What is restorative justice? Core principles explained

Helping victims heal

A major tenet of restorative justice centers around making sure victims’ voices are heard. 

“A lot of victims, and this is supported by a lot of research, sit with their pain for decades. People who have been victims of serious crimes like rape, murder, serious assaults or even home break-ins. Home break-ins are deeply traumatizing—even if you weren’t home and somebody breaks into your house, it really shatters your sense of safety and well-being. And so being able to close that chapter on that experience is incredibly important,” Bradford said.  

A restorative justice approach allows victims to tell their story, talk about how the crime affected them and what they need to move on from the incident. This may look like a direct conversation between the victim and offender, and/or helping decide what the offender or author could do to help heal the harm they caused.  

“There’s some really great work from Common Justice in New York City that talks about how victims of crime have a real deep desire for this not to happen again to anybody else. They’re less concerned about themselves, less concerned about wanting to get even or get their money. They are more worried about not wanting this to happen to anybody else. And that’s a real wonderful experience to actually hear people who’ve been impacted negatively by crime say, you know what? It’s not about me. It’s about our community.”

Accountability for offenders

Besides helping victims have choice and voice in the judiciary process, holding offenders accountable is another defining aspect of restorative justice.  

You might then be wondering—isn’t putting people in jail for their crimes making them accountable for their actions? Not exactly, a restorative justice approach would say.  

Accountability, from a restorative justice approach, means owning up to what someone did, apologizing for it and taking active steps to rectify the damage caused by their actions as an alternative to incarceration, school expulsions or other major punishments.  

“I have a near infinite reservoir of empathy for people who take responsibility for their actions,” Bradford said. “But if I see you punch somebody, or you bring and sell drugs on campus, or you get into a fight and you say ‘It wasn’t me,’ then my empathy is set aside. I need you to engage in the process, and by engaging in the process you are taking responsibility. But there’s no incentive for adults or young people in the criminal justice system to actually take responsibility for their actions. If you do, you get seven, 10, 15 years in prison. Whereas a restorative system says, you want to take responsibility for your actions? That’s fantastic. Let’s do that.” 

Community building and circles of support

The third vertex of the restorative justice triangle is community. One great example of inviting community members into the restorative justice process is through what Bradford calls circles of support and accountability.  

“When adults are leaving prison after five, 10, 15 years, the reintegration into society is incredibly challenging,” Bradford said. “They’ve got no network, no job, they’ve got no places to go, no housing, no credible workforce skills. Circles of support and accountability pair a small group of community members, maybe three to five people, with this adult that’s coming out of prison and goes, ‘Hey, we’re your support system. We can help you with these things, and we can do this work together.’” 

The idea of circles of support pinpoints a critical difference between restorative justice and criminal justice. Criminal justice seeks to correct behavior by hitting someone hard enough with the metaphorical stick, whether that’s a massive fine or time behind bars.

“But actually, it’s a skill deficit and a relational deficit. So we’ve got to solve those problems,” Bradford said. “Get the guy into a welding program and then have him start making $60,000, $85,000 a year. Now we’re cooking with gas. Now we can solve some of this stuff, as opposed to trying to just threaten with the stick hard enough. It just doesn’t work.” 

Financial concerns

Facilitating discussions between victims and offenders. Connecting offenders with the social services they need to help get their life on track. Training staff members on best practices for a restorative system. There’s no getting around it—these and so many other tasks cost time and money, leaving some to question whether a restorative system makes financial sense.  

Though these concerns are valid, supporters would argue that a restorative system is actually more financially viable in the long run.  

“The thing is that the expenses associated with a criminal justice system are front loaded at the beginning of the incarceration where it costs the most money. Judges, lawyers, transportation, etc. But those years after the first year or two are less expensive for society,” Bradford said. If we can avoid all this expensive judicial intervention that takes place at the beginning of an incarceration, it can save a lot of money.  

And that makes no mention of the annual cost of incarceration over time. In California, the average annual cost to incarcerate someone was $133,000 at the time their 2024-2025 budget was enacted. If a restorative system manages to keep more people out of prison entirely, the savings over time could be enormous.

Time and effort required

Another one of the challenges of restorative justice is simply the time and resources it takes to make it happen. Some critics argue, for example, that things like talking circles in schools not only take away precious learning time, but it also puts teachers into the role of counselor or psychologist which is beyond their expertise. 

“I think time is a really common challenge, both in the classroom and in the justice system. I also want to be effective and efficient with my time. And I think the balance there is that if we are too efficient with our time, we are less effective with our approach,” Bradford said.  

Such is one of the advantages of our current criminal justice system, Bradford acknowledged. A court system has its standard operating procedures and doesn’t really make time to slow things down and have a conversation with every person who passes through. Facilitating conversations between offenders, victims and community members can simply take more time and resources—but there are solutions.  

“I worked with an organization in Kitsap County, and they had a really powerful program that was for theft. But if you have 100-150 cases a month of juvenile theft, how do you actually run conferences for each one of those? That is a mountain’s worth of work,” Bradford said. “So they developed a program which is a multi-author conference where there’s maybe four to eight young people in this circle taking responsibility for action at the same time. This is a really important part of our system, because we need to be mindful about how we can sort of batch some of this stuff together to be more efficient.” 

Too much compassion, too little accountability

One pitfall that Bradford has seen within the community may be an unexpected one—having too much empathy. 

When authors or offenders tell their side of the story, there is often some undertow of trauma at play, whether it’s food scarcity, drug addiction, abuse in their past or something else entirely. While these stories may allow us to better understand why someone did what they did, it’s imperative that we don’t excuse the behavior.  

“Sometimes there’s so much compassion that we actually miss the point of giving them the opportunity to make things right. We get in our own way when we make it about us, and that’s a real problem that we have to manage,” Bradford said. “I care about people and I have a deep well of empathy, but when people do terrible things to other people, I have to recognize that. I can’t get in the way of this person taking responsibility, owning it, connecting with the victim and doing that work.”