Doing Justice, Doing Life: A Conversation with Howard Zehr

Howard Zehr Regina Stoltzfus

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What if justice meant sitting in a room with the person who harmed you? Howard Zehr has spent five decades asking that question.

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In This Episode

Howard Zehr has been called the grandfather of restorative justice, a title he accepts with some amusement. In this conversation, he traces a path that began with a single year at Goshen College in 1962, a dining-table conversation with a civil rights leader who had worked alongside Dr. King, and a lecture that gave him what he came to call the gap principle: do the work no one else is doing. That principle took him to Morehouse College, to Talladega, and eventually back to Elkhart, Indiana, where he reluctantly joined an experiment bringing burglary victims face to face with the people who had broken into their homes. 

He talks about where the term restorative justice actually came from, what he learned about justice from traveling across the globe. Also his decades photographing people serving life sentences, why trauma destroys a person’s story, and why recovery means building a new one.

Links

Credits

Host: Regina Shands Stoltzfus

Senior Producer: Yebu Ji

Sound Engineering: Alex Dugger

Background Research: Alaina Wolfe

Marketing Manager: Melissa Troyer

Audience Engagement Manager: Courtney Dobrzykowski

Directed by: Duane Stoltzfus

Tape Sync: Tobias Tate

Music

Theme Music: Umbilical Moonrise by Lotus

Capocollo Theme from Blue Dot Sessions

Eleven Count from Blue Dot Sessions

Liptis from Blue Dot Sessions

Cheap Red from Blue Dot Sessions

Guest

Howard Zehr

Howard Zehr is widely known as the grandfather of restorative justice. He began as a practitioner and theorist in the late 1970s, at the field’s foundational stage, and has since led events in more than 25 countries and 35 states, with particular impact in New Zealand, whose juvenile justice system was restructured around a family-focused, restorative approach. A writer, educator, and photojournalist, he was an early advocate for placing victims’needs at the center of restorative practice. He has taught more than a thousand practitioners, many now leading their own organizations, and in 2013 co-founded the Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice.

Zehr Institute