice to provide a confidential program […]

Making effective apologies is a necessary skill.  Yet few of us know how to do it and most of us fail to teach our children how to make effective apologies.  Many of us think we can simply say, “I’m sorry,” or “Please forgive me.”  But often an apology requires that we do more.  Restorative justice […]