BOOK REVIEW (2017) Reimagining Restorative Justice. Agency and Accountability in the Criminal Process. Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 272.

Restorative justice is a growing field of research, practice and policy. The broad idea of repairing the harmful consequences of a crime, by involving direct stakeholders in a constructive dialogue, has increasingly drawn the attention of academics, practitioners and policy-makers, in the global West. However, criminologists and legal scholars have often denounced that the theoretical frameworks used to make sense of the applications of restorative justice are somehow underdeveloped, that is, in need of further conceptual and methodological refinement. David O’Mahony and Jonathan Doak’s new and ambitious book aims to address this gap. It consists of an endeavour to ‘reimagine’ restorative justice, that is, to rethink the meaning, role and position of this acclaimed development in criminal justice and criminological practice and thinking. In order to achieve this goal, they devise a conceptual and analytical apparatus inspired by certain normative commitments. The application of such a framework to the current practice of restorative justice produces a number of interesting and significant outcomes which render this book a valuable addition to the canon.