Edinburgh Napier University

  Restorative justice is a growing field of theory and practice. Once a marginal phenomenon, with very limited traction among criminal justice reformers, today restorative justice is widely studied, globally practiced and increasingly present in the media and political discourse. A crucial step in the recent development of restorative justice is the proliferation of state policy on this subject. This incipient ‘institutional turn’, entails a significant qualitative transformation of restorative justice, born as a range of crafty instruments emerged organically at the periphery of formal criminal justice systems, and originally designed as alternatives to formal criminal justice practices. In this chapter, I reflect on the re-codification of restorative justice as a criminal justice reform, focussing on the challenges related to this transformation, providing some conceptual tools to make sense of this phenomenon. I start from a few preliminary considerations on what restorative justice is. Then, I examine the relationships between restorative justice and criminal justice reform, highlighting some issues related to the use of restorative justice as an instrument to enhance criminal justice systems. In the conclusions, I sketch out a possible way forward for the restorative justice movement, toward a radical reimagination of restorative justice.