The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives

by Dashka Slater

“Our system is focused on blame and punishment and not on healing and learning,” says Lauren Abramson, who founded the Community Conferencing Center in Baltimore, Maryland, one of the oldest and most widely respected RJ programs in the nation. “There’s a different way to deliver justice that’s been proven in many cases to be more socially effective and more cost-effective.”

recent study of the Community Conferencing Center, one of the nation’s oldest restorative justice programs, in Baltimore, Maryland, found that those who took part in the process were 60 percent less likely to reoffend than those who went through the traditional legal process.