Over the last decade or so, more has been more written and talked about restorative justice than any other criminological topic. In addition to the proliferation of published work, there have been numerous national and international conferences and seminars both within and outside the academy, and the stream of e-conversations taking place via the many and various restorative justice e-mail lists and websites is in constant spate.
As research on and around restorative justice flourishes as never before, this new four-volume collection in the Routledge Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Criminology, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of the subdiscipline’s rich and diverse heritage. It provides a much-needed map to steer students and scholars towards the truly essential foundational and cutting-edge materials and offers an essential grounding in the philosophy and principles of restorative justice in a number of jurisdictions around the world. Furthermore, it furnishes users with a critical awareness of the potential and the pitfalls of restorative justice in responses to crime, conflict, and civil disputes.
The first volume in the collection (‘The Rise of Restorative Justice’) brings together the best research that inspired the restorative justice ‘movement’ and gives a flavour of some early practices that, on reflection, can now be considered to be at least partly restorative. The work gathered here considers the competing definitions of restorative justice, distinguishing between those that focus on restorative values and principles, those that emphasize aims and outcomes, and those that are premised on the idea that the term should only be applied to specific processes or programmes. Volume I will also develop in readers a critical approach to the relationship between punishment and restorative justice in the context of debates about whether restorative justice can fairly be characterized as non-punitive in nature.
Volume II (‘Restorative Practices on the International Stage’) collects the most important work to describe and critically evaluate the varied practices across the globe which have been labelled ‘restorative justice’. The scholarship gathered here assesses the extent to which the (often competing) visions, discussed in Volume I, have been put into practice and draws on research carried out in North America, Asia, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Africa in various civil and criminal justice settings.
Volume III (‘The Promise of Restorative Justice’) assembles the vital research to describe the instrumental achievements of restorative justice and to provide users with critical approaches in assessing ‘effectiveness’. The materials in Volume III also give a thorough appreciation of how successfully restorative justice is able to reconcile the variety of interests that may be implicated in responding to crime, and examines the related issues of accountability, the protection of rights, and proportionality.
The final volume in the collection (‘Stumbling Blocks on the Road to a Restorative Jurisprudence’) gathers together key thinking to explore the extent to which there is an emerging consensus on a future jurisprudence of restorative justice. The material here seeks to understand the role of restorative justice in relation to both rehabilitation and retribution and other philosophies of punishment, and to consider how it can be protected by legal standards and ethical safeguards.
