When Someone Hurts You—What does Justice Really Look Like?

“When people around the world shout, ‘We want justice!’, they don’t typically mean, ‘We want those criminals to get better!’ “

I’ve been thinking a lot about justice recently. Specifically, I’ve been wondering: what should happen when one person wrongs another? What does justice look like when a crime occurs? My impulse is to say, “PUNISH THE CRIMINAL!” But the more I think and talk about it, the more I realize that punishment might not be the whole story.

There’s Justice, and Then There’s Justice

To get clarity here, the first step is to understand what it is we’re even talking about. Justice is one of those slippery, catch-all concepts that seem to change depending on who you’re talking to. What makes it even more confusing is that there seems to be a hundred different types of justice: social justice, restorative justice, criminal justice, procedural justice; there’s justice served, poetic justice, The Justice League, and that French electronic duo JUSTICE who made that banger D.A.N.C.E. back in the early 2000’s.

In the most general sense, justice deals with fairness. When we talk about justice, what we’re really talking about is what’s fair. When we think about what’s fair in society, we call it “social justice”; fairness in the courts: “legal” or “procedural” justice; fairness in the economy: “economic” justice; and so on. All of these are related in that they deal with fairness—which is the core defining feature of justice. 

Two Types of Justice

The various types of justice can be categorized into two main groups: distributive justice and corrective justice. Distributive justice deals with the way in which rights, resources, and goods are distributed fairly and equitably in a society. This is the kind of justice people refer to when they talk about “social justice” or a “just society”. It’s concerned with how society (and all its parts) is structured to ensure fairness.

Corrective justice, on the other hand, deals with righting wrongs—with correcting the imbalances created when harm occurs. Corrective justice is what people refer to when they shout, “We want justice!” And it’s this kind of justice, I realized—corrective justice—that I had been thinking about. I wanted to know how wrongs are properly righted. What is the appropriate course of action when a crime or wrongdoing occurs? This is an important question because answers here directly influence how things like the legal system or the prison system work. 

Rehabilitation as Corrective Justice

I was in the car with my wife and our friend when the topic came up. We were talking through one of the cards in THINK. (which is great for these kinds of conversations, by the way; check the description for more info) when the idea of corrective justice came up. My friend, who tends to be more liberally minded than myself, was insisting that criminals need to be rehabilitated. In fact, she made the claim that rehabilitation should be the sole focus when it comes to criminality. 

Her main point was that rehabilitation, when done correctly, leads to a drastic decrease in recidivism. She cited Finland as an example, where open-air “prisons” allow inmates to shop for groceries, hold jobs, and even have their own cell phones. Instead of punishment, prisoners are offered rehabilitation—classes, connection, and chances to reintegrate into society. The profound result of this approach—and this is the point that my friend kept coming back to—is that rehabilitation leads to less crime being committed over time. This is because criminals are cured of their criminality; they’re healed of the traumas and destructive patterns that cause criminal behavior in the first place.

But Rehabilitation and . . .

No one can argue with less crime. If rehabilitating criminals leads to less crime, then it stands to reason that rehabilitation must be an important part of corrective justice.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was missing, though. I kept thinking, if someone close to me were murdered, would I be satisfied with the murderer only being rehabilitated? Would I feel that “justice is served” if I knew that person was in an open-air prison somewhere holding a job and taking phone calls every night? If the worse they suffered for their crime was taking anger management classes? The answer, I kept finding, was a resounding, “No.” 

Maybe this was some moral failing on my part. Maybe if I was more compassionate, more understanding, more empathetic and forgiving, I’d be more accepting of rehabilitating criminals instead of punishing them. My friend suggested this inclination to punish wrongdoers stems from the way we dehumanize criminals here in America; maybe it was a matter of socialization and how I was taught to view criminals. 

But I quickly came to the conclusion that the desire to punish criminals couldn’t just be me and my socialization. Because it’s not just me, and it isn’t just us here in America. When people around the world shout, “We want justice!”, they don’t typically mean, “We want those criminals to get better!” They mean they want the criminals to be punished; they want consequences for the wrongdoing. And these consequences usually entail some degree of suffering, often by depriving the criminal of rights and freedoms (i.e., by putting the criminals in a not-so-cozy jail cell—and at the very least taking their cell phones away). So while rehabilitation certainly seems like an undeniably important part of corrective justice (and perhaps a part that, admittedly, we don’t focus on enough here in America), it doesn’t seem to be the whole picture, either. Rehabilitation is, as they say, “a necessary but not sufficient” criterion of corrective justice.

In my view, punishment (or “retribution” in fancy terms) is also a crucial factor in the corrective justice equation. Not only does it serve to deter future crimes by discouraging those behaviors through fear and shame, it also serves to rectify the wrongs that have already been committed. By punishing criminals, they’re forced to endure suffering commensurate with the suffering they caused others. Punishment balances the equation by “re-leveling the playing field”, so to speak. (Not to mention, it also satisfies a deeply ingrained impulse that many of us humans across time and space seem to share, perhaps hinting at its roots in evolutionary psychology—but that’s a topic for another discussion). 

A More Complete Picture of Corrective Justice

Let’s return to the original question: What exactly should happen when a wrong is committed? 

My friend helped me to understand that rehabilitation should certainly be part of the process. If rehabilitation serves to decrease crime, then that alone warrants its inclusion in corrective justice. But I also firmly believe that punishment is an important part of corrective justice as well. Punishment serves an important role here in that it works to correct the imbalances created by wrongdoing by paying suffering for suffering.

So when someone is wronged, here’s what we should do: punish the criminal—but also help them to get better so they don’t commit more crimes in the future.