Restorative justice is an approach to harm that brings together the person harmed, the person responsible and the community to repair the damage and prevent it from happening again. It asks what harm was done and what is needed to make things right, instead of only what rule was broken and what punishment fits.
The modern movement grew in the 1970s and 1980s through victim-offender mediation programs and the work of criminologist Howard Zehr, whose 1990 book Changing Lenses became a foundational text. It also draws on Indigenous peacemaking traditions, such as the Navajo Nation's Peacemaker Court, created in 1982.
In the US, restorative justice is used in schools as an alternative to suspension and in courts as an alternative to prosecution. Programs such as Common Justice in New York work with violent felony cases. Critics warn that when run inside punitive systems, programs can be underfunded or shallow. Transformative justice pushes further, addressing the conditions that cause harm.