Felix Rosado: A Restorative Justice Story

Felix Rosado first began working with Community College of Philadelphia in 2023 when he was asked to join the advisory board for a new Restorative Justice certificate program. After a few months, it occurred to him that he was well-suited to assume a teaching role within the program as well. Now in its second cohort, the program offers students an opportunity to gain skills in building community, addressing harm through active accountability and healing.

When Rosado first encountered the concept of restorative justice, he was serving a sentence of death by incarceration—more commonly known as life without parole. He was reading a book assigned to him through a class called Inside Out, which was facilitated by a faculty member at Temple University. “So, yeah, over a decade later, I'm sitting here face to face with this really hard truth [about the harm I had caused]. And so I asked myself, ‘Now what? What should I do? What can I do?’” Rosado said. “And at the end of the book, the author started talking about this thing called restorative justice. And my mind was blown. A way of doing justice that seeks to heal harm by involving those directly impacted by it, including the person who caused it. And to me, that was revolutionary.”

Rosado started to envision what some restorative justice concepts could look like in practice within his own circles and situation. “I connected with someone on the inside who was equally passionate about restorative justice,” Rosado said. “His name is Charles Boyd. And we created this Intro to Restorative Justice workshop. And we started to pilot it.”

Rosado and Boyd started developing a curriculum and sharing it with other folks in the prison, leading weekly workshops together. Eventually, Rosado began to form a relationship with the author of the book that inspired him, Howard Zehr, who then connected him to a publishing company called Living Justice Press that releases restorative justice books. Rosado began writing and editing a facilitator’s manual titled Justice from the Inside Up via email, 15-minute supervised phone calls, and snail mail with the goal of helping others understand how to facilitate experiential restorative justice education. “I’m editing through these three channels, an entire book. And then in the middle of that, the miracle of my freedom happened,” Rosado said.

In 2022, Rosado was able to escape his sentence through clemency under Governor Tom Wolf. “After 27 years, during a brief alignment of political stars, our last governor, Wolf...opened up a window and...I squeezed out of that little crack.” As soon as Rosado came home, he hit the ground running as program manager of Healing Futures, a youth restorative justice diversion program in Philadelphia. And in 2023, Let’s Circle Up, the restorative justice project he and Boyd founded inside, became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

Now, Rosado is executive director of Let’s Circle Up and is an adjunct instructor at CCP and Chestnut Hill College. What he loves most about CCP is the community environment and sharing in that spirit with his students.

“So, we put on [our playlist], and then the students start coming in and it feels like family,” Rosado said. He said each week his class is different but always filled with experiential, creative and fun activities. “I love being able to share that with them. You know, this isn't the kind of class where you're going to come and sit down and listen to a professor speak for three hours.” Rosado values learning in a supportive and communal environment, where he learns just as much from his students as they do from him.

CCP’s Restorative Justice proficiency certificate program aims to deepen students' understanding of restorative justice; help them become skillful facilitators of restorative processes; and contribute to efforts to implement restorative justice practices, programs and policies. Learn more about this program.