ABSTRACT
Dutch scholars and practitioners in the criminal justice field have become aware of international discourses and practices of restorative justice in the past decade. Moreover, there are even several experiments going on with mediation and conferencing in the Netherlands. In this contribution I will analyse to what extent the present experimentation with restorative practices represents an incipient institutionalization of restorative justice. In order to do this it is necessary to have a theoretical understanding of the process of institutionalization. In the first two sections I therefore discuss institutionalization from a fundamental sociological angle, making use of my experiences in studying and discussing penal abolitionism. Restorative justice differs in a number of important respects from abolitionism. It is not a movement of de- institutionalization, but much more clearly a movement aiming at criminal justice reform.
