The authors claim that restorative justice is mainly an ideological movement that lacks convincing empirical, anthropological or legal grounds. Instead of trying to make criminal law more restorative, or even trying to replace penal law by an alternative system of restorative law, restorative thinkers had better turn to the opportunities that the civil law offers for ‘horizontal’ conflict resolution. Their critique of restorativist ideology does not imply that the authors want to defend criminal justice as it is administered today in Western Europe, to the contrary. On the one hand the scope of criminal law could and should be drastically reduced by strategies of depenalisation and transfers of matters to the sphere of civil law. On the other hand much can be learned from the creative and constructive way in which restorative writers have been approaching sanctions, which they mistakenly do not call punishments. The use of criminal punishment will have to be reduced to the last resort they should be, and prison should be avoided as much as possible. Nothing stands in the way of developing options in the criminal (procedural) law to allow for constructive sanctions that satisfy victims, offenders and the public prosecutor as the representative of the criminal law. Also in the civil law domain much more could be done to make possible adequate repair. But punishment is not repair and punishment has its legitimate functions that should be recognized.