A non-lawyer's thinking about justice

1. What is justice?

When a crime occurs, it creates some sort of debt on a victim. That debt can vary from material to emotional to psychological. In order to achieve the social reconciliation back to what life was like before the crime, justice occurs to help determine who should pay the price tag to bring about the healing needed for society to recover for the crime, and what that price tag is.

2. What about victimless crimes?

There really aren't victimless crimes. In such cases, the victim is the one who would have been condemned as the perpetrator of the crime if justice were to occur. The idea of invoking justice in such a case is that the process of the justice system is better at achieving social reconciliation that not invoking justice would. Considering both the time and financial costs of using the justice system, it would take a lot for a victimless crime to require the justice system.

3. What payments can justice require?

Essentially, justice can require payments of money fine, incarceration time, or access to particular goods, services or people. Money is essentially to replace material goods or to get the services required to get the healing the victims require. It can also cover loss of income that occurred because of the crime. Time of a sentence is partially to represent the amount of time victims would require to rebuild what was lost, or, in cases like murder, the time that was taken from the victim.  Denying access for a time, allows what was being accessed to be used (or grow in the case of a person) in a proper fashion for a time. Any combination of the three can be used to give assurance that there is disincentive for such a crime to occur again.

4. Is justice or healing the harder part of social reconciliation?

It really depends on the crime. For example, in theft, the healing is quite simple: just return or buy the goods that were stolen. The legal process to get the perpetrator to pay for the goods is going to be harder. In the case of murder, complete healing cannot occur. The main victim cannot be brought back to life.

5. Is justice required for social reconciliation?

Technically, no. Healing definitely is, though. If there is no justice, the victims are left with the burdens of debt from the crime. While unfair, as long as the debt gets paid, healing can occur. If a thief isn't found, the victim can actually mentally and physically recover without justice. It will just be harder.

6.  Can invoking justice hinder social reconciliation?

Yes. As mentioned before, invoking the justice system has a real cost of both time and money. If that cost of time and money is significantly greater than the debt created by the crime, it takes away from the purpose of justice. In more cruel ways, lengthening the time and cost of justice through appeals can actually cause injustice by sapping away all resources a claimant might have before a final sentence can occur.

7. What makes justice most effective?

As anyone would expect, a fair, balanced and expedient justice system helps make a good justice system. However, there is another important point. The more effective the techniques for healing are, the more effective justice is. The effectiveness of justice is limited by the amount of healing it can set out to pay for. If the victim cannot be healed, justice is merely punitive.

8. What hinders the effectiveness of justice?

An unfair and unbalanced justice system makes it harder for the system to properly charge the correct person as the perpetrator of a crime and to come up with a proper cost. A slow justice system just raises the cost of entry of using the justice system. Weakening the means of healing lowers the ameliorating possibilities of justice.

9. What is the use of "innocent until proven guilty"?

I quickly mentioned the idea of a good justice system being fair, but there's more to it than just that convicting an innocent isn't fair. When a justice system convicts an innocent of a crime, the justice system itself is committing a crime. In that case, the victim has to appeal to the perpetrator of the crime in order to get justice. All human systems have an element of self-preservation. The more the justice system has to prosecute itself, the harder it is for the system to remain fair. Thus, it's best for the justice system to actively not put itself in such a position.