mission Statement
Nothing touches and speaks to the human heart more profoundly than stories. Stories have the unique ability to communicate pertinent, relevant truths about the human experience. Life itself ias a narrative, often scared and dotted with tragedy, trama, crisis and destruction, and the best stories tell how someone experienced, coped, survived and championed its ironies, predicaments and circumstances.
The human imagination thrives on stories. Some narratives are true, some are fantasy and myth, but all coherent stories strike a pose in the human heart. Good stories convey sentiments that are often more real than our own lives. We are drawn to the story because we seek in the narrative a reality that our hearts intuitively recognize and know, and which our own lives may be lacking. Stories give our lives meaning by presenting ideals and sentiments that quicken the heart, reminding us of what it means and how it feels to be alive.
No narrative moves us more than the Redemption Story. This Story tells of how a life can be ravished, destined for destruction, and then ultimately restored. The deepest of human ideals and sentiments are stroked by stories of redemption. Very few lives have lilly-white pasts. Without the elements of redemption, our lives would be missing much of the meaning and reason we have to live.
The Restorative Justice Network was founded as a forum to tell the redemption story. Prison is the best place to find such a story. The human heart is born to soar free, so the redemption story is nowhere more pronounced that in the circumstances of captivity. The depth of destruction and ruin that leads to prison provides the best potential for this story. The redemption story gives us the only hope and a solution to the dilemmas of suffering and crime.
The Restorative Justice Network exists to both lobby the legislature and SCDC, promote restorative rather than retributive justice, provide a model for a comprehensive rehabilitation program, organize a network of community-based service providers to effectively funnel faith-based services, resources, and aid to inmates during their incarceration, in their transition, and as a part of their aftercare in an effective way that promotes in the community a philosophy of restorative justice.
The Restorative Justice Network is a private, faith-based organization dedicated and committed to promoting a restorative philosophy of Justice in public policy, society at large and the lives of individuals by educating, facilitating and initiating the restorative approach. The Restorative Justice Network pools the resources of various agencies, organizations and individuals to provide services and support aimed at restoring those whose lives have been impacted by crime. We are “buying back people’s dignity by investing in their lives.”
The Restorative Justice Network is exploring new and time-tested strategies for solving the problems associated with crime and vengeance. The Restorative Justice Network is an organic conglomerate of ministries, agencies and non-profit organizations in South Carolina who work together, by networking and providing their respective services, resources and aid to restore lives ruined by crime, providing the opportunities necessary for reformed and promising offenders to successfully transition back into their communities as productive, law-abiding citizens, and promoting a restorative philosophy of justice in public policy, society and the lives of individuals.
The purpose of the RJN is to provide and facilitate comprehensive programming and opportunities within the Justice System for the reform and restoration of offenders. The RJN also provides organizational coordination, structure, support, grants and scholarships, and a non-profit umbrella to independent ministries, organizations, and community service providers to assist them in reaching their target audience. The Restorative Justice Network is one of the Country’s most noble and innovative movements. Proclaiming the Wisdom of God through Restorative Justice, because restoration is in the best interest of everyone.
The Restorative Justice Network has a three-part emphasis:
1. Organize, help individual ministries cater their services to the Network model, effectively network members and organizations (through web site, updated ministries bios/contact info).
2. Programming, to population that touches the lives of those incarcerated by offering services, resources, and aid inside the fences, in transition, and after their release.
3. Promote, influence, and affect the culture with the Restorative philosophy of Justice by lobbying and engaging the government, community at-large, public policy and private lives.