It's the season (assuming the weather begins to co-operate any time soon) of earthly rebirth and, for the biblically inclined, the season of second chances, forgiveness and reconciliation.

Which makes it just about the perfect season for Eva Marszewski's Youth Circles project to get up and running.

Marszewski is a lawyer, which long ago knocked the naïveté out of her. She also founded Peacebuilders International, which suggests some idealism might nevertheless have survived.

Youth Circles is an aboriginal-style peacemaking process intended to help inner-city Toronto youth between 12 and 17 stay out of trouble with the law, reduce violence and build safer schools and communities.

It will give young people in trouble a chance to talk out differences and to make amends for wrongdoing rather than heading to courts and jail - an alternative, she says, to a law-enforcement process that frequently leads to incarceration (and its corrupting influences) without addressing the underlying causes of problems.

"It's very exciting," Marszewski said yesterday. "It's much more than just, `Okay, you have to write an apology and do 40 hours of community service."

The Youth Circles initiative was announced in February, flowing from an award-winning pilot project in St. James Town and Regent Park. It is now training volunteer lawyers and mental-health workers who will be partnered to serve as "circle-keepers," and expects to receive its first referrals early next month through St. Stephen's Community House conflict-resolution service.

Youth could be referred, say, by a school vice-principal as the alternative to suspension or expulsion, by a police officer prior to a criminal charge being laid, by a Crown prosecutor before trial, or a judge prior to sentencing.

Referrals will be screened prior to acceptance in the program, Marszewski said, the key being that they are willing to take responsibility and "come to terms with their behaviour."

"It is a detour essentially from the usual disciplinary or justice system," she said. But it will be no easy way out. "Each of those people who refer retains the discretion to decide if the product of the circle process is good enough or if it doesn't cut it."

In fact, proponents say participation in the circle process is usually more difficult than attendance in court. It requires taking full responsibility for behaviour and consequences, including making amends for damages and - something no court is equipped to demand - committing to personal change.

The process also takes place outside school hours, to make sure youth involved aren't missing classes or, if suspended, being "sent home to watch TV or hang out or whatever they're doing."

Depending on circumstances, preliminary circles will be held with family or school staff or - if an offence has been committed - with victims willing to participate in the confidential sessions.

"The main circle then brings in the various participants in order to actually figure out what happened and to try and set some course of action that is going to reflect the needs of the justice system, or the school, the youth, their community and family. So it's a fairly comprehensive exercise."

As often happens, Marszewski "fell into the circle process" more or less by accident.

Called to the bar in 1975, she litigated for 10 years, then did labour arbitration for 10 more, and became most interested in issues "where there were relationships that couldn't really be addressed in a court of law."

She began mediating in the 1990s, appreciating any system in which people's "lives weren't being destroyed in the process of trying to come to a resolution."

A judge she knew, who had been a professor when she was in law school, was at the time working on the territorial court in the Yukon. There, jails were full and aboriginal friends were saying that many of those behind bars should have been put instead "into a circle" as a means of restorative justice.

In such circles, a "talking piece" - a physical object that could be a stick, a carving, a baseball cap - goes from person to person as they speak "and it really doesn't work if that doesn't happen," Marszewski said.

"If you don't have a talking piece, it's just the usual kind of conversation where people start to interrupt and somebody has to manage, and some people talk a lot and other people don't talk at all."

Her friend, the judge, started using circles for sentencing rather than throwing people in jail, she said. In Yukon, she watched one such circle in action. By the time it was done, maybe an hour later, there was a community-supported plan in place for how the youth in question would work to pay for and rebuild what he had damaged.

"I thought to myself this is so much more civilized than anything else I could think of. Our society suffers from the punishment-oriented theory of life, which is really pretty barbaric.

"Basically, there are circles all over the world," Marszewski said. "And, basically, we don't pay attention to them.''

Even though the current approach to youth justice - with the easy, empty rhetoric of zero tolerance - seems to serve and satisfy no one.