From Harm to Healing
We incorporate the interrelated and imperative concepts of healing and justice to address the widespread harm caused by systemic failures that result in wrongful convictions.
In our healing work, we create safe spaces and individualized support that enable us to tackle the complex grief and trauma caused by injustice, including issues of gender violence, racial inequity, and social marginalization.
In our justice work, we focus on improving the justice system to prevent future harm and on restoring the voices of those harmed by helping them become change-makers for reform through training, advocacy, technical assistance and product development.
Through this unique combination of program services, we transform the lives and communities of those harmed and leverage their experiences to transform the justice system. Our model of transformative justice can be applied to all contexts and cases of injustice where healing is needed in order for justice to be achieved.
Healing Justice on 60 Minutes
Resources for Crime Victims & Families
Resources for the Exonerated & Families
Resources for Practitioners
Our Stories
“Healing Justice’s programs have helped so many people find their way out of the darkness of injustice. Through their unique and powerful approach, they are able to give people hope where there once was none.”
Our Unique Healing Retreats
Our Five-Year Review
Healing Together
Our Organization
Healing Justice is a unique national nonprofit organization that utilizes restorative justice and justice reform to provide healing to individuals and families harmed by wrongful convictions and to prevent future harm. We seek to heal the lives of crime victims and survivors, those who have been exonerated, both sets of families, and many others. We also seek to transform the criminal legal system that serves them. To achieve its goals, Healing Justice offers:
Direct post-trial support and healing to crime victims, survivors, and their families;
Direct post-prison support and healing to returning citizens and their families in cases where innocence has been proven;
Opportunities for peer support and restorative justice to all impacted in these cases;
Education, training, and technical assistance to prosecutors, police, judges, victim advocates, and other justice professionals.
Healing Justice was founded by Jennifer Thompson based on her personal experience as a crime survivor whose case was overturned more than a decade after the trial and conviction when DNA evidence proved that the wrong man had been convicted. Jennifer became a pioneer of restorative justice in these cases through building a friendship with the innocent man wrongly convicted in her case. They later co-authored the bestselling book, Picking Cotton: Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption.
Healing Justice’s work is led by real people with lived experiences, all of whom contribute their own unique perspectives to our goals and programs. Through all of our work we strive to restore the voices of those harmed and provide them with peer support and individual healing. We also strive to build relationships across all stakeholders to create collective healing and prevent future harm.
Healing Justice is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization (ID number 47-3424404). Our mailing address is: 11312 US 15-501 N, Suite 107 - #181, Chapel Hill, NC 27517. You can also reach us at: info@healingjusticeproject.org.
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