Field: Criminogenics and Restorative Justice Core Scholarship: Craig Haney, Criminality in Context: The Psychological Foundations of Criminal Justice Reform and Reforming Punishment; Howard Zehr, Changing Lenses and The Little Book of Restorative Justice Supporting Scholarship: Shadd Maruna, Making Good; Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon; Andrews and Bonta, The Psychology of Criminal Conduct; Sampson and Laub on life-course criminology
Description
This is the course where TJP residents stop being subjects of the criminal justice literature and become its critics.
Craig Haney spent forty years assembling the evidence that criminal behavior is produced by identifiable, documentable, and largely predictable conditions, and that the American legal system is built on the opposite assumption. The system asks what the defendant chose. Haney asks what the defendant was given, and demonstrates that the second question explains far more variance than the first. This is not an argument that eliminates responsibility. It is an argument that locates responsibility accurately, which is the only way to prevent the next instance.
Howard Zehr supplies the other half. Retributive justice asks three questions: what law was broken, who broke it, and what do they deserve. Restorative justice asks three different ones: who was hurt, what do they need, and whose obligation is it to meet those needs. Zehr's reframe is not softer. It is harder, because it requires the person who caused harm to face the person harmed rather than face a docket number.
The course then goes where most restorative justice programming refuses to go. Danielle Sered's work with violent crime survivors establishes that restorative practice is most needed and most effective in exactly the cases it is usually withheld from, and that violence is driven by four conditions: shame, isolation, exposure to violence, and an inability to meet economic needs. Shadd Maruna's desistance research closes the loop by showing that people who permanently stop offending share a specific narrative structure, a redemption script, that reinterprets the past as the source of a present purpose.
That is the intellectual foundation of the entire Transformative Justice Project, stated in one course.
Expectations
Residents are expected to:
- Complete a structured Social History Analysis of their own life using Haney's framework, identifying the specific contingencies, exposures, and absences that shaped the pathway. This is analysis, not excuse-making, and the distinction is enforced.
- Read and be prepared to argue against the assigned material. This course requires adversarial reading.
- Complete a Restorative Inventory: identify every party harmed by the resident's offense, direct and indirect, name each party's likely needs, and state the resident's obligations. This document is not submitted to any court and is not a legal instrument.
- Draft a personal Redemption Script using Maruna's framework and defend its accuracy against peer challenge.
- Produce, as part of a team, a policy brief translating criminogenic research into one specific and actionable South Carolina intervention.
- Argue an assigned opposing position in week 9 regardless of personal belief.
Benefits
To SCDC as an institution. This course produces residents who can articulate the difference between explanation and excuse, which is the single most common failure point in correctional programming and parole preparation. It builds internal capacity for restorative conferencing, which reduces grievance volume and gives the institution a non-punitive pathway for resolving conflict that would otherwise become an infraction. It also generates institutional research product: real analysis of what SCDC's own environment produces, written by people living in it.
To the outside community. Communities absorbing returning citizens are asked to trust a transformation they cannot verify. This course produces residents who can explain, in public and under hostile questioning, exactly how a person becomes dangerous and exactly what unmakes that. It also produces trained restorative facilitators for community conflict, school discipline alternatives, and victim-offender dialogue where survivors request it.
To funders and policymakers. Restorative justice programs show consistent effects on victim satisfaction and offender accountability across multiple meta-analyses, and criminogenic needs assessment is already embedded in correctional practice nationally. This course sits directly on top of the existing evidence base and existing justice reinvestment funding streams. Its policy brief output is immediately usable legislative product, written by the population most affected and least consulted.
Outcomes
Behavioral markers:
- Completed Social History Analysis meeting a rubric standard for causal specificity, with excuse-language flagged and revised.
- Completed Restorative Inventory naming direct, secondary, and community harms with articulated obligations.
- Resident articulates Zehr's three restorative questions and applies them to an unfamiliar case with accuracy under timed conditions.
- Documented participation in at least one facilitated restorative conference or role-played equivalent inside the unit.
- Team produces one publishable policy brief that survives adversarial review.
- Reduction in cohort grievance filings and conflict-related infractions against the prior 6-month baseline.
Validated instruments (baseline week 1, post week 10, retention at 6 months):
- Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking Styles (PICTS), Walters. Primary outcome measure. Track the Mollification, Entitlement, and Superoptimism scales specifically.
- Criminal Sentiments Scale-Modified (CSS-M), Simourd. Measures attitudes toward law, courts, and police, plus identification with criminal others.
- Measures of Criminal Attitudes and Associates (MCAA), Mills and Kroner. Captures both attitudes and peer association, which the Central Eight identifies as the two strongest dynamic risk factors.
- TCU Criminal Thinking Scales, Texas Christian University Institute of Behavioral Research. Free, widely used in corrections, and easy to defend to an evaluator.
- Level of Service Inventory-Revised (LSI-R) or the institution's existing risk instrument, used as a secondary systemic indicator where SCDC already administers it.
Community Applications
Channel 1, Written. The Prevention Brief Series: short, rigorously sourced policy briefs on specific South Carolina intervention points, written for legislative staff, county councils, and school boards. This is the flagship written output of the entire curriculum.
Channel 2, Recorded. "How a Kid Becomes a Case": a recorded module tracing the documented pathway from adverse childhood conditions to first contact to incarceration, narrated by the people who walked it.
Channel 3, Live. Restorative justice teach-ins for visiting groups, and a dedicated session format for law enforcement trainees, judges, prosecutors, and victim advocates. Also: facilitated dialogue support for community conflict where survivors initiate the request.
Channel 4, Inside. Restorative conferencing capacity delivered to other SCDC units, with TJP residents trained as circle keepers for peer conflict, plus a condensed Social History Analysis workshop for units with high infraction rates.
Facilitation Note
Six staff sessions, four peer sessions. Weeks 2, 3, and 6 are staff-facilitated without exception, because social history work and violence-exposure content surface trauma reliably and because the excuse-versus-explanation boundary requires an authority in the room who is not a peer.
Scope of practice. Peer facilitators do not conduct victim-offender dialogue with actual victims. Any real restorative conference involving a harmed party is convened and facilitated by trained staff or a credentialed outside facilitator, through SCDC's victim services process, with the victim's fully informed and revocable consent. Residents train as circle keepers for peer conflict only until formal restorative justice certification is available.
Materials
Core texts: Haney, Criminality in Context; Zehr, The Little Book of Restorative Justice (one copy per resident, inexpensive and short). Supporting: printed excerpt packets from Changing Lenses, Making Good, and Until We Reckon; Social History Analysis template; Restorative Inventory template; policy brief format guide; TCU Criminal Thinking Scales (public domain). No internet access required.