Restorative Justice: An Interview with Dan Van Ness

By Elizabeth Stalcup

(This interview originally appeared in August 2020 newsletter of the Healing Center International.)

Dan Van Ness has been an international leader in restorative justice for more than 37 years. Although I’ve known Dan for many years and knew that he had played an important part in Rwanda’s recovery after the 1994 genocide, I did not understand what restorative justice was or how it might help us in our nation’s current struggles with racial injustice. But I wanted to learn more. Dan sent me his book, Restoring Justice: An Introduction to Restorative Justice, now in its fifth edition, which is used as a textbook all over the world. Then we spoke in July. Here is what I learned.

Dan: Restorative justice (RJ) is a way of thinking about crime that puts more emphasis on repairing the harm done by the offender to the victim and community than on punishing the offender. Think of the scales of justice. Crime causes an imbalance in pain and loss that weighs down the victim’s side. One way of pursuing justice is to add pain and loss to the offender’s side. Another is to move weights from the victim’s side to the offender’s. Restorative justice seeks justice by reducing the negative effects on the victim.

In the Bible, restitution was the key punishment. Exodus 22:1 says: “If a man steals an ox or a sheep, and kills it or sells it, he shall repay five oxen for an ox, and four sheep for a sheep. We see this in the New Testament story of the corrupt tax collector Zacchaeus who promised to pay back what he had stolen from his victims (Luke 19:1-10). David complained about the injustice of having to restore what he had not stolen (Ps 69:4).

Betsy: So how did the idea of punishment change from repairing harm to adding harm?

Dan: That is a long story. The goal of Old Testament Law was to restore shalom—completeness, fulfillment, and wholeness. To restore right relationships between individuals, the community and God.[1] Beginning in the 11th century, for those of us whose legal processes came through England, the new goal became order by reducing crime. Shortly after the Norman invasion, the king tried to gain power over local rulers, called barons, by claiming jurisdiction over crime. The king decreed that anyone who had committed a crime had violated his peace. So, he took on himself the responsibility for catching and prosecuting the defendant. Over time, the government took on more and more responsibility for preserving order, which changed the way we see crime from hurting other people to breaking the king’s peace.

Then, over time, the idea of punishment also changed from repairing harm to inflicting comparable harm on the offender. Eventually, a new form of punishment was introduced, which was imprisonment.

Betsy: So, in our current justice system it is the offender against the state? The victim is not represented?

Dan: Yes. Criminal justice is now based on the premise that the state, the government, has been wronged. Think about the implications: the offender knows they broke into someone’s house, for example. But then they go to court before a judge they have never met and told that they face a substantial prison sentence. They get a lawyer who tells them not to say anything that might incriminate them. The victim, meanwhile, may never come to court unless the prosecutor needs their testimony to get a conviction. The victim and offender never talk to each other. 

A restorative intervention could not be more different. Rather than being punished for breaking an abstract code, the offender is confronted with the harm they caused to a real-life victim. Restorative justice is relational. In fact, restorative programs invite the victim and the offender to meet. They may bring family and friends with them if they wish. There is always a trained facilitator there as well. The offender must be willing to admit guilt and make amends. The victim explains how the offender’s actions have hurt them. The offender apologizes and tries to answer any questions the victim has. “Why me? Why did it happen? Why did you do what you did during the crime?” The victim may be curious about the offender’s motivation which often moves into conversation about the offender’s life. 

Often a degree of empathy between them begins to emerge. Offenders are often surprised to hear how their crime affected the victims. 

Betsy: What has the impact been of this kind of work? Are recidivism (repeat offending) rates lowered?

Dan: Yes, and even when it does not happen, it does not get worse. The victim gets answers they needed to heal and receives financial restitution. 

We have found that offenders are changed by the connection with victims. Prison Fellowship International developed a victim impact program many years ago. It was tested in New Zealand and England. Prison psychologists in New Zealand were surprised to see that prisoners who had been resistant to treatment programs started to sign up for them after taking this 12-week program. Researchers in England found that prisoners had “increased empathy for their victim, greater awareness of the harm they had caused victims and a reduced expectation that they will commit new crimes in the future.”1

We all have ideas about what should happen when someone commits a crime. Most of us are used to thinking that crime should be followed by punishment, and the result is an enormous, expensive system that does not work. The U.S. now has 2.5 million prisoners. When I started working, 37 years ago, that number was about 10% of that. We may have more criminals now, but not ten times as many. And yet so many more people are being locked up. 

Imagine a criminal justice system that is not crime and punishment based, but crime and repair based instead. We would not send anyone to prison unless they posed a real threat to community safety. The cost of incarcerating prisoners is roughly what it costs to send someone to Harvard. Restorative justice is not only much less expensive, it works better. 

Betsy: I understand that RJ is being used all over the world, even in schools. 

Dan: Yes, particularly with children up to 12th grade, but also at colleges and universities. These are settings in which the educators have decided that even conflict can be an occasion to learn. Students learn that talking together helps them understand what is happening and builds compassion; “Replacing disciplinary processes with restorative processes allows us to see what can happen when a culture changes.”1

Betsy: I am also wondering about Rwanda. That was so horrific, one ethnic group slaughtering another. Can you tell me what happened?

Dan: The 1994 genocide started when members of the Hutu tribe (about 90% of the population in Rwanda) began killing their Tutsi neighbors. The country’s president, a Hutu, had been killed but it was not clear who had done it. Urged on by government radio broadcasts, the Hutu majority became convinced that the Tutsis were a threat to their existence and a killing frenzy began. In one hundred days, 850,000 to one million people were killed, mostly Tutsis and moderate Hutus. I worked for Prison Fellowship International at the time and got involved in the work of Prison Fellowship Rwanda, one of our affiliates, after meeting with their board chairman, Bishop John Rucyahana, shortly after 9/11 at a conference in South Africa. At the time, the small country of Rwanda had a prison population of 115,000 people, all but 4,000 of whom were in prison for genocide-related crimes.

The government had built 14 massive prisons, each holding 7,000 -10,000 people. What had looked like a temporary expediency was starting, seven years later, to look like a permanent situation. Many lawyers and judges had been killed in the genocide. The international community initially refused to become involved in stopping the genocide and then locked up the accused ringleaders in a new, air-conditioned prison where they were given medical treatment, skilled lawyers, and investigators to help with their defense.

Western justice did not look like justice in Rwanda. Life outside was hard, and to Rwandans it seemed much harder than the prison and tribunals built to handle the ringleaders. I spoke to victims of the genocide who said they would like to receive the care the ringleaders were afforded. The government estimated that it would take over 225 years to try all the genocide prisoners using Western-style justice systems.

When I first visited the country, there was a great sense of urgency and desperation. The government was considering adapting a pre-colonial process, called gacaca (pronounced guh-cha-cha), to handle most of the prisoners. Gacaca courts were informal hearings conducted before leaders of the community, in which victims could accuse people of participating in the genocide. If that person admitted their participation and was willing to tell about what happened, who else was involved and where the bodies of people they had killed were buried, then they could be released with a sentence focused on helping victims.

The gacaca process had been used for centuries before the Europeans had arrived. The word means the grassy area in front of the chief’s house where people would come if they had complaints about something others had done to them. The chief wanted his people to be content so that his group would be strong and less vulnerable to attack from outsiders. So, his goal was to help victims negotiate a reasonable and satisfactory agreement with the offender.

The government decided to resurrect the gacaca courts to handle the cases of many of the accused people in their prisons. The problem was that prisoners had expected to be tried in Western courts where the usual posture of defendants is to deny any responsibility and make the government prove them guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Prisoners did not trust the government or the gacaca process and at the time I met Bishop Rucyahana, only 5,000 of the 115,000 prisoners had agreed to accept responsibility for what they had done.

Prison Fellowship Rwanda was active in all the genocide prisons in Rwanda. Its executive director was Deo Gashagaza, a Tutsi whose family had been killed in the genocide. God had appeared at his bedside one night and told him, to go into the prisons to preach the gospel. He told God, “I can’t go in until you give me a love for them, because otherwise I will want to kill them. They killed my family.” God gave him that love, so he began visiting prisons and over a period of several years had won the trust of the prisoners. 

I mentioned before that we had developed a victim awareness program called the Sycamore Tree Project,from the story of Zacchaeus. The program had been designed for groups of 12-16 people, but of course it needed to be changed to deal with hundreds of prisoners at a time. I made some modifications and had the draft workbooks translated into Kinyarwanda; the official language spoken by most Rwandans. I traveled back to Rwanda thinking we would be refining the program to make it more culturally sensitive so that they could begin implementing a month later. 
But when I got there, I discovered that they felt they had to use the course immediately because they were afraid of the threat of more violence. They thought the program would be good enough as it was. 

So, I trained 30 people to use the course in the genocide prisons, and they began rolling the program out the following week. One question was what to call the program. There are no Sycamore Trees in Rwanda, so Bishop John suggested we call it the Umuvumu Tree Project after a similar tree that was revered in Rwanda. The Umuvumu tree has a small fig-like fruit, like the sycamore tree. The shade protects the local community when they meet during the day. It is here that Rwandan people have historically gathered to share opinions and concerns and discuss how to strengthen their society. One other trait was important: if the tree were wounded by chopping off branches, for example, it would drop thin tendrils on the opposite side which left untended would turn into new branches. But if harvested, the tendrils could be woven into a soft, pliable cloth. Because of their rarity, only kings wore robes made of Umuvumu cloth. So, they called the program the Umuvumu Tree Project, named for a tree that provided shade for conversation and whose wounds could be worked into beautiful robes.

Betsy: So, you started with those who were willing. The perpetrators admitted their guilt and the families of those who were murdered got to say how it impacted them?

Dan: Yes, it was so critical that the prisoners admitted what they had done when accused by victims. Thanks to Prison Fellowship Rwanda’s efforts, in six months the number of people who were willing to admit guilt had increased from 5,000 to 35,000. 

Betsy: There are several things I liked about your model. RJ rewards people for taking responsibility and admitting to what they did. It gives them an opportunity to come clean and make amends, as well as be willing to hear the impact they had on the victim. The other thing I like about this model, is that it creates empathy on both sides. The model is being used in schools now too, and with youth offenders. Do you think the RJ model could help us with racial injustice?

Dan: I have hope for the USA. Since the death of George Floyd, there has been a shift in our sense of justice. Will it stay that way? I do not know.

Slavery in the Bible was so different from chattel slavery in the US. In biblical times slavery was more like indentured servitude, which lasted for a defined period (3-7 years) and left the slave with usable skills. Chattel slavery, on the other hand, meant you were the property of another person. Your body and your work were owned by another person. After the Civil War, southern states adopted Jim Crow laws as a way of continuing to suppress the now freed slaves. The civil rights movement exposed the 100 years of oppression, but the same political parties that ended the worst extremes of Jim Crow became fixated on increasing prison sentences to preserve law and order. Those laws had the effect of incarcerating black and brown people disproportionately.

Betsy: Yes. That is a huge problem. I keep wondering if there is a way to get conversations going between races in the US. Would it be possible to gather in circles and share what we have experienced? I love the way RJ builds empathy. I have asked my friends who are people of color for their stories and it has helped me understand. Just as you began small in Rwanda . . . I wonder if we can begin with those who are willing. We have recently spent a great deal of time training our leaders in empathetic listening. It is amazing how good it feels to be heard without having the listener try to fix you.

Dan: Rwanda taught me that if we wait until we have a perfect solution to problems, we will wait forever. If God has called HCI to this work, he will open doors for healing conversations to begin. Jesus told us that peacemakers are blessed. In my experience, those who have witnessed them at work are blessed as well.[1] Dzur, Albert, “A Talk with Dan Van Ness, International Journal of Restorative Justice. Issue 2, 2018,

Elizabeth Stalcup is the founder and executive director of Healing Center International, a nonprofit that grew out of the healing ministry of Church of the Apostles, Fairfax, VA.