The process starts with getting in touch with folks in your local juvenile legal system departments and will include many meetings in order to establish shared understanding of the program's goals and principles.
Our intention in this section is to equip you with the resources, tools, and wisdom you’ll need to get a meeting with your local district attorney or head of the juvenile charging unit. It’s important that they learn from you and talk through what implementing RJD could look like in your community. Moreover, you will need their buy-in as a primary source of receiving cases that would most likely enter the juvenile legal system without your program, and also, ultimately, for making sure nothing that happens in restorative processes can used in a court of law.
While this step focuses on establishing a referral relationship with your local district attorney or head of your juvenile charging unit, we encourage you to think expansively about additional referral sources. Is there a local community based service provider that’s interested in sending cases to your program? Establishing an additional referral source will provide greater reach and greater sustainability for your program.
Of the many meetings with key actors in the juvenile legal system you’ll have in the process of starting an RJD program, the district attorney’s office (DAO) is one of the most important. The idea of getting in touch with the DAO might initially feel intimidating, but you can do this in many different ways. The easiest and quickest way is to lean on existing relationships that you or someone you know already have with criminal or juvenile legal system people. These existing relationships do not have to be with someone working in the DAO—but if they are, that’s great! Having your foot in the door with anyone in the system is beneficial and can expedite this initial phase.
If you don’t have existing relationships with anyone in the system, don’t fret! Previous sections have offered tools you can utilize for this exact scenario. Take a look at your System Partner & County Leadership Landscape, Power Map, and System Partner Profile that you created in Step 2B: Community Held. Using those resources, you can begin to identify potential allies in the system who you can start connecting with. Is there a local youth or criminal justice reform workgroup? Try to start with someone who can help you make connections that will lead you to the DAO.
Once you’ve identified some potential allies in the system and made connections, begin developing a foundation of shared understandings, values, and vision between all of you and the RJD program. The system partner profiles you created can be very helpful for this. They should detail the issues these people care about, and commitments or intentions they made to the public during their campaign or while in office. If a legal system representative hasn’t explicitly voiced interest in restorative justice or even diversion for young people, but has been very vocal about supporting survivors, that’s an in for you! When reaching out to that person, be sure to emphasize RJD’s orientation around survivors and their self-identified needs. The RJD Program Overview and Elements below can be a helpful resource for figuring out how to play to both the strengths of the program and system folks’ interests.
Use your system partner profiles to find people’s contact information once you feel ready. Keep in mind that this first contact, whether it’s by email or phone, shouldn’t be too information heavy. Your goal in this initial contact should be to schedule a face-to-face meeting where you can share more information in-person.You can always send follow-up supplemental documents after you all meet.
In order to get to an in-person meeting, your email or phone call should:
Based on our experience working with legal system actors, we’ve found these three points about RJD are the most compelling to them:
We detail these three main points in more depth in Talking Points for Meeting with System Partners, above. Familiarize yourself with these talking points prior to making initial contact. Reference the points when reaching out to folks while also knowing that you can and should discuss them more in detail once you meet in person. Additionally, watch the video below of sujatha baliga speaking with District Attorney Larry Krasner for a look into how these talking points can be utilized in real time.
Meeting in person is always preferred, especially during these initial stages of the process when you are focusing on building relationships and trust with folks in the system. It’s also worth keeping in mind that each person you meet with is a human being deserving of compassion and care. While your goal is to meet with your local DA, you don’t want anyone you meet with beforehand to feel used or any less important. Moreover, almost everyone ultimately plays a role, small or large, in the rollout and sustainability of RJD in your county. The more everyone feels heard and valued, the more care they will put into ensuring the success of the program.
Be patient with this process! System folks may not be so quick to get back to your email or return your phone call. That doesn’t mean they won’t get back to you eventually. Try reaching out to multiple people at the same time to increase your odds of getting a response. Additionally, once you start this networking process, you most likely will hold the same or very similar conversations with many different people, over and over and over again. Just remember that even if the conversations seem repetitive and tedious to you, this information is probably brand new to whoever you’re talking to and could be incredibly exciting or potentially difficult for them to grasp. To the best of your ability, try to approach each new conversation or interaction with enthusiasm and care.
Congratulations! You have a meeting scheduled with a point of contact who works in, or is connected to, your local criminal or juvenile legal system. Before your meeting, make sure you know exactly who will attend, the length of the meeting, how much time you need to talk and present, the type of meeting, and your goals for the meeting. Using the Meeting Agendas and Activities resource below, you can start to gain insight into the different types of meetings you may experience, what to prepare beforehand, and what resources to bring to each meeting.
This resource includes important tips and strategies for creating agendas when meeting with system partners, such as:
Additionally, this resource provides sample agendas for the following types of meetings you may have with system partners:
In this initial phase of connecting with system folks, you will be living in the “introductory or relationship building meetings” and sometimes (most likely later on) in the “presentation or informative meetings” arena. Both are extremely important and extremely different, so make sure you know which type of meeting you’re walking into! After each meeting, find out if there are additional people you can reach out to, such as others who would be interested in supporting RJD and have more direct relationships with the DAO.
Ultimately, every single person you will talk to has either been elected or reports to someone who was elected to serve and represent the people of your county. Whether or not you agree with their approach, those who work directly in the criminal or juvenile legal field have been tasked with ensuring the safety of everyone in your county. In asking for RJD, you’re effectively asking these officials to relinquish a part of their responsibilities to a community-based organization. It’s a dance—you want to demonstrate respect for their important role in their county, while also kindly and compassionately showing them a different way to support youth and people harmed.
A resource we’ve found to be really helpful for this framework is the 21 Principles for the 21st Century Prosecutor released by Fair and Just Prosecution (FJP). FJP is a network of newly elected local prosecutors “committed to promoting a justice system grounded in fairness, equity, compassion, and fiscal responsibility.” Using real examples and experiences from innovative prosecutors across the nation, this report offers prosecutors practical steps to transform their office and county. We strongly encourage taking a look at this report and FJP in general, as they can be useful reference points and beacons of insight when thinking about how to frame and engage in conversations with system partners. Accountability and Repair: The Prosecutor’s Case for Restorative Justice, written by FJP’s Founder and Executive Director, Miriam Krinsky, and FJP’s Research and Policy Associate, Taylor Phares, provides additional insight into what prosecutors find particularly persuasive about restorative justice.
This section of the toolkit has several additional resources that will be helpful for you to read when preparing for meetings with system partners and to distribute to system partners as you continue to garner trust and interest in RJD. Familiarize yourself with them and trust your instincts for when it feels right and necessary to share and utilize each resource, while keeping in mind that folks probably won’t read through every single thing. So rather than sending them all at once, pick and choose which ones to highlight at different stages of the process. Below are brief snapshots of the remaining resources this section has to offer:
Coming to your meetings with folders of resources is always a nice thing to do. Your folders should contain a mix of RJD resources and resources about your organization, your team, and you specifically! Be sure to slip your business cards in there as well. Even if you get a headcount of everyone who will be in the meeting or presentation, it’s always useful to bring extra materials just in case. Additionally, we’ve found it useful to hand the folders out after the content portion of our meeting or presentation was over. We’ve found that doing it this way ensures you have folks’ full attention while you are speaking rather than tempting them to rustle and read through all the incredible resources you provided.
After any meeting you have, even if it’s incredibly brief and doesn’t lead you any closer to the DAO, it’s important to write a follow-up. These follow-up emails are a good opportunity for you to thank your new connections again for their time and energy, send them soft copies of any resources you already provided and any additional resources that may be helpful or relevant to your discussion, and gently remind folks of who they promised to connect you with.
Building relationship, trust, and a deeper understanding of what an RJD program can offer your community is a crucial piece of this process and makes space for your DAO to express any type of interest or buy-in in this program. Once that has happened, you’ll be able to dive deeper into what this program will actually look like in terms of case types, referral process, eligibility criteria, etc. Head on over to Step 2F: Referring Cases to gain a deeper understanding of how to navigate the next steps of implementation.
After a DA received an email from the presiding judge of the juvenile division asking him to come learn about restorative justice, he thought to himself, “Here we go again, everyone thinks they know better than we do…” Out of respect for the judge and a sense of duty and protocol, he replied to the email saying that he would attend. During that first meeting, he was intrigued by the notion that youth would be encouraged to take responsibility for the harm they caused. In the weeks that followed, he was impressed that the restorative justice advocates reached out to meet with him individually and to ask him questions like: What about his current job was and wasn’t working for him? What he would need to be able to support the development of an RJD program? He admitted he was tired of speaking with “angry, dissatisfied crime victims,” and he was impressed with the idea that RJD involved youth being directly accountable to survivors’ self-identified needs.
In those initial conversations, the presiding judge of the juvenile division quickly handed over facilitation of the meeting to local CBO staff who were grounded in restorative justice practice and facilitation. These meetings gave people the opportunity to share their frustrations with the current system of justice, to find shared strengths and interests, and to stand on common ground. Often the DA and the public defender would joke that this was the only meeting in which they’d sit next to one another.
Because many attendees expressed appreciation for these meetings, the judge convened a county-wide restorative justice task force, which met monthly. The DA attended all of these meetings, eventually attended multiple restorative justice trainings, and read foundational texts about restorative justice. This DA began regularly saying that the juvenile legal system was out of date and generated poor outcomes, and that he preferred community members to take the lead on helping youth in conflict with the law. He cared deeply about people harmed and saw that the criminal legal system failed to attend to their needs the way restorative justice processes did. It took him a while, but when he truly understood the philosophy and practice of restorative justice, he became a champion for it.
In one jurisdiction, the creation of a pre-charge felony diversion program for youth required the approval of the chief of probation. He was initially opposed to the idea that any child in conflict with the law could resolve the harm without probation supervision. In the first meeting to discuss the possibility of a pre-charge RJD program, he made it very clear that he had had negative experiences with restorative justice trainings in the past (“I’ve been on the RJ merry-go-round before”). The RJD advocates didn’t take this as a closed door. Instead, they met with him several times, allowing him to vent about the failures of decades of “newfangled” approaches to addressing youth crime, before moving into helping him see why the proposed approach to RJD attended to many of the things he was legitimately angry about. While he never became a “true believer,” these conversations led to him getting out of the way of the program proceeding without probation supervision.
Resource: RJD Program Overview & Elements
Resource: Potential RJD Funders
Resource: Talking Points for Meeting with System Partners
Resource: Guide to System Partner Meeting Agendas and Activities
Resource: Case & Program Eligibility Recommendations
Resource: 4-year RJD Program Growth
Template: Two-Way Expectations of CBO/SP
READ FJP’s 21 Principles For The 21st Century Prosecutor report
ESTABLISH CONTACT with someone in the criminal and/or legal system
PRESENT RJD 101 powerpoint to potential system partners
ESTABLISH CLARITY and UNDERSTANDING of roles and expectations between all potential system partners and CBO
RECEIVE informal buy in from DAO
