Facilitating Restorative Justice Practices: Counsellors Disrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline

In this course, Dr. Chris Townsend (Ph.D., NCC, LPC, LCMHC, LCAS, AADS, CCS, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, Department of Clinical Counseling and Mental Health) cites the much higher arrest and incarceration rates of African-American and Latinx students (who are often school dropouts) than their white peers and makes a compelling case for counsellors to align their practices with those of restorative justice, which is based on similar principles to counselling. Dr. Townsend identifies multiple systemic issues which confront those who would disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline for these minoritised students, including lack of funding, lack of multicultural competence on the part of counsellors, and manualised treatments which do not take culture and context into account. He identifies interventions counsellors can make at multiple levels of the ecological system.