Terry O'Connell
Terry O'Connell was brought up as one of ten children in the Australian railway town of Valley Heights, New South Wales (NSW), which he left at 21 to join the NSW Police Service. Until 1990, he undertook a wide range of police duties, including that of Street Patrolman and Community Liaison Officer, and spent 16 years as a senior elected official of the largest police union in Australia (14,000 members.) In 1989 he earned a Social Welfare degree from Charles Sturt University, and a year later was appointed Sergeant-in-Charge of the Beat Police for the town of Wagga Wagga, where he began developing a diversionary program for young offenders. Always aware that the conventional system of arrest, arraignment, trial, and punishment had proved inadequate either to change the behavior of whoever had been designated the perpetrator of a crime, or to satisfy the visible victims of that incident, he devoted much time and energy to the search for systems that might work better. In 1991, he began bringing together victims and offenders "just to talk about their experiences," and realized that this process alone brought significant benefits for all concerned. By 1992, having refined the Conference Process to a smoothly running and teachable system, he was made aware of the Tomkins-Nathanson approach to the study of emotion in general and the role of shame in both crime and punishment. His addition of the psychology of affect and script to these protocols later became known as the Wagga Wagga Police Conference Model, and is now the basis of the scripted RealJustice model.
In 1994, Terry used the proceeds of the prestigious Churchill Fellowship to travel widely in search of new ideas related to this work, visiting Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Canada, the United Kingdom, and South Africa. Whilst visiting Dr. Nathanson in Philadelphia, he conferred with then Mayor Edward Rendell, and with Dr. Nathanson presented lectures to both the Juvenile Division of the Philadelphia Police Department and a large audience of judges, mental health workers, and juvenile justice authorities in Doylestown, PA. It was at this latter event that educator Ted Wachtel became so enthused about the potential for change offered by Terry's work that he organized RealJustice and joined with Terry to develop the international organization that has become so important a movement to promote healthy ways of dealing with crime and its consequences. A year later he introduced the Conferencing Process to England as consultant to the Thames Valley Police Department and formed a Restorative Justice Group within the NSW Police Department.
Terry began the new millennium with a bang, winning in the year 2000 the Paul Harris Fellowship of Rotary International, the Michael Franz Basch Award of Philadelphia's Silvan S. Tomkins Institute, the coveted Order of Australia Medal, and was the focus of the Australian television film "Facing the Demons." In the following years Mr. O'Connell and his unique brand of Restorative Justice were featured in the Australian Story video productions "Justice for All" and "Murder, He Wrote." Asked about his plans for future work in this field, he replied "I've dedicated myself to the enhancement of healthy relationships everywhere we can see that they've gone wrong. When there's been family violence, we look at what's gone wrong with the core relationships needed to make a family. In cases of institutional and other sexual abuse, we want to ensure the reality of right practices and behaviours. In our work with schools, we're privileged to assist teachers to base their pedagogy on sound principles of affect management. And when we're asked to comment on and perhaps change organizational and institutional practice, we encourage leaders and managers to take their rightful place as agents of change." Despite a crushing schedule that sees him working literally anywhere in the world on any given day, Terry O'Connell's real home is in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney with his wife Margaret and their seven children.
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