The Mischaracterization of Restorative Justice: Claims, Limits, and Potential

Abstract Despite evidence that restorative justice delivers benefits for victims, offenders, schools, communities and societies, its potential to transform thinking and responses to harm and conflict remains unrealized. We assess how the restorative justice movement can step beyond self-referential claims made by its proponents to reconsider its spiritual and ideological underpinnings. Expanding previous arguments about the sociopolitical dynamics of restorative justice, we argue that its claim to be a progressive criminal legal strategy has been mischaracterized. Instead, we demonstrate that restorative justice can be understood as, (1) a spiritual healing practice that may in fact, (2) valorize neo-liberal ideology and, (3) conservative values ensconced within settler-colonial legacies of Eurocentric justice models.