ABSTRACT
Youth justice systems all over the world have been under pressure because of an ongoing debate about balancing treatment and punishment in the response to youth crime. The discussion seemed to be repetitive and dead-locked until the emergence of restorative justice opened new possibilities. Restorative justice increasingly appears to be a source of renovating practices and empirical evaluation, a central issue in theoretical and policy debates, and a ubiquitous theme in juvenile justice and criminal justice reforms worldwide. Restorative practices are being inserted into most crime response systems, especially those aimed at youth crime. In this chapter, both the potential and the limits of restorative justice for renovating juvenile justice are explored. In the first section, the essentials of restorative justice are presented. The second section asks which criticisms make a fundamental reform of juvenile justice systems necessary. The third section combines both issues and examines whether the restorative approach can respond satisfactorily to the criticisms. The final section reflects upon the conditions on which the further incorporation of restorative ideas into juvenile justice systems will depend.
