Beyond the Comfort Zone: A Guide to the Practice of Community Conferencing

by Susan Sharpe
Reviewed by Wayne Northey
Calgary Community Conferencing, 2003, 84 pp.

Susan Sharpe has become a widely respected name in Restorative Justice. With good reason. She has written already one of the finest resources available on Restorative Justice: Restorative Justice: a Vision for Healing and Change, has presented workshops widely, and headed government-sponsored Restorative Justice Colloquia. Susan writes compellingly lucid prose that renders every idea invitingly “potable”, like encountering a clear mountain stream.

In this publication called a “practice guide”, she does a close-up of a highly innovative “demonstration plot” of Restorative Justice that is widely considered the model in Canada for working with youth justice issues. “This guide concerns the practice of restorative justice. It is not a how-to manual for facilitating community conferences, and it does not attempt to survey the field of community conferencing practice. Its goal is to highlight some of the issues related to the practice of restorative justice and how they can play out in a program's operation (p. 6)”.

Calgary Community Conferencing is six years old. The envy of Canada, it is a challenging instance of multiple agency cooperation that has established a superb peacemaking response to youth crime in greater Calgary.

The thesis of the book's underlying philosophy is simply presented in the Introduction by dignified understatement: “Educational and justice systems in Western culture have traditionally relied on clear rules, consistent controls, and punishment to teach responsibility and to keep people safe. It turns out, though, that responsibility and safety are achieved more effectively through restorative interventions than through punitive ones (p. 5, italics added)”. Twenty years ago, a Canadian coalition against capital punishment posed an unanswerable question which, modified, underscores this observation: “Why harm people who harm people to teach people that harming people is wrong?” (One could wish the irrefutable logic of this on some of our world leaders…)

After a “Preface”, a statement of “The Heart of the Matter”, and an “Introduction”, the book is structured thus: “Chapter 1 – Laying the Foundation”, “Chapter 2 – Developing the Framework”, “Chapter 3 – Strengthening the Facilitation Team”, and “Chapter 4 – Building on the Foundation”.

The packaging of the book is very reader-friendly: spiral binding, horizontal 8.5 by 11 inch layout, and sidebars replete with excellent brief quotes and quips. There are also sprinkled throughout several highlighted pages given to a variety of issues raised, for instance of “Serious Harm vs. Serious Crime”, p. 28, and “The Role of Scripts”. These are invariably pertinent and helpful.

Susan Sharpe cites the recent literature well, and is understatedly modest about the guide's potential use (it should be widely accessed!). She believes Calgary Community Conferencing (CCC) “offers many opportunities for people to move beyond their comfort zones”. And she says of this publication, “This depiction of CCC's history, practice, and evolution illustrates that opportunity on the individual, organizational, and systemic levels (p. 81).”

The guide deserves wide dissemination. Read in conjunction with accessing other resources on CCC's website (www.calgarycommunityconferencing.com), it is a highly inspirational and informative impetus to develop such initiatives in every major city in Canada – and beyond. One can always hope and dream…

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