This chapter presents an overview of the restorative justice movement in the twenty-first century. Restorative justice, on the other hand, offers a very different way of understanding and responding to crime. Instead of viewing the state as the primary victim of criminal acts and placing victims, offenders, and the community in passive roles, restorative justice recognizes crime as being directed against individual people. The values of restorative justice are also deeply rooted in the ancient principles of Judeo-Christian culture. A small and scattered group of community activists, justice system personnel, and a few scholars began to advocate, often independently of each other, for the implementation of restorative justice principles and a practice called victim-offender reconciliation (VORP) during the mid to late 1970s. Some proponents are hopeful that a restorative justice framework can be used to foster systemic change. Facilitation of restorative justice dialogues rests on the use of humanistic mediation.

This chapter describes some of the recent restorative justice innovations and research that substantiates their usefulness. It explores developments in the conceptualization of restorative justice based on emergence of new practices and reasons for the effectiveness of restorative justice as a movement and restorative dialogue as application. Chaos theory offers a better way to view the coincidental timeliness of the emergence of restorative justice as a deeper way of dealing with human conflict. The chapter reviews restorative justice practices that have opened up areas for future growth. Those practices include the use of restorative practices for student misconduct in institutions of higher education, the establishment of surrogate dialogue programs in prison settings between unrelated crime victims and offenders. They also include the creation of restorative justice initiatives for domestic violence and the development of methods for engagement between crime victims and members of defense teams who represent the accused offender.

The Myers–Briggs type indicator (MBTI) was designed to help people understand themselves and others by helping them appreciate the diverse strengths of different personality types. It has been widely used in counseling as well as business to work on team building and relationships. There is, therefore, room for using this assessment within the field of student affairs to help build teams and groups both for professionals in the field and for students. This chapter discusses the basic information about the MBTI and implications for student affairs. The instrument is considered as a personality assessment for normal individuals designed to assess personality type. The MBTI offers strength-based guidance in every realm of living concerning individual growth to interpersonal relationships, in academic matters to spiritual terrains. From the office of the president to the chaplain, the MBTI is a useful and effective tool on a college campus.

This chapter reviews the questions that are frequently asked in solution-focused therapy (SFT) and how they can be used with couples. It discusses the miracle question, the scaling question, and exception-finding questions, many of which have been written about extensively over the years. Solution-focused questions spring from a therapist’s curiosity curiosity is the foundation of solution building. Deciding which partner to question at a particular moment in the session is an important skill for a couple’s counselor. Solution building is a process of co-constructing a conversation between the couple and the therapist, and all three must take their turn in the conversation. Third-person questions are also a powerful way to bring a couple’s entire support system into the session. Presumptive language is very important in developing solution-building questions. Some questions are crafted to create a picture of the preferred future and to fill it with as many details as possible.

Eliciting a description of a couple’s ideal future without getting sucked into the problem story is one of the hardest tasks in solution-focused therapy. In order to stick to a description of the “future” a therapist must have the discipline to refrain from following the client’s lead toward the use of “problem language”. The process of gathering details about a preferred future is therapeutic in itself. Often nothing more needs to happen for the couple to make significant and lasting changes in their lives and in their relationship, and the more thorough their description of their future, the more good it’s likely to do. The role of a solution-focused marriage counselor is to remind couples of the process that was in play when they first fell in love, and what skills each partner brought to the relationship in its early days.

This chapter lays the foundation for facilitative leadership from the unique social work perspective. Social work’s Code of Ethics and social work practice principles contribute to the value-based leadership that is part of the facilitative leader’s core. Among the important expectations of social work leadership are cultural sensitivity and competence. Five discussion areas have been selected as essential to facilitative leadership from a social work perspective: inclusion, strengths-based leadership, power and the difference between power over and power with, oppression and social justice, and the elusive but critically important concept of empowerment. There are different types of power and power relationships such as productive power and destructive power. Being conscious of privilege and oppression are precursors to understanding social injustice and working toward social justice. The social work program identifies social justice as a professional obligation of social workers to attempt to improve the quality of all people’s lives.

Students may enter higher education with a strong set of ideals, firm models of career options, and certain confidence in their ultimate direction; however, it is not uncommon for students to begin college unprepared for life after graduation, let alone housing assignments and first semester coursework. This chapter focuses on the difficulties surrounding the major choice, the factors that influence decision making, career theories in student affairs, and campus and community resources available to assist students in gathering important data about their major and career choices. Selecting a college major and making career decisions are not easy, and require self-knowledge, self-examination, and research on what is available in the world of work. Essential to student success is the ability of student affairs professionals to accurately recognize when students are struggling and make an appropriate referral for career counseling, academic support services, or personal counseling.

This chapter introduces the theoretical basis for restorative justice (RJ). It assesses the empirical evidence for RJ programs, and explores the challenges and opportunities associated with applying core competencies. The chapter describes competencies of specific interest which include: engaging diversity and difference in practice, and engaging with individuals, families, groups, organizations, and communities. It also discusses skills essential to the success of RJ which include supporting processes that value the experiences of people associated with a crime or harm. The chapter suggests the importance of practical and context-specific knowledge and skills relevant when individuals, families, groups, organizations, and communities find themselves in conflict and require support. Programs that rely upon restorative principles have been used at a variety of points in the criminal justice process. The chapter discusses a practice, a family group conference, which was first developed in New Zealand involving social workers considerably.

This chapter describes the various roles and functions of the treatment program or clinical management staff in the residential facility. It characterizes the roles of support staff and agency personnel. Teachers, physicians, nurses, psychologists, social workers, lawyers, and accountants in the TC ply their professions in the usual way. The relationship between staff and peer roles is rooted in the evolution of the Therapeutic Community (TC). In the TC approach, the role of staff is complex and can be contrasted with that of mental health and human service providers in other settings. An array of staff activities underscores the distinctively humanistic focus of the TC. The chapter describes how primary clinical staff in the treatment program supervise the daily activities of the peer community through their interrelated roles of facilitator, counselor, community manager, and rational authority. Other staff provide educational, vocational, legal, medical, and facility support services.