Leslie Kobayashi’s scientific contributions

In 2015 the United States District Court for the District of Hawai‘i Pretrial Services office collaborated with Hawai’i Friends of Restorative Justice (HFRJ), a small Honolulu non-profit, to provide and measure the outcomes of a reentry planning circle process for incarcerated individuals either facing a federal prison sentence or who had been sentenced to federal prison. In 2017 the pilot was expanded to individuals on probation under the court’s jurisdiction. The reentry planning circle model was developed in 2004 by HFRJ. The process is grounded in public health learning principles and provides both solution-focused and restorative justice approaches. HFRJ has provided over 168 circles that 749 people have participated in including 19 Hawai‘i federal court defendants along with 80 of their loved ones, pretrial services and probation office representatives. The process has been shown to increase healing for children whose incarcerated parents had circles, and an independent evaluation that controlled for self-selection, also showed the circles reduce recidivism. The process has been replicated in whole or part in other states and countries. This paper uses a case the authors worked on to examine the reentry planning process and the pilot project.

Parole, probation, and prison supervise people convicted of crimes until most are released back into the community. According to Braithwaite & Mugford, 1994, and Maruna 2011, reintegration rituals may be vital for the rehabilitation of people who engage in criminal behavior. Just as the rituals of criminal trials confirm the wrongfulness of behavior, rituals celebrating the success of good behavior confirm one’s positive endeavors, which may promote desistance and law abiding behavior. This chapter examines Hawai’i’s experiments with rituals celebrating people’s strengths and efforts in completing parole and incarcerated women who have completed a 12-week restorative justice prison program since 2010. The reintegration rituals are based on restorative justice and therapeutic jurisprudence, and apply elements of Collins’s interaction ritual theory.