Restorative Justice

Course Description

CCJ4141 examines restorative justice — an approach that asks a different question about crime than the criminal justice system does. Where the conventional system asks which law was broken, who did it, and what punishment they deserve, restorative justice asks who was harmed, what they need, and whose obligation it is to put it right.

Florida's statewide description sets it out plainly: the course "provides students with information on theory [and] practice of restorative justice. Restorative justice is [an] alternative to [the] traditional criminal justice model. Focuses on meeting needs of victims, offenders [and] community as they relate to crime."

UWF, the reachable carrier, describes a course in four parts: it "introduces the philosophy of restorative justice. Students critically analyze and compare retributive justice with restorative justice. Explores various restorative justice methodologies and evaluation of those methodologies." ⚠⚠ And then a sentence that makes this course unusual: "Hands on instruction in the use of restorative practices will be given."

⚠ That last element is worth registering before you enrol. Most 4000-level criminal justice courses are read-and-write courses. This one includes practising the techniques — circle process, facilitated dialogue, conferencing — which means role play, participation and being observed. Students who prefer to stay behind a desk should know that in advance; students who want a transferable skill should notice that this is one of the few undergraduate criminal justice courses offering one.

⚠⚠ A caution the course itself should teach: restorative justice is a genuinely contested field, and the evidence is better on some outcomes than on others. Victim satisfaction and perceived fairness are consistently and substantially higher than in conventional processing — that finding is robust. Effects on reoffending are real but more modest and more variable than advocates often claim. ⚠ And the strongest criticisms come from within victim advocacy rather than from outside it, particularly about cases involving intimate partner violence and serious sexual offences, where a poorly run process can re-victimise. UWF's inclusion of "evaluation of those methodologies" is the signal that the course takes this seriously rather than treating the approach as self-evidently good.

Two Florida public institutions carry this number at three credits — the University of West Florida and Florida Atlantic University, the latter under the title Restorative Community Justice.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Explain the philosophy and core principles of restorative justice — harm, needs, obligations, engagement and the role of the community.
• ⚠ Compare restorative and retributive justice systematically: their differing definitions of crime, of the victim's role, of accountability and of a successful outcome.
• Trace the origins and influences of the approach, including indigenous and community justice traditions, and discuss the questions of appropriation that accompany that history.
• Describe the principal methodologies: victim-offender mediation and dialogue, family group conferencing, peacemaking and sentencing circles, community reparative boards, and restorative practices in schools.
• Explain where restorative processes can be located in the justice system — diversion, pre-sentence, post-sentence, in custody, and at re-entry.
• ⚠ Evaluate the research evidence on victim satisfaction, offender accountability, completion of agreements and reoffending — and distinguish what is well established from what is not.
• Explain the victim's perspective: what victims report wanting from a justice process, why participation must be genuinely voluntary, and the conditions under which a process can do harm.
• Analyse the limits and criticisms — power imbalance, coercion of participation, net-widening, inconsistency of outcome, and the specific concerns about intimate partner violence and sexual offences.
• ⚠⚠ Demonstrate core restorative practice skills — facilitating a circle, asking restorative questions, active listening, managing emotion in a room, and knowing when not to proceed.
• Explain facilitator ethics: neutrality, confidentiality, preparation, and the duty to screen out unsuitable cases.
• Describe how restorative programmes are implemented and funded in practice, and why implementation quality drives outcomes more than model choice does.

Optional Outcomes

• Analyse juvenile diversion in depth, including Florida's civil citation framework.
• Analyse school-based restorative practices and their relationship to exclusionary discipline.
• Examine restorative approaches to serious and violent crime, including post-conviction victim-offender dialogue.
• Examine transitional justice and truth commissions.
• Examine restorative practice inside prisons and in re-entry.
• Examine restorative practices in the workplace or on campus, including Title IX contexts.
• ⚠ Prepare for mediation certification and understand what it requires.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• What restorative justice is — principles, values, and the three questions that define it.
• Retributive, rehabilitative and restorative models compared — and where they overlap in practice rather than in theory.
• History and influences, including indigenous justice traditions and the critique of their appropriation.
• The victim — needs, participation, voluntariness, and secondary victimisation by the conventional process.
• The offender — accountability as an active obligation rather than a passive sentence; shame, stigma and reintegration.
• The community — its role, its capacity, and the difficulty of defining it.
• Victim-offender mediation and dialogue — preparation, process and follow-up.
• Family group conferencing and its origins in New Zealand's juvenile system.
• Circles — peacemaking, sentencing, and community-building circles.
• Reparative boards and community panels.
• Restorative practices in schools and the discipline context.
• Points of entry in the justice system, and diversion as the commonest one.
• ⚠ Evaluation research — what has been measured, how, and with what results.
• ⚠ Criticisms and limits, including the intimate partner violence and sexual offence debate.
• Facilitation skills — the practical component: circle keeping, restorative questioning, preparation, and screening.
• Ethics, confidentiality and the facilitator's role.
• Programme design, funding and implementation fidelity.

Optional Topics

• Florida's juvenile civil citation programme in detail.
• Teen court and youth court models.
• Post-conviction victim-offender dialogue in serious crime.
• Transitional justice and truth and reconciliation processes.
• Restorative practice in correctional settings and in re-entry.
• Campus conduct and Title IX applications.
• Comparative practice — New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Northern Ireland.
• Mediation certification pathways.

Resources & Tools

• The Little Book of Restorative Justice (Howard Zehr) — ⚠ short, inexpensive, and the standard starting point in the field. Nearly every course in the subject assigns it or assumes it.
• Changing Lenses (Howard Zehr) — the fuller argument behind the little book.
• The Little Book of Circle Processes (Kay Pranis) — ⚠ the practical manual for the hands-on component, and a genuinely useful thing to own if you end up facilitating.
• Restorative Justice: Ideas, Values, Debates (Johnstone and Van Ness) or Restorative Justice Dialogue (Umbreit and Armour) — for the evaluation and criticism material.
• ⚠ The Campbell Collaboration and the Cochrane-style systematic reviews of restorative justice conferencing — the most rigorous synthesis of the outcome evidence, and the right citation when you need one.
• Florida Statutes §985.12 — ⚠ the juvenile civil citation statute. Read it; it is Florida's largest restorative-adjacent diversion mechanism and it is the one you are most likely to encounter professionally in this state.
• Florida Department of Juvenile Justice — publishes civil citation data by county, including utilisation rates. ⚠ County-level variation in Florida is very large, which makes it an unusually good subject for a term paper with real data behind it.
• Florida Dispute Resolution Center (Office of the State Courts Administrator) — ⚠⚠ administers Florida Supreme Court mediator certification. See Career Pathways; this is a concrete credential and the Center's requirements are public.
• Florida Department of Corrections, Office of Victim Services — operates Florida's post-conviction victim-offender dialogue programme for serious crimes, victim-initiated.
• International Institute for Restorative Practices (IIRP) and the National Association of Community and Restorative Justice (NACRJ) — training, conferences and practitioner networks.
• Your own community. ⚠ Many Florida counties run teen courts, neighbourhood accountability boards or school-based restorative programmes staffed substantially by volunteers. Volunteering is the fastest route from this course to actual practice, and it is how most practitioners started.

Career Pathways

• Mediator — ⚠⚠⚠ the most concrete credential this course points at, and Florida's is well defined. The Florida Supreme Court certifies mediators in county, family, circuit civil, dependency and appellate categories through the Dispute Resolution Center. Each requires a certified training programme, mentorship and point-based qualification. County mediation has the most accessible entry requirements, and a bachelor's degree is sufficient for several categories. Requirements change; check the Center directly.
• Juvenile diversion coordinator — with the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice, a State Attorney's office, a sheriff's office, or a contracted provider. ⚠ Florida's civil citation infrastructure means these positions genuinely exist across the state.
• Teen court or youth court coordinator — run by county courts, clerks of court and non-profits throughout Florida.
• Restorative practices coordinator in a school district — a growing role, and one where this course plus the practical component is close to a direct qualification.
• Victim advocate — at a State Attorney's office, a law enforcement agency, or a victim service organisation. ⚠ Restorative training is an asset here, but the work is broader than this approach.
• Probation and community supervision, and re-entry programme staff.
• Community organisation and non-profit programme work — where much restorative practice actually happens, in Florida as elsewhere.
• Campus conduct administration — student conduct offices increasingly use restorative processes.
• ⚠ Graduate study and law. An MSW, a criminology master's, or law school with a dispute resolution focus. Several Florida law schools run mediation clinics, and the field's leading practitioners tend to hold a graduate credential plus substantial facilitation hours.
• ⚠⚠ An honest note on the job market. Few positions are titled "restorative justice practitioner." The skill is usually an asset attached to another job — diversion officer, advocate, school staff, mediator — and the people who build careers in it tend to accumulate facilitation hours voluntarily alongside paid work for some years first. Start the hours now if this interests you.

Special Information

⚠⚠ Florida is a strong setting for this subject — and juvenile civil citation is why

Florida has one of the more substantial diversion infrastructures in the country, which gives this course something concrete to analyse rather than only a philosophy to discuss.

Mechanism	What it is
Juvenile civil citation Fla. Stat. §985.12	⚠⚠ A statutory alternative to arrest for first-time juvenile misdemeanants: a citation, an assessment, and conditions that commonly include community service, apology and restitution — restorative in structure. Florida has run it statewide for years and publishes the data.
Teen and youth courts	Peer-administered accountability, operating in many Florida counties through the courts or the clerk of court.
Post-conviction victim-offender dialogue	Run by the Florida Department of Corrections, Office of Victim Services. ⚠ Victim-initiated only, for serious and violent offences, with extensive preparation — the most demanding form of the practice and the one with the strongest victim-reported outcomes.
Court-connected mediation	⚠ Florida has an unusually well-developed court mediation system with Supreme Court certification — adjacent to restorative justice rather than identical to it, but the skills and the credential overlap substantially.
School-based restorative practices	Adopted district by district, with wide variation across Florida's 67 county districts.

⚠⚠ The analytically interesting part is the variation. Civil citation utilisation differs enormously between Florida counties for the same category of offence — some divert the large majority of eligible youth, others divert very few. Since eligibility is set by state statute, the variation is produced by local discretion rather than by law, which makes it a clean natural experiment and an excellent term-paper subject with public data behind it.

⚠⚠ The course includes practice, not only reading

UWF states that "hands on instruction in the use of restorative practices will be given." ⚠ Expect to participate rather than observe — circle process, restorative questioning, role play and facilitation practice, assessed by demonstration as well as by writing.

Three things follow. Attendance matters more than in a lecture course, because you cannot make up a circle from notes. ⚠ Role play in this subject involves real emotional content, and scenarios drawn from assault, theft or school conflict can land close to a participant's own experience — a good instructor will say so and will offer an alternative role. And the practical component is the part with direct professional value: it is the beginning of a facilitation skill set, and it is the reason to keep any materials and any record of hours.

⚠ Two things worth checking on the syllabus

First: does the course evaluate, or advocate? Restorative justice attracts committed practitioners, and a course can slide into advocacy. ⚠ UWF's description names "evaluation of those methodologies" explicitly, which is the right signal. Look for a unit on criticism and limits, and for systematic-review evidence rather than case anecdotes. A course that never addresses the intimate partner violence debate is incomplete.

Second: whose emphasis — community, or victim-offender dialogue? ⚠ FAU titles its version Restorative Community Justice, and UWF titles its version Restorative Justice. The addition of "community" is the language of a broader tradition concerned with community capacity, neighbourhood boards and collective harm, rather than primarily with the dialogue between one victim and one offender.

Community-justice emphasis	Dialogue emphasis
reparative boards; neighbourhood accountability; community capacity; collective harm; crime prevention	victim-offender mediation and dialogue; conferencing; preparation and facilitation technique; victim needs

⚠ Both are within the field and the statewide description covers both — it names "victims, offenders [and] community" together. FAU's catalogue could not be read for this guide, so the distinction above is inferred from the title and should be checked against the actual syllabus rather than assumed.

Offering Notes

Institution	Its title	Credits	Contact hours	Notes
University of West Florida (SUS)	Restorative Justice	3	not published	no prerequisite; may not be repeated for credit; ⚠ includes hands-on instruction in restorative practices; Dept. of Criminal Justice, College of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
Florida Atlantic University (SUS)	Restorative Community Justice	3	not published	⚠ catalogue not readable — see below

Both carriers award three credits and neither publishes a contact-hour figure, so the 45 hours recorded here is Florida's convention for a three-credit course with no C or L suffix. ⚠ Given the practical component, expect the scheduled time to be used intensively — a circle does not compress into the last ten minutes of a class.

⚠ Florida Atlantic University's catalogue could not be read for this guide, because FAU does not expose a public course catalogue at its catalogue host. Its description, prerequisite and term pattern are therefore unavailable, and the title is the only evidence of its emphasis. The content above is written from UWF and the statewide record.

Florida's statewide record lists the prerequisite as NONE, and UWF adds none. ⚠ Unusual for a 4000-level course, and it means the course is genuinely open — including to students from education, social work, psychology and conflict resolution, for whom it is often more useful than for criminal justice majors.

Position in the curriculum and transfer

A 4000-level elective, normally taken late in a criminal justice degree, and one of the few that leaves a student with a practical skill rather than only an analytical one. It pairs naturally with victimology, juvenile justice and corrections, and it is a good companion to any course on community supervision.

⚠ Florida carries a graduate continuation, and its record is confusing. CCJ6142 is titled Community Oriented Policing in the statewide catalogue — but its statewide description is entirely about restorative and community justice, promising "in-depth familiarization with contrasts among traditional justice system approaches and emerging policy, theory, and research in restorative and community justice." ⚠⚠ The title and the description of that graduate number do not describe the same course, so do not rely on the title if you meet it. It is also classified not automatically transferable, as graduate courses in this prefix generally are.

Florida's statewide record classifies this course as transferable to an institution offering the same course, with no Gordon Rule designation and no general-education category. It is marked for dual enrolment with elective high-school credit — ⚠ and every active number in the CCJ prefix carries that identical marking, so it says nothing about this course specifically.

⚠⚠ A general caution for this prefix: CCJ splits several courses across two numbers by sector — the introductory course at CCJ1020 (state colleges) and CCJ2002 (universities), and criminal justice administration at CCJ2452 and CCJ3450. This number is not one of them, but check the number as well as the title on anything in CCJ you intend to transfer.

AI Integration

⚠⚠⚠ This is the course in the criminal justice curriculum where the boundary is sharpest, and the reason is worth stating precisely rather than as a general caution.

Restorative justice is constituted by people being present to each other. Its entire mechanism is that a person who was harmed and a person who caused harm are in a room, with a facilitator, speaking and being heard. ⚠ The outcome that the research most consistently supports — victim satisfaction and a sense of having been treated fairly — comes from that presence. It is not an information transfer, and there is nothing in it for a model to do.

That said, the field is not untouched, and two developments are worth knowing about. Online and video-mediated dialogue expanded substantially and is now a permanent option — valuable for participants separated by distance or by incarceration, and genuinely weaker on the non-verbal signals a facilitator reads to decide whether to continue. ⚠ Knowing what is lost is part of the skill. And some programmes are using tools for case tracking, scheduling and agreement monitoring — administrative work, where the gains are real and uncontroversial.

Where generative tools help in the coursework. Summarising a systematic review; building and verifying a literature list; explaining an unfamiliar model; generating practice scenarios to rehearse against; and drafting and revising your own writing. ⚠ Scenario generation is genuinely useful for the practical component, provided the scenarios are then worked with real people.

⚠⚠ Where it will mislead you. Two specific risks in this subject:

• The evidence is overstated in the source material. ⚠ Much of what is written about restorative justice is advocacy, and a model trained on it will reproduce confident claims about recidivism reduction that the systematic reviews do not support. Cite the review, not the summary.
• The criticisms get flattened. The intimate partner violence debate is substantive, is led by feminist scholars and victim advocates, and does not resolve neatly. ⚠ Generated prose tends to give it a sentence and move on, which is precisely the failure this course exists to prevent.

⚠⚠⚠ And the point that belongs to this field specifically, which a student should be able to articulate by the end of the term. The question "could an AI facilitate a restorative process?" is not a question about capability. An offender's accountability means something because it is offered to a person who can accept or refuse it; a victim's account matters because another human being has heard it. ⚠ A process with nobody on the other side is not a cheaper version of restorative justice — it is not restorative justice at all. Being able to say why, clearly and without sentimentality, is a good measure of whether you have understood the philosophy the course opens with.

⚠ One professional limit, as in every course in this prefix: never put participant information, case details or anything said in a restorative process into a consumer chat interface. Confidentiality is the condition on which people agree to participate, and in Florida's court-connected mediation it is also a statutory protection. Breaking it ends the process and, for a certified mediator, the certification.