Stephanie Haider, a restorative justice practitioner for over twenty years, is currently the Coordinator for the Victim Restoration Program in Minnesota’s Dakota County Community Corrections.  This office emphasizes victim and community involvement and gears its programs toward improving accountability and offenders' competencies.

Through her early work as a juvenile probation officer, Stephanie learned the value of bringing young offenders face-to-face with the victims of their crimes.  She worked for one of the first mediation program for juvenile offenders in the country. The success of that program led not only to introduction of numerous other strategies in Dakota County but also to a statewide focus on providing opportunities for victims to be heard and offenders to be held accountable to those they have harmed.

Stephanie’s professional memberships, activities, and awards include:

• Faculty member of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges
  
• Founding member of the advisory council for the Restorative Justice Initiative at the Minnesota Department of Corrections
  
• Board member for the Minnesota Restorative Services Coalition
  
• The Balanced and Restorative Justice (BARJ) Project
• Trainer for the Office for Victims of Crime
  
• Trainer at many national conferences such as the American Probation and Parole Association and the International Victim Offender Mediation Association as well as for many city and state organizations
  
• Consultant and trainer recently for the Japanese government on restorative justice and victim-sensitive programming for probation and, especially, in juvenile corrections
•  1999 Distinguished Service award from the Minnesota Department of Crime Victim Services.   

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Important Idea

Working inside the juvenile justice system with hundreds of young offenders and crime victims over the past thirty years has given me these insights on the juvenile justice system:

• In the traditionally retributive system, youth do not participate in the justice process; they merely observe it. 

• They do not show full responsibility for their actions because they are not given that responsibility.

• They do not view their punishment as justified because they do not see that their offending behavior was unjustified.

• They do not focus on those whom they victimize because the victim has no focus in the system. 

• They do not become contributing members of the community just because their community chastises them. 

• They do not give of themselves because there is no expectation for them to do so.

In a restorative justice system, the emphasis is on personal empowerment and positive change.  Offenders are expected to

• be actively responsible 
  
• learn the impact of their behavior
  
• restore the victim
•  give of themselves
  
• become contributing members of their community.  

I firmly believe that by evolving our justice system toward using restorative processes with offenders we will then reciprocally benefit crime victims and the communities in which we all share.

-- Stephanie Haider

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Leading Edge.  Stephanie was a member of a national team of professionals who wrote and developed a curriculum for the National Institute of Corrections titled Facilitating Restorative Group Conferences . She has been one of the principal national trainers for this curriculum. Stephanie also co-developed a video produced by Taproot Productions that illustrates the value of Group Conferencing as a means of conflict resolution in educational settings.

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Reach Stephanie Haider at
stephanie.haider@co.dakota.mn.us.

Bibliography