Restorative Justice Practices: How Effective Are They as An Alternative to Punitive Sanctions in Criminal Justice System?

Abstract

As crime rates increase in the society, the administrators of criminal justice have more issues to deal with owing to the complexities associated with crime in the contemporary world. If the ultimate goal of the law is to achieve justice, the measures used to achieve same must be channeled to fit into the era of its exigency. Restorative justice sets in as a concept to fill in the lacuna of the previous two approaches namely: Retributive and Rehabilitative Justice System. How then does restorative justice resolve the imbalance of the retributive and rehabilitative justice system? What exactly does restorative justice system advocate? What are the key models to the approach? Are there possible negative sides to it? This article intends to answer these posers by examining Restorative Justice Practices from a perspective that admits a dynamic approach for sanctioning offenders to enforce justice in the modern era.