He has worked in restorative justice since 1989. His work has evolved over the years from a primary focus on victim offender mediation to seeking a comprehensive transformation of an entire local justice jurisdiction.  

In his present role, Eric provides coordination for the ongoing development and implementation of a holistic balanced and restorative justice focus for the work of the county’s juvenile court. This work has resulted in a number of highly successful programs and innovative practices, but the goal is to bring every practice and policy of the juvenile department into line with restorative principles. The result of this endeavor is that every victim and every offender being responded to in a restorative manner.  

Informed and active community participation, on a broad scale, is central to this endeavor and has involved engaging hundreds of community members, in dozens of community organizations, in the restorative activities of the court.

Prior to his present work in Clark County, Eric worked for ten years with the highly respected restorative justice agency in British Columbia, Fraser Region Community Justice Initiatives Association. His work there included supervising the victim offender mediation program, bringing a restorative focus to mediating community and workplace disputes, and developing and delivering restorative justice trainings across the U.S. and Canada.

Eric was, also, a co-developer of the pioneering program in Canada that facilitates contact between victims and offenders in serious and violent crimes (e.g. rape and murder). For five years, he was part of the team of three staff members providing services to many victims and offenders through this innovative resource. This highly successful program is now in its fifteenth year of providing service and is serving as a model to numerous such programs in the U.S. After moving to Clark County, which adjacent to the state of Oregon, Eric played a leading role in the development of Oregon’s serious and violent crime Facilitated Dialogue program.

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Eric continues to provide training and technical assistance to communities across the U.S.   This work is primarily focused on encouraging communities to see restorative justice as way of doing justice that is more far-reaching than a program, or even series of programs. His understanding of restorative justice envisions a holistic way of understanding crime that impacts a community’s response to every victim and every offender that is touched by the justice system.

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If restorative justice is going to be an effective and meaningful response to crime, and by that I mean a response that genuinely changes how justice is done in a community, then it must entail a vision and practice of justice that impacts the experience of every victim and every offender that is touched by the justice system in that community. 

Restorative justice is not only about individual victims, or individual offenders, choosing to engage in a specific restorative practice. Restorative justice must be an understanding and response to crime that is embraced, and carried out, by a community. Restorative justice must be a community’s decision about how it chooses to respond to everyone harmed by crime in the community, how every offender will be responded to, and what standards and expectations must be met for justice to be done. Justice is not restorative if it does not strengthen and increase the level of safety and well-being for the community. 

Restorative justice advocates must move beyond a limited view of RJ as some form of face-to-face encounter between select victims and select offenders. Restorative justice is a much more profound and comprehensive concept than any one specific practice. Its growth and acceptance has been hindered by such a restricted understanding.

  --Eric Gilman

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Reach Eric Gilman at  Eric.Gilman@clark.wa.gov

 

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