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

Abstract

This article accounts for a prison policy initiated in Belgium in 1998 that aimed at reshaping 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 justice ideas and practices in Flemish and French-speaking prison policies. The discussion finally points out some critical questions raised by the concept of restorative justice, its political and legal inscriptions (Freeman & Sturdy, 2015), and some of the paradoxes it entails in terms of 'institutionalised alternative' (Bastard & Cardia-Vonèche, 2000) and 'retribution and/or restoration' (Albrecht, 2011; Pavlich, 2013).