This 13-week, bilingual recovery and reconciliation program uses group study sessions, panel discussions, and Fr. Richard Rohr’s book Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps to transform the attitudes, beliefs and behaviors of incarcerated men and women. It helps participants talk honestly and frankly with an experienced facilitator about life, addictions, God, and change. The textbook contains epigrams (quotes and biblical passages), essays, and questions that are discussed and evaluated during two-hour sessions. These sessions help participants take stock of their lives and actions, admit shortcomings, and seek reconciliation of wrongs in order to face the challenges ahead. The entire curriculum is spread over 26 sessions.
Finding the Way to Restorative Justice has seven goals:
Creating a space in jail for participants to meet and speak honestly about their lives and actions, and guiding them through a process of accepting and taking responsibility for those actions, and seeking reconciliation and peace.
Fostering a spiritual relationship with God through group discussions, prayer, meditation, and study groups, and using the teachings and actions of Jesus as a model for a happy, moral, and satisfying life inside and outside of jail.
Challenging participants to transform their way of thinking about God, themselves, their own behaviors, addictions, and actions inside and outside of jail, and how those actions have impacted the lives of victims, the families of victims, themselves, and their own families.
Organizing opportunities for participants to hear from victims/victim panels who relate their experiences and perspectives, and from families/family panels.
Facilitating sessions on acceptance, forgiveness, reconciliation, and reunification.
Developing peer leadership abilities, meditation and stress management techniques, and conflict resolution skills.
Directing incarcerated men and women towards a plan for personal change, recovery, and rehabilitation.
Finding the Way to Restorative Justice
This 13-week, bilingual recovery and reconciliation program uses group study sessions, panel discussions, and Fr. Richard Rohr’s book Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps to transform the attitudes, beliefs and behaviors of incarcerated men and women. It helps participants talk honestly and frankly with an experienced facilitator about life, addictions, God, and change. The textbook contains epigrams (quotes and biblical passages), essays, and questions that are discussed and evaluated during two-hour sessions. These sessions help participants take stock of their lives and actions, admit shortcomings, and seek reconciliation of wrongs in order to face the challenges ahead. The entire curriculum is spread over 26 sessions.
Finding the Way to Restorative Justice has seven goals: