Dan Van Ness

Dan Van Ness is the executive director of the Centre for Justice and Reconciliation at Prison Fellowship International. He has been involved with criminal justice issues for 30 years, as a lawyer, restorative justice advocate, and teacher.

After six years’ poverty law practice on the West Side of Chicago, he joined Prison Fellowship Ministries (the US Prison Fellowship affiliate) in 1981 and with Charles Colson founded Justice Fellowship to promote criminal justice reforms. During his 11 years with Justice Fellowship, he organized lobbying activities on sentencing reform and victim rights issues, did research and writing on restorative justice and helped launch the victim assistance organization Neighbors Who Care.

After leaving Justice Fellowship and completing additional graduate study, he taught law in Detroit and then criminology at the University of Malta where he lived for two years while helping that government as it worked on reform of its correctional system.

Dan represents Prison Fellowship International at international gatherings on restorative justice, and was a primary architect of the development and eventual endorsement by the United Nations of Basic Principles on the Use of Restorative Justice Programmes in Criminal Matters.

Dan received a BA degree from Wheaton College, the J.D. degree from DePaul University College of Law, and the Masters of Law from Georgetown University Law Center.

He is the author of articles, papers, and several books on restorative justice, the most recent of which are Restoring Justice, 3rd edition (co-authored with Karen Heetderks Strong) and Handbook of Restorative Justice (co-edited with Gerry Johnstone).