Restorative Justice Lab at UNA
The Restorative Justice Lab is a collaborative and interdisciplinary hub for rethinking justice through community-building, mutual aid, and restorative practices that prevent, reduce, and transform harm. Our work is generated from and around prisons in Alabama.
We currently offer a number of programs in Alabama prison facilities, including the following:
Restorative Justice Program (Limestone CF)
This interdisciplinary undergraduate program is delivered through the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program model at Limestone CF and is credit-bearing for all students. Coursework includes six classes that span criminal justice, English, psychology, and sociology. The curriculum is designed to prepare students to contribute to conflict resolution, community-building, and transformative justice movements.
Check out our Restorative Justice newsletter, composed and formatted by Inside students at Limestone CF, to follow our work!
RJ 102: Circles (Tutwiler CF)
This series of six workshops is delivered via Zoom in partnership with AIM and is an applied continuation of RJ 101: Principles of Restorative Justice. Participants learn and apply the basics of circle structures while learning about the indigenous history of circle processes. We practice problem-solving, consensus-building, healing, and listening circles through a trauma-informed lens.
Foundations of Reading and Writing Correspondence Course (Limestone CF, Holman CF)
This zero-credit college preparatory class introduces students to the fundamentals of critical reading, thinking, and writing through a series of guided readings, prompts, and exercises over 12 packets. It is designed for a range of learners and includes expository, narrative, and creative writing prompts that can be completed individually or in group settings with guided questions. Each participant also receives a dictionary to support their exploratory, vocabulary-building work in the packets.
The Restorative Justice Lab also supports a number of related projects:
Alabama Death Row Archive (Collier Library, Special Collections, UNA)
This living digital archive contains artifacts– documents, manuscripts, moratorium efforts, photographs, and audio files– related to the policy and practice of capital punishment in Alabama, centering the experiences and voices of people on death row.
Southern Higher Education in Prison Collective
The Restorative Justice Lab is a proud member of the Southern Higher Education in Prison Collective, a network of organizations dedicated to the post-secondary educational aspirations of incarcerated individuals in the U.S. South.
Donate to Inside-Out
You can make a tax-deductible donation to the Inside-Out program here:
https://www.givecampus.com/mpisn2?designation=insideoutprisonexchangeprogram&
Contact RJL@UNA
If you are interested in becoming involved with any of these projects, please contact Katie Owens-Murphy at kowensmurphy@una.edu.