In 2022, Zehr and co-author Barb Toews returned to prisoners featured in the 1996 book and produced Still Doing Life: 22 Lifers 25 Years Later (The New Press, New York & London, 2022).
"Your ability to listen and your respect for human beings, whether they are victims or offenders, is vividly expressed in your two books of photographs and interviews, Transcending – Reflections of Crime Victims, and Doing Life – Reflections of Men and Women Serving Life Sentences," said Thomas J. Porter, JD, executive director of JUSTPEACE Center for Mediation and Conflict Transformation at Hamline University in a ceremony announcing a "lifetime achievement award" for Zehr.
[8] An Ebony magazine reporter wrote: "Howard Zehr, the restorative justice pioneer recognized for building bridges for the voiceless, calls them [the children of prisoners] hidden victims.
"[6] Since 1996, Zehr has been a faculty member of Eastern Mennonite University, based at EMU's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding.
His impact has been especially significant in the United States, Brazil, Japan, Jamaica, Northern Ireland, Britain, Ukraine, and New Zealand, a country that has restructured its juvenile justice system into a family-focused, restorative approach.
[4] The title of this book refers to providing an alternative framework for thinking about – or new lens for viewing – crime and justice.
[21] The book made reference to the positive results of efforts in the late 1970s and 1980s at victim-offender mediation, pioneered in the United States by Howard Zehr, Ron Claassen and Mark Umbreit.
"[27] "Restorative justice is a fast-growing state, national and international social movement that seeks to bring together people to address the harm caused by crime," write Mark Umbreit and Marilyn Peterson Armour.
[30] In the afterword to the third edition of Changing Lenses, Zehr acknowledges the debt that restorative justice owes to many indigenous traditions.
[31] "Two peoples have made very specific and profound contributions to practices in the field – the First Nations people of Canada and the U.S., and the Maori of New Zealand... [I]n many ways, restorative justice represents a validation of values and practices that were characteristic of many indigenous groups," whose traditions were "often discounted and repressed by western colonial powers.
[33] Zehr argues that punishment – or inflicting suffering as repayment for harm done – rarely results in healing for anybody and often makes matters worse.
It is the reason why, from a 'Zehrist' point of view, restorative justice "does not succeed in reconstructing the traditional legal theory, nor build a new theory of criminal intervention as a whole” - it is rather proposed as an analog of justice as we know it (Juliana Tonche, 'Justiça restaurativa e racionalidade penal moderna', Revista de Estudos Empíricos em Direito, vol.
"Restorative justice is a process to involve, to the extent possible, those who have a stake in a specific offence and to collectively identify and address harms, needs and obligations, in order to heal and put things as right as possible."