One of the most important questions facing legal philosophers concerns the legitimacy of state institutions of legal punishment which visit citizens who have broken the law with condemnation and hard treatment. The purpose of this thesis is to attempt to answer the question of how we ought to respond to criminal offenders whose guilt has been established. The Canadian approach to criminal sentencing is evaluated, as are prominent restorative justice sentencing models. A novel composite-aims restorative justice model of responding to convicted offenders is introduced and the model’s aims and limits are specified. The thesis attempts to establish that a composite-aims model which encompasses certain restorative justice values and processes can provide a desirable framework for responding to convicted offenders. The implication for Canadian criminal justice policy is that the practice of applying punitive sanctions that are proportional to the moral gravity of the criminal offence should be abandoned in favour of a model based on securing censure, amends, crime control and reformation.