Twenty Years of Restorative Justice in Belgian Prisons: Traces and Critical Questions

peer reviewed ; This article accounts for a prison policy initiated in Belgium in 1998 that aimed at re-shaping the culture of detention towards a culture of ‘restorative justice’. This analysis first illuminates the relationship between knowledge and policy in the policymaking process, but also in the top-down implementation process. The article then assesses the current embeddedness of restorative jus-tice ideas and practices in Flemish and French-speaking prison policies. The discussion finally points out some critical ques-tions raised by the concept of restorative justice, its political a... Mehr ...