ABSTRACT
A basic goal of the restorative justice campaign is to establish new forums and processes to which many criminal cases currently dealt with by conventional criminal justice forums and processes can be diverted either at the pre-trial or sentencing stage. One of the key distinctive features of these new forums and processes is that they are intended to promote restorative outcomes, such as reparation of harm to people and relationships, healing of victims, and reintegration of offenders. However, restorative justice also differs procedurally from the conventional criminal justice process. In order to introduce the most important of these procedural differences, it is useful to think of crime in the way proposed by proponents of restorative justice, i.e. as a conflict.1
