Restorative Justice: An Empirically Grounded Movement Facing Many Opportunities and Pitfalls

This article provides an overview of the restorative justice movement in the twenty-first century. In Section II we offer a summary of the movement's distinguishing characteristics, its history and development, and what it looks like in practice. Section III is focused on restorative justice dialogue, the most widely practiced and extensively researched modality of the restorative justice movement. We present a review of current restorative justice dialogue research and an examination of public policy support for such dialogue across the United States.

In Section IV we turn to continuing issues, including pitfalls, opportunities, and questions for the future.