By Khulisa Crime Prevention Initiative. Johannesburg, South Africa: Mirage. 2006. 16 minutes.

Founded in 1997, Khulisa offers several educational and training programmes to help individuals grow in self-awareness and build stronger communities. These programmes are offered in a variety of settings, including schools and correctional facilities. They focus on crime prevention and offender reintegration.

Khulisa worked with government agencies and other NGOs to create a pilot peacemaking programme in Kwa-Zulu Natal known as the Phoenix Justice and Restoration Programme (Phoenix JARP). This video discusses the development of Phoenix JARP and its philosophies of restorative justice and alternative dispute resolution.

The Khulisa national director and the Phoenix JARP programme manage discuss the roots of peacemaking in South African culture and the inadequacy of courts to solve conflicts. They explain that they researched crime trends and court backlogs as they selected the location for the pilot. They were careful to train not only community mediators in restorative processes but prosecutors and other criminal justice officials as well.

The video not only describes the programme but also offers an excellent summary of restorative justice and the processes related to it. We are shown conflict or crime situations to set up an explanation of how restorative justice focuses on the harm done to individuals and seeks ways to heal that harm.

Using South African traditions, the video describes crime or conflict as breaking the circle of belonging. Restorative justice, then, is a way of repairing that circle.

The video then returns to the case studies to show individuals engaged in restorative processes – victim offender mediation, community conferencing, and peacemaking circles.

This 16-minute video is well done and offers an excellent introduction to the ideas of restorative justice from a non-western perspective.

For more information about the video, please contact Khulisa:

P O Box 412560
Craighall
2024
South Africa
Telephone: (011) 788 8237
Fax:(011) 788 3353
E-Mail: info@khulisaservices.co.za
Website: www.khulisaservices.co.za

Lynette Parker

June 2007