Unlikely friends? Oprah Winfrey and restorative justice.

Source: (2005) Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology. 38(3):381.

In recent years, restorative justice has surfaced as a new criminal justice practice in diverse parts of the world. Often, it
appears that these practices have emerged in complete isolation from one another. This prompts us to question what it is
that has allowed restorative justice to become an acceptable way of dealing with criminal justice issues, or in Foucault’s
terms, the ’conditions of emergence’ of restorative justice. This article explores one of numerous potential ’conditions of
emergence’ of restorative justice–the discourses of the therapeutic’, ’recovery’, ’self-help’ and ’New Age’ movements. It
aims to investigate the ways in which the taken-for-granted nature of these discourses have, in part, permitted restorative
practices to become an approved way of ’doing justice’. (author’s abstract).