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Last modified 2008-04-15 01:43

Daniel W. Van Ness

DWV1


Dan Van Ness is the executive director of the Centre for Justice and Reconciliation at Prison Fellowship International. He has been involved with criminal justice issues for 30 years, as a lawyer, restorative justice advocate, and teacher.

After six years’ poverty law practice on the West Side of Chicago, he joined Prison Fellowship Ministries (the US Prison Fellowship affiliate) in 1981 and with Charles Colson founded Justice Fellowship to promote criminal justice reforms. During his 11 years with Justice Fellowship, he organized lobbying activities on sentencing reform and victim rights issues, did research and writing on restorative justice and helped launch the victim assistance organization Neighbors Who Care.

After leaving Justice Fellowship and completing additional graduate study, he taught law in Detroit and then criminology at the University of Malta where he lived for two years while helping that government as it worked on reform of its correctional system.

Dan represents Prison Fellowship International at international gatherings on restorative justice, and was a primary architect of the development and eventual endorsement by the United Nations of Basic Principles on the Use of Restorative Justice Programmes in Criminal Matters.

Dan received a BA degree from Wheaton College, the J.D. degree from DePaul University College of Law, and the Masters of Law from Georgetown University Law Center.

He is the author of articles, papers, and several books on restorative justice, the most recent of which are Restoring Justice, 3rd edition (co-authored with Karen Heetderks Strong) and Handbook of Restorative Justice (co-edited with Gerry Johnstone).



L. Lynette Parker

L. Lynette Parker

Lynette works with Prison Fellowship national organizations in the development of justice reform initiatives and programmes. She provides training and information in the area of restorative justice and oversees PFI’s two main justice programmes – the Sycamore Tree Project® and Communities of Restoration. Lynette also represents PFI at meetings of the U. N. Alliance of NGOs on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice and other United Nations events. She has also published articles on the use of restorative practices in Latin America.

Lynette's background is in history and anthropology. As an undergraduate, she majored in both at the University of South Alabama in Mobile. She then earned a Master's in Latin American Studies from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Aside from her work at PFI, Lynette serves as a volunteer restorative conferencing facilitator for the Piedmont Dispute Resolution Centre in Warrenton, Virginia.


Vision and Mission

The mission of the Centre is to develop and promote restorative justice around the world.

The vision of the Centre is that one day restorative justice will be the normal way of responding to crime throughout the world.

 

 

 

Centre Notes

 

Continuing Support for Restorative Justice by the United Nations

The United Nations continues to promote its basic principles on the use of restorative justice programmes, which it adopted in 2002. You may recall that PFI played a major role in the development and eventual adoption of these guidelines. Now, the criminal justice reform office of the UNODC (UN Office of Drugs and Crime) plans to publish a handbook for countries preparing to use restorative justice programmes in their criminal justice systems. This will be a practical guide for starting programmes and for linking them effectively to police, prosecutors, judges or prisons.

The UNODC held an expert meeting in Vienna at the end of January 2006 to review an initial draft of the handbook. Dan Van Ness, who participated in this meeting, reports that the handbook should be of practical value to PF national ministries as well as their governments.