Reconstructing Restorative Justice: Assessing the Limits and Implementation of Restorative Justice in the Modern Criminal Justice System

Abstract

Restorative justice has emerged as one of the most significant paradigm shifts in modern criminal law, moving the locus of justice away from state-centred retribution toward victim-offender reconciliation, harm repair, and community reintegration. Yet despite its rapid normative expansion across jurisdictions, restorative justice remains conceptually contested and unevenly implemented, producing a persistent gap between legal certainty and substantive justice. This article reconstructs the theoretical and practical boundaries of restorative justice by examining how its limits and implementation manifest differently across normative systems, including Indonesia, England and Wales, India, Latin America, the ASEAN region, and China. Using a normative juridical method combining statutory, conceptual, and comparative approaches, this study analyses primary and secondary legal materials to identify the structural, cultural, and institutional constraints that hinder restorative justice from becoming a fully embedded criminal justice mechanism rather than a discretionary add-on. The findings show that restorative justice functions optimally only where legal recognition, prosecutorial discretion, victim protection, and cultural legitimacy operate coherently together. The article's novelty lies in offering a reconstructed, cross-jurisdictional normative framework that repositions restorative justice's limitations not as failures of the concept itself, but as symptoms of fragmented legal architecture, providing a basis for more coherent statutory reform, particularly within Indonesia's ongoing criminal procedure code reform