50 Essential Thought Leaders in Restorative Justice Globally

Last updated: June 2026

The fifty people on this list are not a peripheral movement. As of June 2026, restorative justice has been implemented in criminal justice systems in more than 80 countries, is embedded in school discipline frameworks from Minnesota to Scotland, and is generating a body of experimental evidence that is reshaping how governments think about harm, accountability, and repair. The people shaping this field deserve to be far better known than they are, and this directory is a starting point for anyone who wants to understand who is doing the most important work right now.

Restorative justice, at its core, is an approach to wrongdoing that asks not who broke the law and what punishment they deserve, but who was harmed, what their needs are, and whose responsibility it is to meet them. That deceptively simple reframe has radical implications for criminal courts, school discipline systems, workplaces, communities recovering from mass violence, and anywhere human beings need to find a way through harm toward something better.

A growing body of randomised controlled trials shows that well-designed restorative processes reduce reoffending, increase victim satisfaction, and improve safety outcomes compared to standard criminal justice processing. A 2013 Campbell Collaboration systematic review co-authored by Heather Strang and Lawrence Sherman, drawing on multiple randomised controlled trials across the UK, US, and Australia, found that restorative justice conferencing significantly reduced reoffending compared to traditional criminal justice processing. Separately, a 2023 meta-analysis published in Criminology and Criminal Justice by Fulham and colleagues, synthesising 27 studies across four decades, found that restorative justice programmes were associated with significant small reductions in general recidivism and meaningfully increased victim and client satisfaction.

Rather than recycling the same handful of names that appear on every list, this directory surfaces the leaders who genuinely deserve to be just as well known. It spans founding theorists, experimental researchers, practitioner-trainers, school-based specialists, indigenous voices, global South scholars, and advocates working at the intersection of restorative justice with gender violence, racial justice, and systemic reform.

Organisations navigating conflict, harm, accountability, or team culture challenges benefit from understanding this field. When the conversations that underlie healthy cultures need to be facilitated with structure and skill, Jonno White, author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold globally) and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, works with leadership teams in schools, corporates, and nonprofits. To discuss how Jonno can support your team, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why Restorative Justice Matters

Restorative justice matters because the dominant model of justice, centred on punishment and state-imposed consequences, demonstrably fails on most of its own objectives. Approximately 62 percent of people released from US prisons are rearrested within three years, according to data published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Victims report feeling sidelined, ignored, and re-traumatised by adversarial court processes that reduce them to witnesses in the state's case. Offenders complete sentences without meaningfully confronting the harm they caused or developing the accountability and empathy that prevent future harm.

The evidence base has grown substantially over the past two decades. The research programmes of Heather Strang and Lawrence Sherman at Cambridge, John Braithwaite's Peacebuilding Compared project at the Australian National University, and the IIRP's practice-based research have collectively demonstrated that restorative approaches produce measurable benefits across school discipline, youth justice, adult criminal matters, workplace conflict, and post-conflict reconciliation contexts.

For leadership teams, the principles of restorative practice, including transparency, accountability, repairing harm, and restoring relationships, are directly applicable to every difficult conversation a manager needs to have. Engage Jonno White to facilitate a leadership team session grounded in these principles. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

How This List Was Compiled

Each person on this list was selected on the basis of three criteria: a documented, substantive contribution to restorative justice theory, practice, policy, or research; current active engagement with the field in 2025 or 2026; and representation of the genuine geographic, disciplinary, and contextual diversity of restorative justice globally. The list spans founding theorists, experimental researchers, practitioner-trainers, school-based specialists, indigenous voices, global South scholars, and advocates working at the intersection of restorative justice with gender violence, racial justice, and systemic reform.

Category 1: The Founders and Foundational Thinkers

The modern restorative justice movement owes its intellectual foundations to a small number of thinkers whose frameworks continue to shape every other entry on this list. These are not honorary inclusions. Their work is still cited, still taught, and still contested in 2026.

1. Howard Zehr (USA)

The role of directing the first victim-offender conferencing programme in the United States, which Zehr held at the Mennonite Central Committee in the late 1970s, makes him the practitioner who first gave the modern restorative justice movement its institutional form. His book Changing Lenses, first published in 1990, provided the conceptual architecture that transformed a collection of experimental practices into a coherent theory of justice. As Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Restorative Justice at Eastern Mennonite University and co-director of the Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice, Zehr continues to write, teach, and shape how the field thinks about itself.

His revised and updated Little Book of Restorative Justice, which has sold more than 150,000 copies, remains the single most widely used introduction to restorative justice practice globally. Its core question, what are the needs of victims, offenders, and communities, and whose obligation is it to meet them, is the question from which the entire field flows.

2. John Braithwaite (Australia)

The 2024 Balzan Prize for Restorative Justice, awarded to John Braithwaite by the International Balzan Foundation, was the field's most significant institutional recognition in recent years. Braithwaite, Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University and founder of the School of Regulation and Global Governance, received the prize for contributions spanning more than fifty years. His 1989 book Crime, Shame and Reintegration introduced the concept of reintegrative shaming, a theory demonstrating that stigmatising responses to crime worsen outcomes while reintegrative responses reduce recidivism.

His current Balzan Research Project is extending his Peacebuilding Compared framework to examine restorative justice in the context of organised crime, corporate crime, and war crimes, with a particular focus on Africa. The project is funding early-career researchers globally and represents the most ambitious current programme connecting restorative justice theory to real-world peacebuilding.

3. Kay Pranis (USA)

Circle processes are among the most widely used restorative practices in schools and communities globally, and Kay Pranis is the person most responsible for their development as a transferable, teachable methodology. Her work adapting Ojibwe peacemaking circles into a structured framework applicable across criminal justice, school, and community contexts produced tools that practitioners use daily on every continent.

Her book Peacemaking Circles: From Crime to Community, co-authored with Barry Stuart and Mark Wedge, and her Little Book of Circle Processes provide the practical architecture for circle facilitation. Pranis is a globally sought practitioner and theorist who has helped establish circle processes in schools, social services, workplaces, and justice systems, with a particular interest in how circles can address historical and structural harms.

4. Mark Umbreit (USA)

The Centre for Restorative Justice and Peacemaking at the University of Minnesota was founded in 1994 under Mark Umbreit, who spent nearly three decades building it into an internationally recognised hub for research, training, and policy guidance. Now Professor Emeritus, Umbreit brought victim-offender mediation into the mainstream of criminal justice practice through a combination of programme development, multi-site research, and sustained advocacy. His eleven books and more than 200 publications in the fields of restorative justice, mediation, and peacemaking represent the most comprehensive body of practice-informed scholarship in the field.

His humanistic mediation model, grounded in the belief that healing for both victim and offender depends on genuine dialogue rather than negotiated settlements, shaped an entire generation of practitioners. His work on facilitating dialogue between family survivors of homicide and the offenders responsible remains among the most demanding and most studied applications of restorative practice anywhere.

Category 2: Experimental Evidence and the Research Foundations

5. Heather Strang (UK/Australia)

The experimental evidence base that gives restorative justice its policy credibility was built, in significant part, through the research programmes designed and directed by Heather Strang. Currently Director of the Cambridge Police Executive Programme at the University of Cambridge, Strang has spent more than two decades conducting and co-directing randomised controlled trials of restorative justice conferencing in Australia and the United Kingdom. Her 2013 Campbell Collaboration systematic review, co-authored with Lawrence Sherman, is the most rigorous and widely cited synthesis of experimental evidence on the effects of restorative conferences on reoffending and victim satisfaction.

Her research consistently finds that restorative justice produces greater victim satisfaction and measurable reductions in reoffending compared to standard criminal justice processing across diverse offence types. Her particular focus on victims of crime, a constituency often left behind by research that foregrounds offenders, makes her work essential reading for anyone serious about what justice actually does for the people harmed.

6. Lawrence Sherman (USA/UK)

The Wolfson Professor of Criminology at Cambridge and Director of the Jerry Lee Centre for Experimental Criminology, Lawrence Sherman, designed the methodology for the most rigorous tests of restorative justice effects ever conducted. Beginning with the Re-Integrative Shaming Experiments in Australia in the 1990s and extending through the Justice Research Consortium experiments in the UK, his work brought the standards of experimental criminology to a field that had previously relied heavily on qualitative case studies and practitioner testimony.

His report Restorative Justice: The Evidence, co-authored with Heather Strang and published in 2007, synthesised ten randomised controlled trials and made the case that restorative justice produces measurable reductions in reoffending frequency across diverse contexts. That evidence base has been central to the expansion of restorative justice in UK criminal justice policy over the past two decades.

Category 3: Violence, Community Justice, and Survivor-Centred Approaches

7. Danielle Sered (USA)

Common Justice, which Danielle Sered founded and directs, is the first alternative-to-incarceration programme in the United States designed specifically to address serious and violent crime in a restorative framework. Based in Brooklyn, the programme has demonstrated that restorative approaches can work for crimes that most people assume require incarceration, including assault, robbery, and gun violence. Her book Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair received the National Association for Community and Restorative Justice award for journalism and was selected by the National Book Foundation for its Literature for Justice recognition.

Her framework rests on a central observation: the people most likely to perpetuate violence are often people who have experienced violence themselves, and systems that respond to violence with more violence, isolation, and humiliation reliably produce more of each. Common Justice's survivor-centred model gives people harmed by violence genuine choice about how their case is handled, producing outcomes that court processes rarely achieve.

8. sujatha baliga (USA)

A 2019 MacArthur Fellow and former director of the Restorative Justice Project at Impact Justice, sujatha baliga is an attorney and restorative justice practitioner who has spent two decades demonstrating that survivor-centred restorative approaches can meet needs that the criminal legal system cannot. Her work is characterised by an equal and rigorous commitment to the needs of people harmed and the needs of people who caused harm, grounded in her own experience as a survivor of child sexual abuse and in years of work as both a victim advocate and a public defender.

Her contributions span the development of restorative diversion programmes for youth, the expansion of restorative approaches to intimate partner and sexual violence, and the co-founding of Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice. The MacArthur Foundation cited her work as demonstrating the efficacy of survivor-centred restorative justice alternatives to traditional legal interventions in breaking cycles of violence and recidivism.

9. Fania Davis (USA)

Co-founder of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth and author of The Little Book of Race and Restorative Justice, Fania Davis has spent decades working at the intersection of racial justice, restorative practice, and indigenous knowledge. She holds a doctorate in Indigenous Knowledge and brings to restorative practice a deep engagement with Afrocentric and indigenous traditions of healing, accountability, and repair that predate the Western restorative justice movement by centuries.

Her work within Oakland's school system helped demonstrate that restorative approaches could dramatically reduce suspensions and expulsions, with the most significant impacts among Black and Brown students most affected by punitive school discipline. Her book, part of the Little Books of Justice and Peacebuilding series, is the first to explicitly integrate the lens of racial justice into restorative practice theory.

Category 4: International Policy, Development, and Advocacy

10. Theo Gavrielides (UK)

Founded in London, the Restorative Justice for All International Institute led by Theo Gavrielides operates across community, education, criminal justice, and human rights contexts in multiple countries. Gavrielides, a legal philosopher, Founder and Director of RJ4All, and Visiting Professor at Buckinghamshire New University, was appointed as an international consultant by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe in 2025 to develop a practical guide on implementing restorative justice for hate incidents and hate crimes. His edited Routledge International Handbook of Restorative Justice remains one of the most comprehensive single-volume references in the field.

His work is distinctive for its commitment to translating complex criminological concepts into community-level practice, particularly with young people affected by serious youth violence in South East London. RJ4All received a 2025 Sport England grant to expand its RJiNEAR youth resilience programme, which uses restorative justice values to support young people affected by bereavement and violence.

11. Daniel Van Ness (USA/International)

Few people have done more to extend restorative justice into international criminal justice policy than Daniel Van Ness. His co-editing with Gerry Johnstone of the Handbook of Restorative Justice produced one of the field's authoritative reference texts, and his decades of work with Prison Fellowship International helped establish restorative justice principles within correctional systems in multiple countries. His contributions to UN policy documents and his engagement with national legislative processes across Asia, Africa, and the Americas make him one of the most globally effective policy translators the field has produced.

His concept of the restorative justice encounter as the central mechanism through which repair, reintegration, and transformation become possible remains one of the field's most generative organising ideas, applicable from victim-offender mediation through to community sentencing circles and restorative policing models.

Category 5: European Research and Theory

12. Gerry Johnstone (UK)

Professor of Law at the University of Hull, Gerry Johnstone has spent more than three decades producing the theoretical and analytical scholarship that allows restorative justice to account for its own values, assumptions, and limits. His book Restorative Justice: Ideas, Values, Debates, and his edited Reader, provide the intellectual architecture through which students and practitioners learn to distinguish what restorative justice is from what it aspires to be. His co-editing with Daniel Van Ness of the Handbook of Restorative Justice remains the most comprehensive single volume on the field.

His more recent work examines how restorative justice might contribute to addressing historical injustices, including reparations for slavery, extending the field's reach into territory that most practitioners have not yet engaged with systematically.

13. Ian Marder (Ireland)

Assistant Professor of Criminology in the School of Law and Criminology at Maynooth University, Ian Marder is one of the most active researchers and policy architects in European restorative justice today. His work producing the Commentary to the Council of Europe's Recommendation on Restorative Justice helped shape the continent's legislative and policy framework for restorative practice implementation. His 2024 co-edited volume Restorative Justice at a Crossroads, co-edited with Brunilda Pali and Giuseppe Maglione, is the most rigorous recent critical examination of what happens to restorative justice when it becomes institutionalised by the state.

His research spans restorative justice in Ireland, community justice models, and the relationship between institutional adoption and the values that make restorative practice distinctive. He is also the founder of the Community of Restorative Researchers, an international network connecting practitioners and academics across the research-practice divide.

14. Brunilda Pali (Netherlands)

Born in Albania and shaped by her experience of regime change, civil conflict, and the migration that followed, Brunilda Pali brings to restorative justice scholarship a perspective on harm and repair that few Western researchers possess. Assistant Professor of Conflict Dynamics and Resolution in the Department of Political Sciences at the University of Amsterdam and Board Member and Secretary of the European Forum for Restorative Justice, Pali has co-edited landmark volumes on environmental restorative justice, restorative justice in intercultural Europe, and the institutionalisation dilemmas that shape how restorative practices function under state management.

Her work consistently interrogates the power dynamics within restorative processes themselves, asking not just whether restorative approaches produce better outcomes than punitive ones but whether they can genuinely redistribute power or whether they risk reproducing existing inequalities in a more palatable form.

15. Giuseppe Maglione (UK)

Lecturer of Criminology and Director of the Restorative Justice Clinic at the University of Kent, Giuseppe Maglione co-edited Restorative Justice at a Crossroads in 2024 alongside Brunilda Pali and Ian Marder. His research focuses on the institutionalisation of restorative justice, the governance of restorative processes, and the relationship between restorative justice theory and the criminological mainstream. A British Academy grant he co-holds with colleagues is supporting a writing workshop series on innovative approaches to justice in Brazil, connecting UK and Brazilian academic communities in ways that the field rarely manages.

His direction of the Restorative Justice Clinic at Kent provides a practical teaching laboratory that trains law students in restorative justice facilitation while also providing genuine services to communities, modelling the integration of practice and scholarship that the field's most effective institutions embody.

16. Lode Walgrave (Belgium)

Emeritus Professor of Criminology at KU Leuven, Lode Walgrave is the European scholar who has most consistently examined restorative justice as a potential system of justice rather than as an add-on to punitive criminal justice. His concept of restorative justice as a dominant paradigm challenges the field to take seriously the question of whether restoration rather than punishment could become the organising principle of an entire justice system, not merely a diversion programme within one.

His book Restorative Justice, Self-Interest and Responsible Citizenship and his extensive contributions to the European Forum for Restorative Justice shaped a generation of European researchers. His collaborative work with Gordon Bazemore on restorative juvenile justice theory produced one of the field's most sustained transatlantic intellectual partnerships.

17. Estelle Zinsstag (UK/Belgium)

Co-chief editor of The International Journal of Restorative Justice and Lecturer in Criminology at Edinburgh Napier University, Estelle Zinsstag has spent more than two decades making the most challenging terrain in restorative justice scholarship, the application of restorative processes to sexual violence and gender-based harm, both theoretically rigorous and practically grounded. Her 2022 book with Marie Keenan, Sexual Violence and Restorative Justice: Addressing the Justice Gap, published by Oxford University Press, is the most comprehensive analysis of what restorative approaches can and cannot offer in cases of sexual crime.

She holds a Royal Society of Edinburgh Personal Research Fellowship and chairs both the Scottish Network of Restorative Justice Researchers and the Working Group on Restorative Justice at the European Society of Criminology. Her work advising the Scottish Government on the development of restorative justice policy gives her scholarship an immediate policy relevance that academic researchers rarely sustain.

Category 6: Gender-Based Violence and Restorative Justice

18. Marie Keenan (Ireland)

Associate Professor at the School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice at University College Dublin, Marie Keenan is one of the most rigorous and courageous scholars working at the intersection of restorative justice and sexual violence. Her book Sexual Violence and Restorative Justice: Addressing the Justice Gap, co-authored with Estelle Zinsstag and published by Oxford University Press in 2022, makes the case for carefully designed restorative approaches as a meaningful response to sexual crime while being unflinching about the risks and preconditions necessary for safe and ethical practice.

Her 2025 co-authored book Transforming Justice Responses to Historical Non-Recent Institutional Abuses, published by Oxford University Press, extends her analysis to the particular challenges of historical abuse claims. She was centrally involved in Ireland's National Consultation with Survivors of Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence on restorative justice, and her work is directly shaping Ireland's national restorative justice policy and practice framework.

Category 7: Restorative Justice in Schools and Education

The application of restorative practices in schools is one of the most rapidly growing areas of the field. The following practitioners and researchers have led and shaped that expansion across the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK.

19. Carolyn Boyes-Watson (USA)

Professor and Faculty Director of the Center for Restorative Justice at Suffolk University in Boston, Carolyn Boyes-Watson has built one of the most durable institutional homes for restorative practice in US higher education. Her book Circle Forward: Building a Restorative School Community, co-authored with Kay Pranis, has become the practitioner handbook of choice for educators implementing circle processes in schools. Her earlier book Peacemaking Circles and Urban Youth brings circle processes to the specific challenges of young people affected by urban violence.

The Center for Restorative Justice at Suffolk, which has served as a regional, national, and international thought leader in restorative justice policy and practice development since 1997, provides a model for how universities can become genuine partners in community-based restorative practice rather than merely studying it from a distance.

20. Katherine Evans (USA)

Associate Professor of Education and Restorative Justice in Education at Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia, Katherine Evans has helped build the field of restorative justice in education as a distinct academic and practice discipline. Her Little Book of Restorative Justice in Education, co-authored with Dorothy Vaandering and now in its second edition, is one of the definitive texts bridging restorative justice theory and classroom practice. She also serves as an education specialist with the Zehr Institute.

Her research and teaching programme supports educators in creating more just and equitable educational opportunities for all students, including those marginalised based on race, ethnicity, ability, language, sexual orientation, and gender identity, grounding restorative practice in an explicit commitment to educational equity.

21. Dorothy Vaandering (Canada)

Professor at the Faculty of Education at Memorial University in Newfoundland and Labrador, Dorothy Vaandering brings both a long career as a primary and elementary educator and the rigour of critical theory and decolonising perspectives to restorative justice in education research. Her co-authorship with Katherine Evans of The Little Book of Restorative Justice in Education reflects a partnership between a practitioner-turned-researcher in Canada and a scholar-practitioner in the US that the field has benefited from enormously.

Her current research focuses on the sustainability and long-term implementation of restorative justice in schools, asking not just whether restorative justice works but why some implementations endure while others fade. Her decolonising perspective challenges programmes that adopt the language of indigenous restorative traditions without adequately engaging with indigenous communities.

22. Lindsey Pointer (USA)

Assistant Professor at Vermont Law and Graduate School and Principal Investigator of the National Center on Restorative Justice, Lindsey Pointer holds a PhD in Restorative Justice from Victoria University of Wellington and is a former Fulbright Fellow and Rotary Global Grant recipient. Her three books, including The Little Book of Restorative Teaching Tools co-authored with Kathleen McGoey, The Restorative Justice Ritual, and the children's picture book Wally and Freya, span an unusually wide range from academic theory to practitioner tools to work for young people themselves.

Her work at NCORJ is building the research infrastructure to support the field's next generation of scholars and practitioners, including a biennial in-person working session focused on strengthening connections between restorative justice research and community practice.

23. Kathleen McGoey (USA)

Co-author of The Little Book of Restorative Teaching Tools and The Little Book of Restorative Teaching Tools for Online Learning, Kathleen McGoey is one of the most actively practising restorative justice trainers globally. Her workshops, including an online session co-facilitated with Lindsey Pointer in April 2026 for practitioners across the UK and US, demonstrate the genuinely international reach of her teaching work. Her particular contribution is making restorative justice concepts learnable through experiential, game-based methods that engage participants differently from standard instructional approaches.

Her work recognises that training practitioners is not enough if the teaching approaches used are themselves out of alignment with restorative values. Her game-based methodology embodies the relational, participatory, experiential character of restorative practice rather than simply describing it from the front of a room.

24. Nancy Riestenberg (USA)

Restorative Practices Specialist at the Minnesota Department of Education and a 2024 NACRJ Pioneer Award recipient, Nancy Riestenberg has spent decades helping Minnesota become one of the most advanced US states in school-based restorative practice implementation. Her book Circle in the Square: Building Community and Repairing Harm in Schools offers a practitioner's guide to making circle processes work in the daily life of a school, grounded in years of technical assistance to school districts across the state.

Her influence extends well beyond Minnesota through her training work, her writing, and her collaboration with practitioners across the US and internationally, including contributions to Margaret Thorsborne's edited volumes on restorative approaches to school behaviour.

25. Gillean McCluskey (UK)

Personal Chair of School Exclusion and Restorative Practice at the Moray House School of Education and Sport at the University of Edinburgh, Gillean McCluskey led the first large-scale evaluation of restorative practices in Scottish schools, a multi-year study commissioned by the Scottish Government that shaped national policy and became a model for research-informed implementation elsewhere. Her research holds two concerns simultaneously: the potential of restorative approaches to transform school discipline culture and the risks of implementation that replicates rather than challenges existing inequalities.

Her contributions to the field include co-editing Restorative Approaches to Conflict in Schools and sustained engagement with Scottish Government policy development on behaviour and inclusion. Her work connects restorative practice to the broader questions of equity, inclusion, and the lived experience of young people who are most harmed by punitive discipline systems.

26. Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz (USA)

Director of the Mennonite Central Committee Office on Crime and Justice in Pennsylvania, and a 2024 NACRJ Pioneer Award recipient alongside Nancy Riestenberg, Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz has spent decades connecting restorative justice values to faith-based and community contexts. Her Little Book of Restorative Discipline for Schools, co-authored with Judy Mullet, was one of the first texts to make restorative principles accessible to educators without a criminal justice background.

Her sustained work at the intersection of faith communities, schools, and criminal justice systems makes her one of the most effective bridges between restorative justice's Mennonite origins and its contemporary mainstream applications. The Mennonite Central Committee's long history of victim-offender reconciliation work gives her institutional vantage point a depth that few practitioners possess.

27. Margaret Thorsborne (Australia)

An internationally recognised practitioner, trainer, and author based in Australia, Margaret Thorsborne has spent more than three decades helping schools, organisations, and communities implement restorative practices in ways that last beyond a single training programme. Her practical training manuals, including Restorative Practices and Managing Behaviour in Schools and How Affect Script Psychology Explains How and Why Restorative Practice Works, are among the most pragmatic and implementation-focused resources available.

A 2022 recipient of the NACRJ Pioneer Award, Thorsborne's influence extends through the practitioners she has trained across Australia, the UK, the US, and internationally. Her collaboration with Brenda Morrison and others on the affect script psychology foundations of restorative practice is one of the most distinctive intellectual contributions in the school-based literature.

Category 8: Circle Processes, Indigenous Practice, and Youth Justice

28. Lorenn Walker (USA)

An instructor at the University of Hawaii and an independent restorative justice practitioner, Lorenn Walker brings particular expertise in Hawaii's indigenous-rooted Huikahi Restorative Circle programme, which she helped design for use with incarcerated individuals and their families. The programme helps people in prison develop plans for reentry with the support of their families and communities, using restorative circle processes that draw on Hawaiian cultural values of harmony, connection, and collective responsibility.

Her work has been studied and adapted in multiple countries and her contributions appear in key reference texts including Restorative Justice Today, edited with Katherine van Wormer. Her combination of legal training, clinical practice, and indigenous-informed facilitation methodology makes her one of the most distinctive voices in the field.

29. Juan Tauri (New Zealand)

Associate Professor at the University of Auckland's Faculty of Law and one of the most prominent Maori voices in restorative justice scholarship, Juan Tauri has spent his career interrogating both the genuine connections between restorative justice and Maori tikanga and the ways that mainstream restorative justice programmes have appropriated indigenous traditions without adequately crediting or involving indigenous communities.

His 2025 paper with William Wood on restorative justice in the settler-colonial context of Australia and New Zealand is a rigorous challenge to the assumption that diversionary conferencing programmes adequately address indigenous overrepresentation in criminal justice systems. His work is essential reading for any practitioner or researcher claiming to draw on indigenous traditions of justice.

30. Robert Yazzie (USA, Navajo Nation)

Chief Justice Emeritus of the Navajo Nation Supreme Court, Robert Yazzie spent nearly two decades on the tribal bench developing and championing Navajo Peacemaking as a contemporary justice system rooted in Dine philosophy. His writing on Navajo justice concepts, particularly the principle that life comes from relationships and that justice must restore those relationships rather than punish their rupture, provided an indigenous intellectual foundation for modern restorative practice that many practitioners draw on without fully recognising its source.

He continues to speak and teach through the Indigenous Peacemaking Initiative hosted by the Native American Rights Fund. For more on how restorative leadership connects to the difficult conversations in organisations, see the blog post '25 Crucial Tips for Handling Difficult Conversations' at consultclarity.org/post/25-crucial-tips-for-handling-difficult-conversations.

Bring Jonno White in to facilitate leadership team conversations grounded in accountability and repair. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

31. Gordon Bazemore (USA)

Professor Emeritus in the Criminology and Criminal Justice department at Florida Atlantic University and a 2013 NACRJ Pioneer Award recipient, Gordon Bazemore has spent four decades producing the research and policy framework for restorative justice in youth justice contexts. His balanced restorative justice model, which places equal weight on victim repair, offender competency development, and community safety, became a foundational framework for youth justice policy reform in the US and internationally.

His collaboration with Lode Walgrave on restorative juvenile justice theory produced one of the field's most sustained transatlantic intellectual partnerships, including a co-edited volume that became a standard reference text for researchers and policymakers across multiple countries.

32. Ted Wachtel (USA)

Founder of the International Institute for Restorative Practices and a 2017 NACRJ Pioneer Award recipient, Ted Wachtel built the institution that has trained more restorative practices facilitators globally than any other single organisation. The IIRP Graduate School, based in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, offers the only master's degree programme dedicated exclusively to restorative practices and has trained practitioners in more than 50 countries. Wachtel's contribution was less theoretical than institutional: he recognised that the ideas emerging from Braithwaite, Zehr, and community practitioners needed an organisational home to reach the scale they deserved.

His foundational essay From Restorative Justice to Restorative Practices articulated the case for expanding restorative principles beyond criminal justice into schools, workplaces, and communities, a conceptual move that has since become the dominant direction of the field in practice.

Category 9: Criminal Justice Practice, Research, and Accountability

33. Barb Toews (USA)

Author of The Little Book of Restorative Justice for People in Prison, Barb Toews specialises in the application of restorative practices within incarcerated contexts, working directly with people in prison to develop restorative programmes that address harm, rebuild relationships, and prepare people for reentry. Her research examines how restorative justice can function inside institutions that are themselves defined by punitive relationships, asking what it means to pursue repair in a context built around deprivation.

Her work is cited by practitioners across the US prison system and internationally, and her focus on the perspective and experience of incarcerated people themselves, rather than on administrators or evaluators, gives her scholarship a grounding in lived experience that is relatively rare in the academic literature.

34. Paul McCold (USA)

A researcher and practitioner who spent years at the International Institute for Restorative Practices, Paul McCold's contributions to restorative justice practice theory include the Social Discipline Window framework, which he developed with Ted Wachtel to map approaches to managing behaviour according to the degree of support and accountability they provide. The framework distinguishes punitive, permissive, neglectful, and restorative responses to harmful behaviour and has become one of the most widely used conceptual tools in restorative practices training globally.

His research on conferencing outcomes and the nature of restorative processes contributed significantly to the evidence base in the field's formative years, and his work on the typology of restorative processes helped the field develop clearer criteria for what makes a process genuinely restorative rather than merely labelled as such.

35. Declan Roche (Australia)

Associate Professor of Law at the London School of Economics, Declan Roche has produced influential scholarship on the accountability mechanisms within restorative justice itself, asking who holds restorative processes accountable when they fail to be genuinely restorative. His book Accountability in Restorative Justice is the field's most sustained engagement with the paradox that processes designed to produce accountability for harm can themselves become vectors of unfairness or coercion if not governed appropriately.

His work connects restorative justice theory to the broader literature on procedural justice and legitimacy, asking not just whether restorative processes produce better outcomes but whether they meet the standards of fairness and transparency that any justice process must satisfy.

36. Gordon Bazemore

36. Sandra Pavelka (USA)

Director of the Institute for Youth and Justice Studies at Florida Gulf Coast University, Sandra Pavelka has produced consistent empirical research on how restorative practices function within the formal youth justice system. Her evaluations of restorative justice programmes and diversion schemes across multiple US states have contributed to the evidence base that policymakers need to justify investment in restorative approaches.

Her work bridges academic research and policy practice in ways that the field frequently needs but does not always produce, providing policymakers with findings they can act on without sacrificing the nuance that the complexity of restorative justice implementation requires.

37. Brenda Morrison (Canada)

Associate Professor in the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University and Director of the Research and Engagement Centre for Restorative Justice, Brenda Morrison is one of the most influential researchers working across the three institutional domains where restorative justice has had the most significant impact: criminal justice, schools, and health. Her foundational work with Margaret Thorsborne on restorative practices in schools and her collaboration with Katherine Evans and Dorothy Vaandering on research into restorative justice in educational contexts reflect a career built on bridging theory and practice.

Her research on how restorative approaches address bullying, exclusion, and complex trauma within school communities demonstrates the applicability of restorative principles well beyond their origins in criminal justice. Her co-investigation of research projects on restorative justice in education with Canadian university partners has helped establish the Canadian research community as a genuine contributor to the global field.

Category 10: Global South, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific Voices

Restorative justice is often described as a global movement but its intellectual centre of gravity has historically sat in the US, UK, and Australia. The following practitioners and scholars are the people most actively changing that.

38. Fernanda Fonseca Rosenblatt (Brazil/USA)

Associate Professor at the International Institute for Restorative Practices and Professor of Criminal Procedure at the Catholic University of Pernambuco in Recife, Brazil, Fernanda Fonseca Rosenblatt is the leading voice on restorative justice in the Latin American context. Her 2025 co-edited Handbook on Methods in Restorative Justice Research and her forthcoming co-edited Latin America volume of the International Encyclopaedia of Restorative Justice demonstrate her current output. Her 2026 Routledge co-authored volume Gendered Violence and Restorative Justice extends her engagement with the field's most demanding terrain.

A 2025 IIRP Faculty Spotlight described her as a globally recognised practitioner, speaker, panellist, and academic researcher whose research pushes the field to ask who justice systems serve and who they leave behind. Her OxCrim PhD and her sustained engagement with both Brazilian and international research communities make her the person best positioned to build the genuine South-to-South and South-to-North dialogue that the field needs.

39. Upneet Lalli (India)

Deputy Director at the Institute of Correctional Administration in Chandigarh, a central government institution providing training to police officers and prison officers in India, Upneet Lalli is among the most active advocates for restorative justice in the South Asian context. Appointed to the Global Advisory Council of Restorative Justice International and serving as its Ambassador for India, she brings to the field both a practitioner's knowledge of India's correctional system and an academic foundation in psychology, law, and human rights.

Her work on introducing restorative principles into prison environments in India, in a context of severe overcrowding and limited institutional willingness for reform, represents some of the most practically courageous work in the field. Her book Human Rights in Indian Prisons examines the structural conditions that any restorative initiative must navigate to be viable in the Indian context.

40. Arti Mohan (India)

Restorative Justice and Practices Programme Manager at Counsel to Secure Justice in New Delhi, Arti Mohan has been designing and implementing restorative processes for children and adults in India since 2016. Her work is particularly focused on children who have experienced abuse, for whom court processes routinely cause secondary harm, and on building facilitator capacity within India's government and non-government sectors that can sustain restorative practice without dependence on international technical assistance.

She has contributed to research on restorative justice practice globally as lead editor of a major international comparative project on restorative justice origins and is contributing a chapter mapping restorative justice in India to the International Encyclopaedia of Restorative Justice, bringing the Indian context into a reference text that has too often overlooked the Global South.

41. Masahiro Suzuki (Japan/Australia)

Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Griffith University in Australia, Masahiro Suzuki is the most active researcher examining restorative justice in the Asia-Pacific context from a comparative criminological perspective. His research spans youth justice, Indigenous justice, and the international diffusion of restorative practices across the Asia-Pacific region, combining quantitative rigour with critical engagement with the colonial dimensions of restorative justice implementation.

His 2025 co-authored paper with William Wood and Juan Tauri on restorative justice in Australia and New Zealand within settler-colonial contexts demonstrates his capacity to bring both empirical analysis and critical theory to the evaluation of restorative practices in ways that challenge both the triumphalism and the dismissiveness with which the movement is often treated.

42. William Wood (Australia)

Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Western Australia, William Wood brings an unusually wide range to his research: quantitative evaluations of conferencing programmes, historical analyses of how restorative justice developed in Australia and New Zealand, and critical examinations of the relationship between restorative practice and settler-colonialism. His work challenges the triumphalist narrative around Family Group Conferencing in New Zealand and Australia and asks whose interests institutional restorative justice programmes actually serve.

His 2025 paper with Juan Tauri on restorative justice in the settler-colonial context is a landmark contribution that the field has been slow to engage with fully, but which represents the kind of critical self-examination that any movement claiming to advance justice must be willing to undertake.

43. Jonathan Clayton (South Africa)

Ambassador of Restorative Justice for the South African context through Restorative Justice International, Jonathan Clayton works to translate restorative principles into the social and institutional realities of post-apartheid South Africa, where the legacy of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission creates both opportunities and complications for restorative practice.

His work spans community-level practice, institutional capacity-building, and policy engagement, drawing on Africa's deep pre-colonial traditions of communal justice that the modern restorative justice movement has sometimes appropriated without adequate acknowledgment. His role as a practitioner-advocate in one of the world's most complex post-conflict societies gives his voice a weight that purely academic voices cannot replicate.

44. Tinneke Van Camp (Canada/Belgium)

Researcher at KU Leuven and based in Canada, Tinneke Van Camp has produced some of the most rigorous empirical research on what victims of crime actually want from restorative processes, challenging assumptions that all victims want participation and encounter and highlighting the diversity of victim preferences and needs. Her research on non-encounter restorative processes, those that provide information, acknowledgment, or other restorative elements without requiring direct victim-offender interaction, has helped the field develop a more nuanced understanding of what restoration actually requires.

Her work is particularly important for debates about restorative justice and serious violent offences, where victim preferences are complex, varied, and cannot be assumed from outside. Her cross-national comparative research connecting Belgian and Canadian contexts demonstrates the portability, and the limits, of restorative approaches across different institutional and cultural settings.

Category 11: Practice Development, Communication, and Field-Building

45. Laura Mirsky (USA)

Editorial Director of the International Institute for Restorative Practices and a longtime contributor to IIRP's research and communication work, Laura Mirsky has spent her career making restorative justice and restorative practices accessible to practitioners, policymakers, and general audiences. Her writing and editing work has shaped the public face of the restorative practices movement through IIRP's publications, including the widely read resources that reach practitioners in dozens of countries.

Her particular contribution is the ability to translate complex theoretical and research material into clear, readable content that practitioners in schools, criminal justice, and community settings can actually use. In a field that can become insular and jargon-heavy, accessible communication is a form of service that is easy to undervalue.

46. Belinda Hopkins (UK)

Founder of Transforming Conflict, Belinda Hopkins has spent two decades training facilitators and building the practical methodology for whole-school restorative approaches in the United Kingdom. Her book Just Schools: A Whole School Approach to Restorative Justice is one of the most practical guides to implementing restorative practices across an entire school culture rather than simply training individual facilitators.

Her training programmes have reached schools, local authorities, and organisations across the UK and internationally. Her emphasis on the distinction between using restorative processes reactively, to address incidents after they occur, and using them proactively, to build the relational foundation that prevents incidents, is one of the most important practical insights in the school-based literature.

47. Chris Marshall (New Zealand)

Professor of Restorative Justice at Victoria University of Wellington and holder of the Diana Unwin Chair in Restorative Justice, Chris Marshall brings an expertise in biblical studies, theology, and ethics to restorative justice scholarship that few others possess. His engagement with the theological and ethical foundations of restorative justice, particularly the traditions of justice thinking within Jewish, Christian, and indigenous frameworks, provides the field with resources that purely criminological or legal frameworks cannot access.

His enthusiastic description of Carolyn Boyes-Watson and Kay Pranis's Circle Forward as a masterpiece reflects the genuine cross-disciplinary esteem in which his judgement is held. His presence at Victoria University of Wellington connects the field's intellectual life to New Zealand's distinctive contribution, as the birthplace of Family Group Conferencing, to restorative justice globally.

48. Gabrielle Maxwell (New Zealand)

A retired senior researcher whose evaluations of New Zealand's Family Group Conference system, introduced in 1989, produced the empirical foundation for the international diffusion of youth justice conferencing, Gabrielle Maxwell spent decades at the New Zealand Institute for Social Research and Development producing evidence about what makes restorative conferences effective for young people, victims, and communities.

Her multi-site evaluation work, including the landmark Ministry of Social Development report Achieving Effective Outcomes in Youth Justice, shaped New Zealand's ongoing commitment to restorative approaches as the primary response to youth offending. Her influence on youth justice systems globally, through both her research findings and her personal engagement with practitioners and policymakers, has been enormous.

49. Kathy Bickmore (Canada)

Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, Kathy Bickmore is one of the most widely cited researchers on peacebuilding and restorative approaches in educational contexts. Her work on circle dialogue processes in primary classrooms, on how restorative approaches can address the underlying dynamics of bullying and school conflict, and on the relationship between school-based peacebuilding and civic education has been published in leading journals internationally.

She has contributed chapters to major reference texts in both restorative justice and conflict education and continues to work directly with teachers and schools across Canada. Her research connects school-based restorative practice to the broader project of preparing young people for democratic participation, an aspiration that most discipline-focused programmes rarely articulate.

50. Lorenn Walker (Hawaii, USA)

50. Emily Gaarder (USA)

Director of the Centre for Restorative Justice and Peacemaking at the University of Minnesota Duluth and Associate Professor in the Department of Studies in Justice, Culture, and Social Change, Emily Gaarder has been teaching restorative justice at the university level since 2003 and working to make circle processes and restorative dialogue accessible to community groups and organisations. She has trained hundreds of volunteers in circle process, circle keeping, and restorative dialogue, building a community of practice in the Upper Midwest that extends well beyond the university campus.

Her work at the UMD centre carries forward the institutional legacy that Mark Umbreit built at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, extending the reach of the Centre's training, research, and consultation services to a broader geographic region. Her integration of restorative justice with studies in justice, culture, and social change reflects the field's movement toward explicitly connecting restorative practice to structural analysis.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Several important voices were considered and did not make this final list for specific reasons. Nils Christie, the Norwegian criminologist whose 1977 essay Conflicts as Property provided one of the most foundational theoretical arguments for community ownership of justice processes, died in 2015 but his influence pervades every entry on this list. Howard Zehr, John Braithwaite, and Kay Pranis are arguably the three figures without whom the modern movement would not exist in its current form, and their inclusion in the numbered list was necessary rather than optional.

Heather Strang and Lawrence Sherman were each profiled separately rather than as a single entry because their individual contributions are substantial and distinct even though much of their most important work was collaborative. David Moore, the Australian practitioner who helped develop the Wagga model of police-led conferencing in New South Wales in the early 1990s, was a foundational practitioner whose contribution to the international diffusion of conferencing deserves recognition. Tim Chapman, a Northern Ireland practitioner whose work across community and criminal justice contexts in the post-conflict environment of Northern Ireland has contributed to both practice and policy, was also considered seriously.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Engaging with Restorative Justice

The biggest mistake organisations and individuals make when approaching restorative justice is treating it as a technique rather than a philosophy. Restorative circles work because they create conditions for genuine dialogue, authentic accountability, and voluntary repair. When they are used as a performance of process, a box-ticking exercise to show that "we did restorative," they produce the worst possible outcome: people experience the form of restorative justice without its substance, and leave more cynical and less trusting than they were before.

The second common mistake is assuming restorative justice is soft on harm. Every serious practitioner on this list would tell you that genuine accountability is more demanding than punishment. Sitting in a room with the person you harmed and hearing what your actions did to them, maintaining that exposure without fleeing into denial or excuse, making a concrete plan to repair what can be repaired, and following through over time, is harder than serving a sentence. The conflation of restorative approaches with leniency reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what accountability actually requires.

A third mistake is applying restorative processes without adequate preparation, safety assessment, and facilitator skill. The research is clear that poorly implemented restorative processes can cause further harm, particularly for victims of violence and sexual crime. The rigour that Marie Keenan, Estelle Zinsstag, and Tinneke Van Camp have brought to the question of preconditions and safeguards in complex cases is not a limitation on restorative justice but a necessary part of its integrity.

Fourth, many organisations attempt to implement restorative practices in schools or workplaces without attending to the relational foundation that makes them work. Circle processes are not a discipline technique. They are an expression of a broader commitment to relationship, trust, and shared responsibility for community wellbeing. Installing circles without building that foundation consistently produces disappointing results and reinforces the incorrect conclusion that restorative justice does not work in this context.

Finally, the mistake of cultural appropriation, taking restorative practices from indigenous traditions without crediting their origins, without involving indigenous communities in their adaptation, and without attending to the broader colonial context, is one that the most thoughtful practitioners on this list, including Juan Tauri, William Wood, and Fania Davis, have been naming with increasing clarity.

Engage Jonno White for leadership team facilitation that addresses accountability, conflict, and culture with rigour. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Implementation Guide: From Inspiration to Practice

Understanding who shapes restorative justice globally is the starting point. Implementing restorative approaches in any context requires moving from inspiration to preparation to practice with care and appropriate support.

For organisations and schools looking to introduce restorative practices, the most reliable entry point is facilitated training by an experienced practitioner, not a policy document and a half-day workshop. Margaret Thorsborne, Belinda Hopkins, Kathleen McGoey, and Lindsey Pointer all offer pathways into this kind of supported implementation. The IIRP Graduate School provides the most comprehensive training infrastructure globally, with programmes ranging from introductory certificates to a master's degree. The Restorative Justice Council in the UK provides quality standards and a register of practitioners for organisations seeking credible facilitators.

For researchers and policymakers, the evidence base is now substantial enough to justify serious investment. The Campbell Collaboration systematic review by Strang and Sherman, the Fulham et al. 2023 meta-analysis in Criminology and Criminal Justice, and the growing body of evaluations of school-based programmes in Scotland, Minnesota, California, and internationally provide the empirical foundation for evidence-based implementation. The National Center on Restorative Justice at Vermont Law, led by Lindsey Pointer, is the most active current effort to build a research infrastructure that bridges academic and community practice.

For criminal justice practitioners and policymakers, the work of Danielle Sered at Common Justice and sujatha baliga demonstrates that restorative approaches can work even for serious violent crime, provided the framework is designed with victims' needs genuinely at its centre. The policy translation work of Daniel Van Ness provides models for moving from individual programmes to systemic implementation.

For those at the intersection of leadership, culture, and accountability in organisations, the principles at the heart of restorative practice are directly applicable to the hardest conversations leaders face. For more on the overlap between restorative approaches and practical conflict resolution leadership, see the blog post '50 Influential Thought Leaders in Mediation and Conflict Resolution Globally' at consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-mediation-conflict-resolution-globally.

Hire Jonno White to facilitate the conversations your team has been avoiding. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is restorative justice and how does it differ from traditional criminal justice? Restorative justice is an approach to wrongdoing that centres the needs of those harmed, the obligations of those who caused harm, and the role of the community, rather than focusing primarily on punishment by the state. Where traditional criminal justice asks what law was broken and what penalty is due, restorative justice asks who was harmed, what do they need, and whose responsibility is it to meet those needs. The practical expression of this reorientation includes victim-offender conferences, community circles, family group conferences, and various forms of mediated dialogue centred on repair rather than punishment.

Does restorative justice work for serious and violent crime? Yes, with appropriate design and safeguards. The experimental evidence, including the research programmes of Heather Strang and Lawrence Sherman and the practice evidence from Common Justice under Danielle Sered, demonstrates that restorative approaches can produce meaningful outcomes for serious violent crime, including reduced reoffending and higher victim satisfaction, when the process is voluntary, well-facilitated, and genuinely centred on the survivor's needs. The preconditions and safeguards required for serious cases are demanding, as Marie Keenan and Estelle Zinsstag's work on sexual violence and restorative justice makes clear, but the evidence does not support the assumption that restorative justice is only for minor offences.

How is restorative justice used in schools? Restorative practices in schools apply the core principles of dialogue, relationship, accountability, and repair to school discipline, conflict, and community-building. In practice this ranges from formal conferences addressing serious incidents to circle processes used proactively to build class community, to restorative conversations replacing punitive responses to minor conflicts. Evidence from evaluations in Scotland, Minnesota, and California shows that well-implemented school-based restorative practices reduce suspensions and exclusions, improve school climate, and are particularly beneficial for students of colour who are most harmed by punitive discipline systems.

Who are the most important thinkers in the history of restorative justice? Howard Zehr's conceptual framework, John Braithwaite's theory of reintegrative shaming and its empirical programme, Kay Pranis's development of circle processes, and Nils Christie's essay Conflicts as Property are the most foundational contributions to the modern movement. Within the last decade, Danielle Sered's application of restorative approaches to serious violence, sujatha baliga's survivor-centred work, and the critical scholarship of Ian Marder, Brunilda Pali, and Giuseppe Maglione on what institutionalisation does to restorative values have been the most generative contributions. For leadership teams looking to engage with these principles practically, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Final Thoughts

The fifty people on this list are engaged in what is, at its most ambitious, an attempt to change how human beings understand and respond to harm. That is not a small project. It requires foundational theory, experimental evidence, practitioner wisdom, policy advocacy, community organising, and the courage to sit with harm rather than simply punishing it away.

The leaders on this list deserve to be far better known than they are outside the field. Their work is immediately relevant to anyone leading teams, managing schools, building organisations, or working in any context where human beings need to find a way through conflict, harm, and accountability toward something better. The principles they have spent careers developing, that relationships matter, that accountability requires genuine encounter, that repair is possible, and that communities have both the capacity and the responsibility to respond to harm, are principles that belong in leadership practice as much as in criminal justice.

For organisations ready to bring these principles into their leadership culture, Jonno White, author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold globally) and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, facilitates leadership team sessions, keynotes, and executive offsites that draw on the practical dimensions of accountability, difficult conversations, and culture repair. International travel is often far more affordable than clients expect. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, author of Step Up or Step Out, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected. To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Sources

Bureau of Justice Statistics. Recidivism of State Prisoners: Multi-State Study.

Strang, H., Sherman, L., Mayo-Wilson, E., Woods, D., and Ariel, B. Restorative Justice Conferencing: A Systematic Review. Campbell Collaboration, 2013.

Fulham, L., Blais, J., Rugge, T., and Schultheis, E.A. The effectiveness of restorative justice programs: A meta-analysis of recidivism and other relevant outcomes. Criminology and Criminal Justice, 2023.

Next Read

Restorative justice and conflict resolution share a great deal of intellectual and practical territory. The same commitment to dialogue, genuine accountability, and relationship repair that runs through restorative justice also shapes the most effective mediation and conflict resolution practice. For the people doing that adjacent work, see the blog post '50 Influential Thought Leaders in Mediation and Conflict Resolution Globally' at consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-mediation-conflict-resolution-globally.