The separation of social welfare from criminal social control leaves no role for a separate juvenile delinquency court. However, if States try all offenders in one integrated criminal court, they must formally recognize youthfulness as a mitigating factor when sentencing younger offenders. These issues regarding the failures of the rehabilitative juvenile court and the nature of an explicitly punitive response to youth crime provides a conceptual framework posed to proponents of restorative justice. These questions concern the nature of restorative justice and whether it is a program, an idea, a policy, a strategy, a conceptual framework, or a paradigm shift. The answers to these questions may indicate whether restorative justice represents an attempt to revive rehabilitation, a return to informal and discretionary coercive social control, a series of additions to current dispositions, a threat to a liberal democracy’s tenets of individual liberty and the rule of law, or an alternative conception of social control and a justice system. 102 references