ABSTRACT

Restorative justice is conceived both as a ‘replacement discourse’, decentring punishment of offenders as the focus of criminal justice processes and emphasizing instead reparation to victims and reintegration of offenders into their communities, and as a new resource for existing penal modes. It has been developed as a mode of penality with adherence to an ethic of restoration rather than retribution. As it has developed in policy and practice, restorative justice has become attractive to policy-makers in a multiplicity of jurisdictions as a new form of holding offenders to account, with potential for effectiveness in reducing reoffending as well as recompensing victims. It has become institutionalized in criminal justice to a degree that seemed unlikely twenty years ago.