Restorative Justice Unit Training More Facilitators to Strengthen Programme Delivery

The Restorative Justice Unit (RJU) in the Ministry of Justice is training more restorative justice (RJ) facilitators as part of efforts to strengthen the delivery of RJ services to Jamaicans.

These facilitators are being prepared to lead the conferences, which are key tools in the RJ process. These conferences are structured meetings involving offenders, victims, families and friends of the parties involved in the conflict, as well as community members.

During the sessions, participants address the conflict, its consequences and decide how best to repair the harm. The unit is aiming to complete 3,200 RJ conferences during this fiscal year.

“As you can imagine, with the thousands of conferences and our staff of around 36 full-time workers at the RJ centres, we rely very heavily on the facilitators,” Restorative Justice Coordinator, Andriene Lindsay, told JIS News.

“So we are engaging [persons] and we have seen several applications. Now we are training facilitators for about six to eight weeks. They will be fully trained to assist and support us in delivering RJ conferences,” she added.

The RJU will also be working to train community members across the island in RJ practices.

Ms. Lindsay said that the objective is to equip persons “to be able to deal with community conflicts and [to use RJ] as a preventative measure as well. We have established RJ centres across the island. We really wanted to make sure communities were aware of RJ and to be able to reach out to us before conflicts get to the stage of violence and crime across communities”.

Also, for the period 2021/2022, the unit is aiming to complete 1,280 RJ sensitisation sessions with 14,080 beneficiaries.

Work is also expected to continue in providing training in RJ practices for school administrators.

“That’s a critical relationship,” Ms. Lindsay told JIS News. “We are looking to train, this year, at least 200 school administrators across the island. We’ve kept the numbers low this year because although we have the capacity to train more, we recognise that school is under quite a bit of transformation due to COVID-19. We want them to proceed without conflict but we don’t want to put pressure on our school administrators,” she said.

Approximately 750 Department of Correctional Services (DCS) officers will also be trained.

With all 18 centres operational, one in every parish and six in Kingston and St. Andrew, Ms. Lindsay reiterated the value of the work of the RJU in facilitating healing from conflicts.

“We want to be sure we play our part in making Jamaica a safer, more secure, cohesive and just society for one and all. Earlier this year, we reopened the August Town centre, which we had closed due to fire some years ago and, so far, that has been doing very well. Overall, we want people to be able to feel safe to attend the conferences at the centres and to be able to benefit from them,” Ms. Lindsay said.