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1 Int'l J. Restorative Just. 450 (2018)
A Talk with Daniel Van Ness

handle is hein.journals/ijrestore1 and id is 460 raw text is: CONVERSATIONS ON RESTORATIVE JUSTICE A talk with Daniel Van Ness Albert Dzur Daniel Van Ness has worked in restorative justice for 35 years with Prison Fellow- ship (USA) and then with Prison Fellowship International. He led the design team that created the Sycamore Tree Project, a victim-offender programme currently in place in prisons in 34 countries. He helped draft the UN Declaration of Basic Prin- ciples on the Use of Restorative Justice Programmes in Criminal Matters, endorsed in 2002 by the Economic and Social Council. He is the author of Crime and its victims (Van Ness, 1986), Restoring justice: an introduction to restorative justice (5th ed.) (Van Ness & Strong, 2014) and co-editor of the Handbook of restorative justice (Johnstone & Van Ness, 2007). 1. Early beginnings: a street-level understanding of justice and the king's peace Dzur: From a personal standpoint, what made you think, 'working in restorative justice is the right path'? Was it a person, something you read, something you experienced? When did it click for you, exactly? Van Ness: When I graduated from college it was the tail end of the Vietnam War. Vocationally I was torn between two directions I might take. One was to go to seminary and become a pastor, which would have given me a deferment from military service. The other was to go to law school and become an attorney, which would not give me a deferment. I knew that if I went to seminary I would always wonder if I did that more to avoid going into the military than because God called me. So, I took a year off to see whether I would be drafted. As it turned out, my draft number was high enough that I was not conscripted. I had a little apartment in the Uptown neighbourhood in Chicago, which was a melting pot - a place where people arrived before dispersing throughout the city. Down the street was a federally funded free legal aid office. My interest in law stemmed from concern for people who did not have enough money to hire a typical lawyer and who consequently would end up going without legal represen- tation. So I volunteered as a receptionist at the legal aid office. It became clear to me after about two months that my calling was to practice law. The people I inter- viewed didn't have complicated cases; many were landlord-tenant cases in which they were being evicted illegally. For example, one landlord had recruited a motorcycle gang to break into the apartment, put all the tenant's possessions on * Albert Dzur is Professor, Departments of Political Science and Philosophy, Bowling Green State University, USA. Contact author: awdzur@bgsu.edu. 450 The International Journal of Restorative Justice 2018 vol. 1(3) pp. 450-463 doi: 10.5553/IJRJ/258908912018001003011

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