Restorative justice: Assessing optimistic and pessimistic accounts

For informal justice to be restorative justice, it has to be about restorin g victims, restoring offenders, and restoring communities as a result of pa rticipation of a plurality of stakeholders. This means that victim-offender mediation, healing circles, family group conferences, restorative probatio n, reparation boards on the Vermont model, whole school antibullying progra ms, Chinese Bang Jiao programs, and exit conferences following Western busi ness regulatory inspections can at times all be restorative justice. Sets o f both optimistic propositions and pessimistic claims can be made about res torative justice by contemplating the global diversity of its practice. Exa mination of both the optimistic and the pessimistic propositions sheds ligh t on prospects for restorative justice. Regulatory theory (a responsive reg ulatory pyramid) may be more useful for preventing crime in a normatively a cceptable way than existing criminal law jurisprudence and explanatory theo ry. Evidence-based reform must move toward a more productive checking of re storative justice by liberal legalism, and vice verse.