Just over thirty years ago now, on 12^th January 1977 to be precise, Sir Anthony Bottoms presented his Inaugural Lecture as Professor of Criminology at the University of Sheffield, UK. The full text of this almost prophetic Lecture was subsequently published in the Howard Journal of Criminal Justice and reached a much wider audience. One of its central themes was the emerging tendency within British criminal justice policy to treat really serious offenders in a significantly different manner from their less serious counterparts with whom a more lenient approach might be justified. This tendency he described as penal bifurcation.There were two reasons why such an apparently logical approach might be found exceptionable: the first relates to the general principal of treating like cases similarly, and the second that the practice was proposed on the basis of the relative extent of social risk that might be claimed to differentiate serious from less serious offending. Bifurcation in both of these forms is evident in the use within some jurisdictions of extended and indeterminate sentences for public protection, and in many respects also within parole release considerations.The central proposition in relation to bifurcation within this article is, however, of a somewhat different nature. Restorative justice places considerable reliance upon offenders accepting responsibility for their offences, showing remorse for the harm done to victims in the form of genuine apology, and then making reparation either to the victim(s) directly, or to victims of crime more generally. These principles apply equally to serious and less serious offenders, though the extent of reparation should logically be greater as the crime increases in gravity.In an era of widely increasing penal populations it is apparent that these escalations result from increased severity of sentencing on the one hand, and from wider use of custody and lower thresholds for imposing it on the other. Both forms of resort to custody in sentencing are increasingly justified on the basis of public protection, and to act otherwise is perceived (and often promoted in the media) as being ‘soft on crime’. Politicians anxious to retain electoral credibility do not wish to be labelled as soft on crime, and actively seek to avoid such accusations by supporting increasingly punitive measures against offenders.One of the reasons why restorative justice has attracted only limited acceptance in the world of adult criminal justice is that it is perceived as a less punitive response to offending than the more traditional retributive punishment mode or its ‘justice model’ desert-based counterpart. In the span of this article I shall attempt to describe how, with a respectable measure of bifurcation, a model of reparative and restorative justice can be presented as a viable and optimistic alternative to the penal politics of retributive punishment and social protection. That it might bring with it the potential for reduced use of custody will be left to the reader to decide.

The authors latest book on Restorative Justice, Self-Interest and Responsible Citizenship has been discussed in this journal in 2009 and the author now responds to the critiques, which came from three jurists and therefore had a predominantly juristic character. Themes discussed are ‘criminal justice and punishment’, ‘restorative justice and the law’, ‘restorative justice, the victim and public interest’, ‘restorative justice and the legal order’ and finally ‘restorative justice and offender rehabilitation’. Walgrave maintains and clarifies the views he developed in the book explaining why it is correct to claim that criminal justice can be identified as fundamentally punitive (although it does not always punish, as one critic has observed) and that it should be possible to elaborate restorative justice into a completely new legal system, offering legal guarantees fitting to what restorative justice is trying to achieve. Legal guarantees as they exist today in criminal procedure cannot be taken as the benchmark for restorative procedures in view of the totally different aims and procedures. Furthermore, it is not true that the victim gets too much power in restorative justice – as one critic stated – because restorative justice is and should be conceived as a system of public law, involving the legal agencies and authorities such as courts in a proper role as guardians of every citizin’s dominion. It is because of the safeguarding of dominion that the victim should have a key-role to play in restorative justice, although not obliged to participate.One critic has mentioned that Walgraves ideas seem to imply that the legal order is only something being imposed upon the citizens ‘top down’, while in many respects one could maintain that the law and the principles of the legal order have been produced ‘bottom-up’ or at least should be the result of democracy. The response is that restorative procedures offer more opportunities for citizens for this democratic participation in producing the norms of the law.Finally some have argued that the rehabilitative interests of the offender should have a more central place in the definition of restorative justice, more or less of the same importance as restoring the harms of the victim. Walgraves experiences with the Belgian model of juvenile protection made him cautious of the risks of doing so, not only in terms of serving the victims needs, but also in terms of the legal protection of the juvenile offender against arbitrary interventions.

The author reports on the doctorate research that she presented in 2009. Restorative practices have not often been researched as a praxis of social work, on the interface between giving help and administering justice. The author situates restorative mediation as a form of social work on the threshold between the private and the public, a threshold that she considers to be of a social nature.Restorative mediation as social work should contribute to values such as human dignity and social justice. The author observed and studied restorative mediation in adult on the one hand and juvenile criminal cases on the other (in Flanders, Belgium) and found that these practices differ widely.Although in both kind of practices responsibility and restoration are central concepts, their meanings differ fundamentally: in youth cases the offer of restorative mediation departs from a critical pedagogy oriented at emancipation, holding on to protective arrangements at the same time. Societal developments changed the image of youngsters from victims of society into risks for society and this may have implied that social problems around criminality are now also by mediation transformed into individual problems for which juveniles should be held accountable.In adult criminal cases the approach was initially much more on civic responsibility for the harm done to victims and since mediation was only offered in serious cases the courts always had their say too.Reflecting upon her research the author questions whether dominant social norms can be and still are challenged in the praxis of mediation. Restorative mediation has become incorporated into the existing institutional arrangements relevant to juveniles and adults: with juvenile cases the logic of prevention seems to become dominant. The practices seem to become exercises in taking responsibility within the traditional normative framework. On the threshold between the private and the public restorative practices, with their self-image of being a more humane form of law enforcement, run the risk of becoming blind for the potential effect of criminalization of their clients.