Restorative Justice

According to Howard Zehr, restorative justice differs from traditional criminal justice in terms of the guiding questions it asks. In restorative justice, the questions are:

1.  Who has been hurt?
2.  What are their needs?
3. Whose obligations are these?
4. What are the causes?
5. Who has a stake in the situation?
6. What is the appropriate process to involve stakeholders in an effort to address causes and put things right?

1. What laws have been broken?
2. Who did it?
3. What do the offender(s) deserve?

Others, however, have argued that there are several similarities between restorative justice and traditional criminal justice, and that some cases of restorative justice constitute punishment from the perspectives of some positions on what punishment is.

Restorative justice is also different from the adversarial legal process or that of civil litigation.

As Braithwaite writes, "Court-annexed ADR (alternative dispute resolution) and restorative justice could not be philosophically further apart". While the former seeks to address only legally relevant issues and to protect both parties' rights, restorative justice aims at "expanding the issues beyond those that are legally relevant, especially into underlying relationships".