Relational Justice was our launch project building on the book Relational Justice: repairing the breach. In his foreword Lord Woolf described relational justice as “a radical new approach about which anyone with any concern about our criminal justice system needs to be aware.”
The core idea was that justice is fundamentally a relational idea, repairing the relationships broken by crime (between victim and offender, and between offender and society). It also recognises both the relational causes of crime, and the need for relationships within the justice system to be capable of achieving its goals.
As one judge noted in our Relational Justice bulletin: [link] “It is an illusion to fancy that an organisation that is internally unrelational can deliver an effective relational service.”
Following on from the Relational Justice book, we worked with the Scottish Prison Service to develop our first relational audit tools which we went on to use in healthcare, business and schools.