Quotes from Howard Zehr

justice will not be served if we maintain our exclusive focus on the questions that drive our current justice systems: What laws have been broken? Who did it? What do they deserve? True justice requires, instead, that we ask questions such as these: Who has been hurt? What do they need? Whose obligations and responsibilities are these? Who has a stake in this situation? What is the process that can involve the stakeholders in finding a solution?

My hope is that you will understand this as a vision - a vision that is less an elusive mirage than it is an indistinct destination on a necessarily long and circuitous road.

the movement owes a great deal to earlier movements and to a variety of cultural and religious traditions. It owes a special debt to the Native people of North America and New Zealand. The precedents and roots of restorative justice are much wider and deeper than the Mennonite-led initiatives of the 1970s. Indeed, they are as old as human history.

Western society, and especially the United States, greatly overuses prisons. If restorative justice were taken seriously, our reliance on prisons would be reduced and the nature of prisons would change significantly. However, restorative justice approaches may also be used in conjunction with, or parallel to, prison sentences. They are not necessarily an alternative to incarceration.

Restorative justice expands the circle of stakeholders—those with a stake or standing in the event or the case—beyond just the government and the offender to include victims and community members also.1