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 the reparation of harm to people and relationships, the healing of victims and the 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 In many crimes, one person has harmed another, directly or indirectly, through a wrongful act. The injured parties – the direct victim and others indirectly harmed – seek redress for this wrongful harm. They may want retributive punishment or they may want restitution or reparation, but in either event, there is a conflict between two or more parties. How is this conflict to be handled?
