ABSTRACT
In practice, most fully integrated restorative justice processes deal with juvenile offenders. Examples are family group conferences in New Zealand and some Australian states (McElrea 1998; Morris and Maxwell 2000; Daly 2001). And most jurisdictions introducing restorative justice processes tend to do so first for juvenile offenders, as in England and Wales, Northern Ireland and Belgium. It makes sense to do this because the public have long accepted that juvenile offenders can be dealt with differently from adult offenders. In principle, however, there is no reason to restrict restorative justice processes in this way. With increased confidence and over time, it should be possible to extend such processes to adults. This is happening now in New Zealand. Restorative justice processes are gradually being extended to adult offenders there at the discretion of individual judges (Consedine and Bowen 1999) and through a range of pilot programmes (Smith and Cram 1998; Maxwell et al. 1999).
