This paper is intended as a companion to my reprinted 2018 paper (next chapter), in which I outline why the Offender Resettlement Journey (ORJ) is important, how an ORJ process works, and what we might learn about some of our underlying concepts about the arche- typal journey in practice. I believe it is a useful resource for anyone working in the criminal justice or correctional system.
I wrote that paper through the lens of my own 20-year journey through my Dialogue Practitioner experience and work in the criminal justice system. It outlined how Peter Garrett, my colleague and business partner and I, had generated such a distinctive way to bring a system together and how I had developed the skills and understanding for this work through first-hand experience and learning.
In this paper I want to provide some additional reflections for practitioners about the facilitation of the ORJ by taking you ‘live’ into the immediate experience as it is being facilitated. Where the 2018 version gave an overview of the context for and construction of the ORJ, in this briefer paper I give something of a more visceral sense of impact it has on participants, whether they be walking the symbolic journey or witnessing it. For simplicity I will use the label offender here to distinguish the man or woman whose story of their journey is being told, from the many other characters to name. When we are together, I would simply use their preferred name.