Restorative Justice and Transformative Justice (1990 onward)

Three overlapping frameworks for addressing harm without incarceration. Restorative Justice (Howard Zehr, 1990, Mennonite tradition) asks what harm was done, who is responsible, and how it can be repaired. Restorative Circles (Dominic Barter, mid-1990s, Brazilian favelas) adds a three-stage community facilitation structure. Transformative Justice (INCITE! and Generation FIVE, 2000s, abolitionist feminist) adds the question of what conditions produced the harm and how to change them. Used in schools, criminal justice, and intentional communities navigating consent and accountability.

1. What it is

Restorative Justice and Transformative Justice are two related frameworks for responding to harm without relying primarily on punishment, prison, or the police. They share procedural DNA and a common moral starting point: when harm happens, the people most affected by it are the ones who should be at the center of the response. They diverge on politics, scale, and on whether the existing criminal-justice system can be reformed from inside.

Restorative Justice (RJ) is the older and more institutionally established of the two. The canonical formulation comes from Howard Zehr's 1990 book Changing Lenses: A New Focus for Crime and Justice, which articulated three pillars that have become the field's shared grammar. First, harm is more important than rules. Second, harms create obligations to repair the harm. Third, those most impacted by the harm should be the ones involved in the response. Where the conventional question after a wrong is "what law was broken, who broke it, and what punishment do they deserve," the restorative question is "who was hurt, what do they need, and whose obligations are these to make right."

Transformative Justice (TJ) emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s out of communities of women of color, queer and trans people, disability-justice organizers, and survivors of sexual and domestic violence, who found that RJ in its mainstream criminal-justice form did not adequately serve people harmed by interpersonal violence inside their own communities, and that calling the state into the response often produced new harms (especially for Black and brown people, undocumented people, sex workers, and disabled people). TJ keeps the restorative commitment to centring the harmed person and works toward accountability and repair, and it adds two further commitments: the response itself must not rely on state violence, and the underlying social conditions that produced the harm must also be addressed. Mia Mingus, a Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective co-founder, defines TJ as "a political framework and approach for responding to violence, harm and abuse" that "seeks to respond to violence without creating more violence and/or engaging in harm reduction to lessen the violence."

Both frameworks fit a particular kind of group. One that has experienced or anticipates harm inside its own membership (interpersonal violence, sexual misconduct, theft, betrayal, breach of consent, breach of trust, abuse, violation of agreements). One that does not believe the police or the courts will deliver healing for the person harmed, accountability from the person who caused harm, or change in the conditions that produced the harm. One that has the capacity (people, time, training, support) to hold a months-long or years-long process. One whose members are willing to stay in relationship with each other through difficulty rather than expelling the person who caused harm and moving on. The frameworks fit less well in groups that need an immediate-safety response (call the police, evict, separate first), in groups where the person who caused harm refuses to participate, or in groups where the survivor wants to leave rather than stay.

Restorative Circles, developed by Dominic Barter in Brazil from the mid-1990s onward, sit between the two. They are a specific operational form of restorative practice, three structured stages (pre-circle, circle, post-circle), used in favela communities that had no functional access to the formal criminal-justice system. The Restorative Circles approach is procedurally close to RJ and politically close to TJ. It is the most-documented community-scale practice in the family, and the one most directly applicable to intentional communities.

2. Where it came from

The two frameworks have related but separate origin stories.

Restorative Justice: the Mennonite peace tradition and the 1974 Kitchener case. The modern RJ field traces to a 1974 case in Kitchener, Ontario. Two teenagers had vandalised twenty-two properties on a single night. A Mennonite probation officer named Mark Yantzi proposed something the court had never tried: instead of sentencing the young people to prison, have them meet with each of the property owners, hear what the damage had cost, and work out how to make it right. The judge agreed. The young people met with each victim, apologised, and worked out restitution arrangements. The model was named Victim Offender Reconciliation Program (VORP) and spread through Mennonite peace networks across North America in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Howard Zehr and Changing Lenses (1990). Zehr, a Mennonite scholar who had been working in VORP programs since the late 1970s, articulated the theoretical foundation of restorative justice in Changing Lenses: A New Focus for Crime and Justice, published in 1990 by Herald Press. The book argued that the conventional criminal-justice framework was operating with the wrong question (who broke which rule and what punishment do they deserve) and proposed a different framework rooted in harm, obligation, and repair. Twenty-five years after publication, Changing Lenses remained the field's canonical text. Zehr is widely called "the grandfather of restorative justice." He became Distinguished Professor of Restorative Justice at Eastern Mennonite University's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) when CJP was founded in 1994, served as CJP's co-director from 2002 to 2007, and stepped into the leadership of the new Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice in 2012.

The Navajo Peacemaking and Indigenous lineages. The Mennonite VORP work was not the only origin stream. The Navajo Nation's traditional peacemaking system, formalised inside the Navajo Tribal Court structure in 1982, gave the modern RJ field one of its most important non-Western models. Kay Pranis, who became one of the most influential RJ practitioners in North America, drew explicitly on Navajo Peacemaking and on Anishinaabe and Tagish/Tlingit traditions when she developed the Peacemaking Circle practice while serving as the Minnesota Department of Corrections' Restorative Justice Planner (1994 to 2003). Pranis co-authored Peacemaking Circles: From Crime to Community (Living Justice Press, 2003) with Yukon Circuit Court Judge Barry Stuart and Tagish elder Mark Wedge, and her Little Book of Circle Processes (Good Books, 2005) is the field's most-cited practitioner text. The Indigenous lineage is the field's deepest debt and one that contemporary RJ practitioners are continuing to honour and contest.

Restorative Circles: Dominic Barter and the Brazilian favelas. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Dominic Barter, a British-born facilitator living in Rio de Janeiro, began working with residents of favela communities ruled by drug-trafficking organisations and effectively cut off from the formal criminal-justice system. With community members, Barter developed the Restorative Circles model: a three-stage process (pre-circle, circle, post-circle) using the deliberately non-judgemental vocabulary of "author of an act," "receiver of an act," and "community indirectly affected" rather than offender, victim, and bystander. Restorative Circles spread through Brazilian schools and youth justice systems, then through international practitioner networks. Restorative Systems is the umbrella organisation Barter and collaborators founded to develop and support the work.

Restorative Practices in schools: the Wachtels and IIRP. A parallel branch developed in the 1990s out of the youth-services work of Ted and Susan Wachtel, public-school teachers who had founded Community Service Foundation and Buxmont Academy in 1977 to serve at-risk youth in Pennsylvania. Their adaptation of restorative practices for educational settings (peer mediation, circle process for classroom conflict, restorative conferencing for school discipline) became the basis for the International Institute for Restorative Practices (IIRP), incorporated as a nonprofit in 2000 and authorised by the Pennsylvania Department of Education as a graduate school in 2006. IIRP is now the field's largest training institution for restorative-practice work in schools, juvenile justice, and youth-serving organisations.

Transformative Justice: INCITE!, Generation FIVE, and the abolitionist feminist tradition. TJ emerged on a different track. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (founded in 2000) and Critical Resistance (founded 1997) had been organising at the intersection of anti-violence work and prison abolition for several years when, in the early 2000s, organisers began publishing the field's first explicit TJ frameworks. Generation FIVE, an organisation founded in 2000 with the vision to end the sexual abuse of children within five generations, published "Toward Transformative Justice: A Liberatory Approach to Child Sexual Abuse and other forms of Intimate and Community Violence" in 2007. The text is the field's first major theoretical statement. Generation FIVE's more comprehensive Ending Child Sexual Abuse: A Transformative Justice Handbook followed in 2017.

Creative Interventions and Mimi Kim (2004 onward). Mimi Kim, an INCITE! co-founder and Asian Women's Shelter co-director in San Francisco, founded Creative Interventions in 2004 to develop community-based interventions against interpersonal violence as alternatives to police involvement. The Creative Interventions Toolkit, a 600-page practitioner manual covering domestic violence, sexual violence, and family violence, was released in draft in November 2012 and in final web form in 2020. The Toolkit remains the most operationally detailed community-accountability practitioner document in the TJ field.

Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (BATJC). Founded around 2010, BATJC focuses specifically on child sexual abuse and is co-founded by Mia Mingus, an organiser who is also one of the field's most-cited theorists of disability justice and access intimacy. BATJC's "pod" model (small groups of trusted people pre-built to respond to harm before harm happens) has been widely adopted across the TJ field.

Philly Stands Up! and Philly's Pissed (2004 onward). When a series of sexual assaults occurred inside the West Philadelphia punk community in the summer of 2004, two volunteer collectives formed in response. Philly's Pissed provided direct support to survivors. Philly Stands Up worked with the people who had caused harm to build accountability processes. In winter 2006, one member introduced the explicit RJ framework, and from there both collectives moved into the TJ tradition. The two collectives published collected materials online through the In the Middle of a Whirlwind project and are among the most documented case studies of community-scale TJ practice in the English-language record.

The post-2015 movement texts. Three books cemented TJ's contemporary form. adrienne maree brown's We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice (AK Press, 2020) developed the critique of cancel culture from inside the abolitionist movement. Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement, edited by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (AK Press, 2020), gathered practitioner accounts from across the field including Philly Stands Up, Creative Interventions, BATJC, Trans Lifeline, and many others. Mariame Kaba's We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Haymarket Books, 2021) framed TJ inside the broader abolitionist political project and reached the New York Times bestseller list.

Contemporary state, 2026. RJ is institutionally established in mainstream criminal justice across many jurisdictions: school discipline, juvenile justice, victim-offender mediation, restorative re-entry programs, and post-conflict truth-and-reconciliation work. The IIRP graduate school, Zehr Institute, Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, Living Justice Press, and Restorative Systems form the field's institutional core. TJ remains more grassroots and survivor-led; its institutional core is BATJC, Creative Interventions, Project NIA, INCITE!, Critical Resistance, and the network of practitioners around the contemporary abolitionist movement. The two fields overlap substantially in practice while remaining distinct in politics.

3. How it actually runs

The procedural form varies across the three branches (RJ, RC, TJ), but they share enough common ground that a single description covers the working core.

The pre-meeting work. No process starts with everyone in the room. Before any circle, conference, or accountability process, a facilitator (or pod, in the TJ tradition) does separate preparation work with each person who will be in the room. The pre-meeting is often the longest part of the work. The facilitator listens to each party's account of what happened, what the impact has been, what the person needs to feel safe in the conversation, and what they hope for as an outcome. The facilitator does not negotiate, evaluate, or judge. The point is to make sure no one walks into the meeting blind. In Restorative Circles, the pre-circle is built explicitly into the procedural form. In RJ victim-offender conferencing, it is called preparation. In TJ accountability processes, it is the foundation of the "pod" model: the small group of trusted people that supports the person harmed, the person who caused harm, and the community.

The harmed person decides whether and when to participate. Across all three traditions, this is the load-bearing rule. The person who experienced the harm sets the timing, the format, the scope, and the goal. If they want a direct meeting with the person who caused harm, the process moves toward that. If they want a structured indirect process (letters, intermediaries, recorded statements), the process moves toward that. If they want the person who caused harm to do specific accountability work first before any meeting is considered, the process moves toward that. If they want no meeting at all, the process supports them in other forms of healing. The framework's commitment is that the response will not impose itself on the person who has already been harmed.

The meeting structure. Where a meeting happens, it follows a standard procedural form across the family. A facilitator opens with the agreements (who is in the room, what they have committed to, the agreements about confidentiality and process). The harmed person speaks first if they have chosen to be in the room, telling what happened in their own words and naming the impact. The person who caused harm listens without interrupting. Then the person who caused harm has a turn, taking responsibility, acknowledging the impact, and answering questions from the harmed person. The community members (where present) speak to what they witnessed and what their relationship to both parties involves. Together, the room develops a written agreement of what the person who caused harm will do to repair (where repair is possible), what conditions will be in place going forward, how the community will support each party, and how accountability will be tracked over time.

The post-meeting work. Agreements without follow-through are common-mode failures across all RJ and TJ practice. Both traditions have built in structured post-circle or post-process check-ins. In Restorative Circles, the post-circle is the third explicit stage, where the facilitator follows up with each party (and the community) on whether the agreement is being honored, whether the relationships are healing, and whether further work is needed. In TJ accountability work, the pod stays with the process for months or years, not weeks. Both traditions name the temptation to declare a single meeting "the work" and move on as one of the most damaging failure modes.

The vocabulary shift. Across all three traditions, the choice of words is intentional and contested. Restorative Justice traditionally uses "victim" and "offender." Restorative Circles uses "receiver of an act" and "author of an act." TJ uses "person harmed" and "person who caused harm." The TJ vocabulary is increasingly the practitioner default across the field because it leaves room for the complexity of situations where the same person may be both (especially in interpersonal violence between intimate partners) and avoids the criminal-law connotations of victim/offender. The vocabulary itself is part of the work, naming a different relationship between people and harm.

The conventional question vs the restorative question. Howard Zehr's most-cited frame is the two-question comparison. The conventional criminal-justice question asks: (1) what law was broken; (2) who broke it; (3) what punishment do they deserve. The restorative question asks: (1) who has been hurt; (2) what are their needs; (3) whose obligations are these. The TJ question adds two further moves: (4) what conditions in this community produced the harm; (5) how does this response avoid producing further harm, including state violence. The five-question form is the operational summary of the TJ framework.

Concrete repair commitments. A restorative or transformative process produces a written agreement, not a vague statement of intentions. The agreement is specific: the person who caused harm will pay $X for the damage by date Y; will attend Z therapy sessions weekly for six months; will not be in spaces A, B, or C; will not contact person D except through intermediary E; will write a public accountability statement for the community by date F. The specificity is the point. Without specific commitments, accountability becomes a performance.

Community as the third party. Both RJ and TJ position the community as a structural participant, not a backdrop. The community holds the agreement, witnesses the accountability, and is part of what gets repaired. In the favela contexts where Barter developed Restorative Circles, the community is often the literal residents of a building, neighbourhood, or school. In the TJ contexts of urban anti-violence work, the community is the network of people in relationship with both the harmed person and the person who caused harm. In RJ in schools, the community is the classroom or the broader student body. The community's role is to make sure the agreement is honored over time and to learn from what happened.

4. What it is and what it is not

A handful of confusions worth naming directly.

RJ and TJ are not the same as mediation. Conventional mediation aims for an agreement between parties who are treated as equal disputants. Restorative and transformative justice both start from the recognition that harm happened, that the parties are not equal in their relationship to that harm, and that accountability (not just agreement) is part of the work. A mediator can be neutral. A restorative facilitator is partial to the process and to the harmed person's safety; they are not neutral about whether harm occurred.

RJ and TJ are not the same as therapy. Both traditions support the healing of individuals, and both rely on participants having access to other forms of healing (therapy, somatic work, peer support). The process itself remains structured accountability and repair work; therapy is a parallel layer that participants need access to, not what the process delivers. Confusing the two leads to common failure modes: facilitators treating the meeting as a therapeutic intervention for the person who caused harm, or expecting the harmed person to do healing work on themselves before being allowed to participate.

RJ is not the same as TJ. This is the most important distinction. RJ in its mainstream criminal-justice form works inside the existing legal system: it accepts that the state has a legitimate role in identifying offenders and that the response can include incarceration, parole, and other state interventions, with restorative practices added on. TJ rejects this framework. The TJ premise is that the state's response to harm typically produces more harm, especially for Black, brown, undocumented, queer, trans, sex-working, and disabled people, and that genuine accountability work must happen outside the carceral system. The two fields share procedural DNA and a moral starting point. They diverge politically and tactically. A person can practise both in different contexts.

RJ and TJ are not call-out culture. This is the brown critique. In We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice (AK Press, 2020), adrienne maree brown argues that cancel culture and TJ are practically opposites. Canceling is punishment delivered through social ostracism: the harmed person and the community remove the person who caused harm from social participation, sometimes permanently, without process or repair. TJ is the slow, structured, often-painful work of staying in relationship with the person who caused harm long enough for accountability and change to be possible. The two have similar rhetoric and very different practice. Where cancel culture is a single act of removal, TJ is months or years of process.

RJ and TJ are not the same as forgiveness. Neither framework requires the harmed person to forgive. Neither framework requires reconciliation as an outcome. The goal is accountability and the conditions under which the harmed person can heal in the way they choose to heal. If they choose to forgive, the framework supports that. If they choose not to forgive, the framework supports that equally. Forgiveness is the harmed person's call, not the community's expectation of them.

RJ and TJ are not appropriate in every situation. Both traditions are clear about this. Where the person who caused harm refuses to participate, the process cannot proceed. Where the harm is ongoing (active intimate-partner violence, ongoing child abuse), immediate safety must come before any accountability process. Where the power differential is extreme (between a child and an institutional abuser, between an employee and a senior executive who controls their livelihood), the framework alone is insufficient and must be supplemented with structural change. Where the community does not have the capacity to hold the process (no trained facilitators, no pod model, no time, no relational depth), an accountability process can produce more harm than it heals. Honest assessment of fit is part of the practice.

RJ and TJ are not finished. Both fields are in active development. The vocabulary is contested, the procedural forms are still being refined, and the boundary between RJ and TJ is itself part of ongoing field debate. The current best practice is treated as provisional.

5. Communities and organizations using it

A non-exhaustive sample of documented uses, drawn from primary sources.

The Mennonite peace tradition and VORP (1974 onward). The Kitchener Mennonite probation officer Mark Yantzi's 1974 intervention is the canonical RJ origin story. VORP programs spread through North American Mennonite networks in the late 1970s and 1980s and became the procedural foundation for the field's institutionalisation.

Eastern Mennonite University's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (1994 onward), Harrisonburg, Virginia. The institutional home of Howard Zehr and the field's most prominent graduate-level training program. CJP runs an accredited master's program in restorative justice (the first of its kind in North America when launched in 2016) plus shorter intensives and online training. The Zehr Institute, founded in 2012, focuses on advanced practitioner training and field research.

Living Justice Press (founded 2002), Saint Paul, Minnesota. The independent publisher of Kay Pranis's Little Book of Circle Processes and many other field-defining texts. Living Justice Press has become the practitioner field's primary publishing home for circle-process and peacemaking-circle work.

IIRP Graduate School (2006 onward), Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The world's first accredited graduate school in restorative practices, with strong programs for school-based and youth-services applications. IIRP's curriculum has been adopted in school systems in Australia, Canada, Hungary, Latvia, Ireland, the UK, and many US states.

Navajo Nation Peacemaking program (formalised 1982). Operates inside the Navajo Tribal Court system, drawing on traditional Diné jurisprudence. The Navajo system has been studied and cited by RJ practitioners worldwide as a non-Western model of harm response built on relational and community-based principles rather than punishment.

Restorative Circles (Dominic Barter, mid-1990s onward), Rio de Janeiro and worldwide. The Brazilian model has spread internationally through Restorative Systems (Barter's organisation) and through certified facilitators across Latin America, Europe, North America, and parts of Asia. The model has been adopted in Brazilian public schools (under the Ministry of Education's 2014 restorative practices initiative), in youth-justice systems in several Brazilian states, and in non-Brazilian community contexts where practitioner trainings have seeded local groups.

INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (2000 onward) and Critical Resistance (1997 onward). The two foundational organisations of the contemporary US TJ field. INCITE! focuses on the intersection of anti-violence work and anti-state-violence work. Critical Resistance focuses on prison abolition. Both have produced extensive practitioner literature and have trained generations of TJ organisers.

Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (BATJC, ~2010 onward). Co-founded by Mia Mingus, with a specific focus on child sexual abuse. BATJC's "pod" model (a small group of trusted people pre-built to respond to harm before harm happens) has become widely adopted across the TJ field. BATJC also produces curriculum and conducts trainings for groups setting up their own pods.

Creative Interventions (2004 onward), Oakland, California. Founded by Mimi Kim. The Creative Interventions Toolkit (draft 2012, final 2020) is the field's most operationally detailed community-accountability practitioner manual. Creative Interventions has trained practitioners in dozens of community contexts.

Generation FIVE (2000 onward), Bay Area. Focus on ending child sexual abuse over five generations through TJ work. Their 2007 Toward Transformative Justice paper and 2017 Ending Child Sexual Abuse: A Transformative Justice Handbook are field-defining documents.

Philly Stands Up! and Philly's Pissed (2004 to ~2015), Philadelphia. The most-documented community-scale accountability process in the English-language record. The two collectives worked in the West Philadelphia punk community after a series of sexual assaults in summer 2004. Their collected materials are archived on the In the Middle of a Whirlwind project. Their practice integrated RJ in 2006 and moved fully into the TJ tradition by the late 2000s.

Project NIA (founded 2009), Chicago. Founded by Mariame Kaba. Focus on ending youth incarceration through community-based alternatives, including TJ practice. Project NIA has trained thousands of organisers and supported many community-scale accountability processes.

Burning Man and the Bureau of Erotic Discourse (B.E.D., 2004 onward), Black Rock City and regional events. B.E.D. is the volunteer-run consent and sexual-misconduct education program at Burning Man, founded in 2004 (the same year Philly Stands Up began). B.E.D. trains BEDucators who work with theme camps to develop camp-level consent policies, runs workshops at the event, and supports community-level responses to misconduct. Burning Man's organisational response has been contested: Salon's 2019 investigation documented 62 reports of sexual assault from 2002 onward in Pershing County Sheriff records, and the organisation receives between five and twenty assault reports each year. The B.E.D. model represents one of the largest festival-scale consent-education programs in the world; whether it has effectively addressed the underlying problem is genuinely contested.

Anti-Violence Project (AVP), New York. The Anti-Violence Project, founded in 1980 as a LGBTQ-focused anti-violence organisation, has developed a community-accountability program for harm inside LGBTQ communities that draws on TJ frameworks.

Restorative practices in schools and youth justice worldwide. Documented adoption includes the New Zealand youth-justice system (the 1989 Children, Young Persons, and Their Families Act made family group conferences mandatory for serious juvenile offences, the first national-scale RJ implementation), the Australian state of Queensland (post-1991 reforms), Northern Ireland's Youth Conference Service, the Belgian and Norwegian juvenile-justice systems, and school-discipline reform in Oakland Unified, Denver Public Schools, Chicago Public Schools, and many others.

Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. South Africa's TRC (1995 to 2002), chaired by Desmond Tutu, drew heavily on RJ principles in its design. The Canadian TRC on Indian Residential Schools (2008 to 2015) likewise incorporated RJ practice. The TRC model has been replicated in Sierra Leone, Liberia, East Timor, Peru, Argentina, and elsewhere. The TRC is the largest-scale documented application of RJ principles, and also among the most contested in its results.

FROM THE FIELD

From the field. The ToGather archive overlaps with this framework most directly through the Tamera Forum interviews. Sabine Lichtenfels, Bori, Joshua Gottenko, Uri Ayalon, and Aida Shibli describe Forum as Tamera's primary practice for working with conflict, including sexual and relational conflict, inside the community. Forum is not identical to RJ or TJ. It is a witnessed-disclosure practice with a different procedural form (one person in the center, the community as witnesses), with a different theory of change (Tamera's Healing Biotopes Plan posits that healing of the human relationship to love, sexuality, and Eros is foundational to community survival), and with a different relationship to specific accountability (Forum tends to surface conflict and shift the relational field around it rather than produce specific repair agreements). The Tamera Forum entry on this Library covers the practice in depth. Forum and RJ/TJ are different practices that engage with related territory; reading them alongside each other reveals the design space. The ZEGG community, which developed a related Forum practice in 1978, has a more publicly contested history (the 1996 "authoritarian sex cult" allegations connected to Otto Mühl's earlier Friedrichshof community, which ZEGG rejected in a 2013 statement). The contested history is part of what intentional communities adopting any of these practices have to engage with honestly.

Auroville, Findhorn, Feytopia, ZEGG, and Tamera have all faced community-scale consent breaches at various points in their histories. Some have processed these through their own Forum or Circle practices; others have removed members; some have produced public accounts; many have not. The published record is uneven, and the responsible practice when working with any of these communities is to ask directly rather than infer from absence of record.

6. How to begin practicing this in your own community

Six steps. Verb-first.

1. Decide which framework you are reaching for and why. Before any harm happens, the community decides whether it is committed to RJ, to TJ, or to a hybrid practice. The choice has consequences. RJ tends to fit groups embedded in or willing to use the state legal system as a parallel track. TJ tends to fit groups whose members include people who are not safe inside that system (Black, brown, queer, trans, undocumented, sex-working, disabled members) and groups committed to abolitionist politics. Neither is morally superior. Both are real practices with real practitioner communities. The mistake is to reach for one without understanding the political and operational commitments it implies.

2. Build pods before harm happens. This is the core BATJC contribution. A pod is a small group (3 to 8 people) of trusted humans who have agreed in advance that they will respond if harm happens to or by any pod member. Pods are built when nothing is on fire. Each community member is encouraged to build their own pod. The pod members know each other, have explicit agreements about how they will show up, and have trained together. When harm happens, the pods of the harmed person and the pods of the person who caused harm become the initial structural support for any accountability process. Without pods, the response defaults to crisis-mode improvisation. With pods, the response can begin grounded.

3. Train at least three facilitators in your community before you need them. Restorative and transformative practice requires trained facilitators. The IIRP graduate school, the Zehr Institute, Living Justice Press, the Bay Area TJ Collective, Creative Interventions, and Restorative Systems all run trainings ranging from week-long intensives to multi-year certifications. Plan to have at least three trained facilitators in your community at all times, more for larger groups. The training is not free and not quick; treat it as a multi-year investment.

4. Read the Creative Interventions Toolkit and the Generation FIVE Handbook before you start. Both are freely available online (creative-interventions.org/toolkit and generationfive.org). The CI Toolkit is the most operationally detailed practitioner document in the field, six hundred pages covering domestic violence, sexual violence, and family violence with concrete worksheets, scripts, and case studies. The Generation FIVE handbook covers the political and theoretical framing. Reading these before harm happens means your community will have a shared vocabulary when it does.

5. Build the agreement infrastructure before you need it. Decide in advance: what kinds of harm will trigger which kinds of process; who has standing to call for an accountability process; how confidentiality works; how the community will support both the harmed person and the person who caused harm during the process; what the limits of the process are (when will the community call the police, when will it ask someone to leave, what is non-negotiable); how the agreement will be tracked over time. These decisions made in advance are very different from these decisions made under the pressure of an active harm.

6. Stay in the work over years. The most consistent finding across the documented TJ practitioner literature is that accountability processes take longer than the participants expect. Months, not weeks. Years for some. The community must commit to staying with the work, not declaring it finished after a single meeting. The Philly Stands Up materials are clear on this point. The BATJC pod model is built around the long horizon. If your community cannot commit to multi-year process, the framework is not the right fit; reach instead for a structural change (membership review, residency policy, hiring policy) that can happen on a shorter timeline.

One caution. Both RJ and TJ work badly in the absence of relational depth, basic safety, and shared values. If your community does not have the conditions for a difficult conversation in normal times, the conditions for an accountability process after harm are not going to materialise. The frameworks describe what becomes possible when a community already has the relational ground; they do not create that ground. The work of building the ground (Forum, Circle, NVC, regular relational meetings, therapeutic support, conflict-skill training) comes first. The accountability process sits on top.

7. Living examples and entry points for community builders

Where the work is alive in 2026, and how to engage with it beyond your own first attempts.

Living examples

Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (batjc.wordpress.com). The collective's pod-building curriculum, accountability worksheets, and case studies are the field's most-accessible entry point. BATJC also runs trainings and supports communities setting up their own pods.

Creative Interventions (creative-interventions.org). The full 600-page Creative Interventions Toolkit is freely available. The most operationally detailed community-accountability practitioner document anywhere.

Generation FIVE (generationfive.org). The 2007 Toward Transformative Justice paper and the 2017 Ending Child Sexual Abuse: A Transformative Justice Handbook are both freely available. The handbook is the field's most thorough engagement with child sexual abuse specifically.

Project NIA and TransformHarm.org (transformharm.org). Mariame Kaba's curated resource hub for transformative-justice work. The most comprehensive online library of TJ practitioner materials, organised by topic and contributor.

Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice (zehr-institute.org). The mainstream RJ field's primary practitioner hub. Recorded webinars, books, and the Restorative Justice peer-reviewed journal.

Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (emu.edu/cjp). Master's degree, summer institutes, and the Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) program at Eastern Mennonite University.

Living Justice Press (livingjusticepress.org). Kay Pranis's published work and the field's primary publishing home for peacemaking-circle practice.

Restorative Circles (restorativecircles.org). Dominic Barter's organisation and the entry point for the Brazilian Restorative Circles tradition.

IIRP Graduate School (iirp.edu). The school-based and youth-services side of the field. Bachelor's, master's, and continuing-education programs.

Anti-Violence Project (avp.org). New York-based LGBTQ-focused anti-violence work with a community-accountability program.

Adjacent applications

Restorative practices in school systems. Oakland Unified, Denver Public Schools, Chicago Public Schools, and many others have adopted restorative practices for school discipline, generally with documented reductions in suspensions and improvements in school climate. The IIRP curriculum is the most-used training for school adoption.

Truth-and-reconciliation commissions. The South African TRC, Canadian TRC on Indian Residential Schools, Sierra Leonean TRC, and others have applied restorative principles at the national scale. The results are contested and the implementation varies. Reading the TRC literature alongside the community-scale TJ literature reveals the trade-offs of scaling restorative practice to political contexts.

Burning Man's Bureau of Erotic Discourse (B.E.D., burningman.org/event/preparation/health-safety/sexual-misconduct). A festival-scale consent education and community-accountability program. Worth studying for its scale, its limits, and its honest engagement with its own failure modes (which are substantial, as documented in the Salon investigation and subsequent reporting).

Five entry points beyond your own first reading

1. Read the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective's pod curriculum. Available at batjc.wordpress.com. Two hours of reading reveals the operational form. Then build your own pod.
2. Read Mia Mingus's "Transformative Justice: A Brief Description" (transformharm.org/tj_resource/mia-mingus-of-the-bay-area-transformative-justice-collective/). The clearest short introduction to the framework as a political and practical project. Twenty minutes.
3. Read adrienne maree brown's We Will Not Cancel Us (AK Press, 2020). Short, accessible, the cleanest contemporary articulation of the difference between TJ and cancel culture. The whole booklet is under 100 pages.
4. Read the Creative Interventions Toolkit (creative-interventions.org/toolkit). The most operationally detailed practitioner document in the field. Not a quick read at 600 pages, but the foundational reference for community-accountability work.
5. Attend a BATJC, Creative Interventions, IIRP, or Zehr Institute training. Written texts cannot substitute for the embodied facilitation skill that the work requires. Plan multi-year training time for at least one community facilitator. Cost varies; some programs offer sliding-scale pricing.

One caution beyond your own first reading. Both RJ and TJ practitioners agree that the worst common-mode failure is the community that has read the framework, decided it sounds right, and then attempts to run an accountability process without trained facilitators when harm happens. The processes are technically demanding. They require people with the skill to hold a room when survivors are speaking about violence, when people who caused harm are taking responsibility, and when the community is grieving and angry. The cost of running the process badly is high for everyone, especially for the person harmed. Train the facilitators first. The framework is not a do-it-yourself kit.

8. Where it gets hard

The frameworks have accumulated substantial published critique across more than three decades of practice. The tensions worth naming directly:

The survivor-led critique of RJ in sexual-harm contexts. The single most important critique of mainstream RJ is that it does not adequately serve survivors of sexual and intimate-partner violence. The critique, articulated through INCITE!, Generation FIVE, Creative Interventions, and BATJC across the 2000s and 2010s, holds that conventional RJ tends to produce victim-offender meetings that re-traumatise survivors, that prioritise reconciliation over accountability, and that minimise the structural power dynamics inside the harm. The TJ tradition emerged in direct response. RJ practitioners have integrated much of this critique into contemporary practice (extended preparation work, survivor-led pacing, the right to no meeting), but the disagreement is real and ongoing.

The state-violence critique of RJ. Critics across the abolitionist tradition (Critical Resistance, INCITE!, Mariame Kaba, Mia Mingus) argue that institutional RJ inside the criminal-justice system reproduces state violence while adding a more humane veneer. School-based RJ programs have been criticised for being applied disproportionately to behavioural infractions by Black and brown students while serious harm continues to be referred to the criminal system. Re-entry RJ programs have been criticised for placing the burden of healing the harm onto people who have already served time. The TJ critique is that genuine restorative practice cannot exist inside an institution whose foundational logic is punishment.

The "accountability process is tearing my community apart" critique. A pattern documented across many community-scale TJ practitioner accounts (most clearly in Beyond Survival, the Philly Stands Up materials, and the Xtra Magazine article on community accountability gone wrong): accountability processes can themselves become harmful when run badly. The process can be weaponised against people who have done lesser harm, can become a vehicle for ongoing community-level conflict, can re-traumatise the harmed person, can produce false consensus, can collapse under the weight of community division. The honest TJ practitioner literature does not deny this. The response is that the answer is more skilled facilitation and more trained pods, not abandonment of the framework.

The cancel-culture confusion. As adrienne maree brown documents in We Will Not Cancel Us, the contemporary rise of cancel culture has produced a public confusion between TJ and cancellation. The two are practically opposites. Cancellation removes the person who caused harm. TJ keeps them in relationship with the community while requiring accountability. The confusion has produced harm in both directions: communities that practise cancellation while believing they are practising TJ, and communities that fail to remove dangerous people in the name of TJ. brown's critique is internal to the abolitionist movement; it is the most-cited contemporary engagement with this failure mode.

The institutional-capture critique. As RJ has become institutionalised inside criminal-justice and education systems, critics argue, it has been domesticated. Schools have adopted "restorative practices" that look like behaviour management with relational vocabulary. Police departments have adopted "restorative" programs that operate inside their existing power structures. The early radical promise of the framework has been blunted by adoption. The defenders' response is that mainstream institutional adoption was always going to involve compromise, and that the alternative (no adoption) leaves harm-response entirely in the existing punitive system.

The ZEGG / Otto Mühl / Friedrichshof history. Inside the intentional-communities sector specifically, the ZEGG community's adjacency to Otto Mühl's Friedrichshof commune (1972 to 1991), and the 1996 allegations against ZEGG of being an "authoritarian sex cult" that trivialised child abuse (which ZEGG rejected in a 2013 statement that is no longer publicly available), are the field's most-cited cautionary tale. Mühl himself was convicted of sexual abuse of minors and other crimes in 1991 and served seven years in prison. The episode is a reminder that communal sexual cultures and consent-breach accountability are intertwined, that "sexual liberation" framing can mask abuse, and that intentional communities engaging with this territory carry real risk if the structures are not in place. Any contemporary community working with consent and accountability has to engage honestly with this history.

The class and capacity tension. Running a TJ process at the standard the contemporary practitioner literature describes (trained facilitators, pre-built pods, multi-year follow-through) requires substantial resources of time, training money, emotional capacity, and social trust. Many communities and many survivors do not have these. The TJ framework can become a luxury available only to communities with the resources to do it right, leaving everyone else with worse options. The field's own practitioners name this tension openly, including in Beyond Survival.

The non-participation problem. Across all three traditions, the process cannot proceed without the participation of the person who caused harm. When that person refuses to engage, the harmed person and the community are left with worse options: the criminal-justice system (which TJ rejects), removal from the community (which TJ tends to resist), or no response (which leaves the harm unaddressed). The field has not produced a satisfying answer to this failure mode.

The privacy vs accountability tension. Accountability processes typically require the community to know what happened and what the agreement contains. This is in direct tension with the privacy and safety needs of survivors, who may not want the harm publicly named. The field's working compromise (consented disclosure at each stage, multiple confidentiality circles) is workable but fragile.

The frameworks have held up across thirty-plus years of practice and substantial critique. The disagreements are real and the failure modes are documented. Most experienced practitioners are unsentimental about the work: it is hard, it sometimes fails, the alternative (the criminal-justice system, cancel culture, no response) is worse, and the practice is best understood as a long-term commitment rather than a quick fix.

9. Companion frameworks and what to read next

RJ and TJ sit inside a wider cluster of conflict-response, accountability, and community-care frameworks.

Tamera Forum (/library/tamera-forum). The closest archive-grounded relational practice. Forum is the witnessed-disclosure practice Tamera has developed since the 1980s, used inside the community for sexual, relational, and political conflict. Read alongside the RJ/TJ entry to see two different procedural forms with related territory.

Circle / The Way of Council (/library/circle-way-of-council). The deep-listening relational container that TJ accountability processes often sit inside. Kay Pranis's Little Book of Circle Processes is the explicit bridge between the Circle tradition and the RJ peacemaking-circle practice.

Ostrom's Eight Design Principles (/library/ostrom-eight-design-principles). Elinor Ostrom's Principle 6 ("Conflict-resolution mechanisms") is the broad governance frame inside which any community's chosen RJ or TJ practice sits. Communities that fail at Principle 6 fail at the commons; the framework choice is the operationalisation.

Sociocracy For Communities (/library/sociocracy-for-communities). The governance framework most often paired with TJ-style accountability work in intentional communities. Sociocracy gives the decision-making structure; RJ/TJ gives the harm-response practice.

Doocracy (/library/doocracy). The informal-authority counterpart. Doocratic communities (Feytopia, Embassy Network, open-source projects) tend to handle harm informally and have generally not developed structured RJ/TJ practice. The pairing reveals the design trade-off: informality buys speed and loses accountability infrastructure.

The Tyranny of Structurelessness (/library/tyranny-of-structurelessness). Jo Freeman's 1970 critique applies directly to community-accountability work. Without structure, the response to harm defaults to the social capital of the people in the room, which favours the well-connected (often including people who have caused harm) over the marginalised (often including the people harmed).

Howard Zehr, Changing Lenses: A New Focus for Crime and Justice (Herald Press, 1990; 25th anniversary edition 2015). The canonical RJ text. The most-cited single document in the field.

Howard Zehr, The Little Book of Restorative Justice (Good Books, 2002, revised 2014). The short practitioner introduction. The fastest way into the framework if 350-page Changing Lenses is too much for a first read.

Kay Pranis, The Little Book of Circle Processes: A New/Old Approach to Peacemaking (Good Books, 2005). The single most-used practitioner text for community-scale circle work. Short, accessible, operational.

Kay Pranis, Barry Stuart, and Mark Wedge, Peacemaking Circles: From Crime to Community (Living Justice Press, 2003). The deeper practitioner reference for circle-process work.

Generation FIVE, Toward Transformative Justice: A Liberatory Approach to Child Sexual Abuse and other forms of Intimate and Community Violence (Generation FIVE, 2007). The foundational TJ document. Freely available.

Generation FIVE, Ending Child Sexual Abuse: A Transformative Justice Handbook (Generation FIVE, 2017). The comprehensive practitioner handbook. Freely available.

Mimi Kim and Creative Interventions, Creative Interventions Toolkit: A Practical Guide to Stop Interpersonal Violence (Creative Interventions, draft 2012, final 2020). The 600-page operational manual. Freely available.

Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, eds., Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement (AK Press, 2020). The contemporary practitioner anthology with Philly Stands Up, Creative Interventions, BATJC, Trans Lifeline, and many other contributors.

adrienne maree brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice (AK Press, 2020). The cleanest contemporary articulation of TJ as distinct from cancel culture.

Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Haymarket Books, 2021). The TJ framework inside the broader abolitionist political project. New York Times bestseller.

Dominic Barter, "Restorative Circles" practitioner materials (restorativecircles.org). The Brazilian Restorative Circles tradition in the originator's own words. The site hosts free practitioner guides and case studies.

Sources

The references below are the primary sources consulted while writing this entry.

• Howard Zehr, Changing Lenses: A New Focus for Crime and Justice (Herald Press, 1990; 25th anniversary edition 2015).
• Howard Zehr (Wikipedia).
• Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, Eastern Mennonite University.
• Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice.
• Kay Pranis, The Little Book of Circle Processes (Good Books, 2005).
• Kay Pranis, Barry Stuart, and Mark Wedge, Peacemaking Circles: From Crime to Community (Living Justice Press, 2003).
• Restorative Circles, Dominic Barter's site.
• IIRP Graduate School.
• Ted Wachtel, Defining Restorative Practices, IIRP, foundational paper.
• Mia Mingus of the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, TransformHarm.org.
• Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective.
• Generation FIVE, Toward Transformative Justice (2007).
• Generation FIVE, Ending Child Sexual Abuse: A Transformative Justice Handbook (2017).
• Mimi Kim and Creative Interventions, Creative Interventions Toolkit (draft 2012, final 2020).
• Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, eds., Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement (AK Press, 2020).
• adrienne maree brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice (AK Press, 2020).
• Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Haymarket Books, 2021).
• Philly Stands Up! and Philly's Pissed collected materials.
• TransformHarm.org, Mariame Kaba's curated TJ resource hub.
• Project NIA.
• Burning Man Sexual Misconduct Awareness, Education and Prevention.
• Aimee Lutkin, "Exclusive: Burning Man calls itself a safe space. Assault survivors say it's got a sex crime problem", Salon, May 17, 2019.
• ZEGG community (Wikipedia, including the Mühl/Friedrichshof history).
• ToGather archive interviews from Tamera (Sabine Lichtenfels, Bori, Joshua Gottenko, Uri Ayalon, Aida Shibli), Auroville (Johnny, Renana, Peter), and Feytopia (Jess, Mathieu, Lucy Foster, Shelby McAuliffe, Poli, Amy Van Doren), providing the relational-practice grounding for Section 5's "From the field" callout.