Just or Legal?
Last week, I had the privilege of hearing Reverend George Chochos speak. Chochos was formerly incarcerated and now practices divinity, as he continues his educational journey as a PhD candidate in Georgetown’s theological and religious studies program. As someone personally impacted by the legal system, he immediately positioned it as the criminal legal system and not a mechanism of justice. This begs the ethical question of what is the relationship between law and justice? And what makes a law just?
If we turn to another Reverend, the late Martin Luther King Jr, and his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” a just law is a man-made code following the moral law. While King defines moral law as related to the law of God, we can broaden this definition to his correlated premise that any law that uplifts the human personality is just.
If we consider the Aristotelian view of flourishing, or eudaimonia, or a consistent good life and an ultimate good life with all the “virtues” of the character and intellect, but also calls for “friends with good people and a certain measure of good fortune” (Krishnan, 2023). Or if we consider a contemporary Aristotelian conception of the good life, through Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach, the human personality necessitates the government’s promotion of central capabilities, such as freedom of association, life, and bodily integrity. Some of our laws protect flourishing, but they are typically unyoked against marginalized people. The Japanese Internment Act of 1942, where 120,000 Japanese-Americans were wrongly interred in the name of national security. Implementation of this law degraded their ethnic identity, while forcibly removing naturally endowed rights to their identity and due process.
We may see the right to life, including the dignity of self and the body, as part of human flourishing–thus, establishing it as a moral law. So, anyone who degrades someone’s right to life would be seen as breaking the moral law, thereby rejecting a just one.
As modern society evolves and becomes more complicated, we gain a complex system of laws, ranging from tax to family. These laws aim to maintain a citizen’s liberty. Tax laws promote civil rights, like a child’s right to education through property tax, giving each constituent, whether they have children or not, equal burden to ensure the thriving and flourishing of others. where in the case of the tax law, it gives every constituent a burden to uphold to ensure the thriving and flourishing of others. However, when considering King and Chochos’s works, we must also promote civil rights through law for all people, including those who have a conviction and their victims. Yet, when we look at how we create our criminal legal system and how we promote civil rights for people convicted of a crime and their victims, we must ask if we desire to degrade the human personality in pursuit of punishment.
Is it just to uphold the death penalty? Is it just to subject victims to intense guilt, shame, or fear? These are questions beyond the scope of this post. But, as we consider the definition of the criminal justice system, it intends to “manage accused and convicted criminals.” The management of human life is not kin to the protection of the human personality; it already inscribed a moral justification for the gross miscarriages of justice that we see, solely because we create the image of the criminal. This figure of the criminal, as Angela Davis writes, is the young, Black man. This portrayal can be extended to all marginalized people, including other men and women of color, unhoused persons, or those with drug addiction. It is not just to degrade the human personality by classifying these people as subhuman, using the model of the criminal justice system to label them and later, punish them for their crimes.
Perhaps, we should take a lesson from the Chochos and Dr. King and reword our theories of justice to understand that our current nation degrades the human personality of some citizens, including those who have entered the criminal legal system. As Erica Bryant of the Vera Institute of Justice says, the accuracy of our language matters. And it is a misnomer to say that our system upholds or delivers justice.
By beginning with these simple words, we open the conversation up to the Rawlsian idea of normative reflection and revision. We must reflect on the gross miscarriages of justice that Black and other marginalized populations, like those who are disabled, face within our criminal legal system. During this reflection, we must also consider how we approach those who have interacted with the legal system, both as victims and perpetrators. We should not degrade their human personality for their actions; instead, we must hold space for restorative justice principles. The Restorative Justice Exchange finds three core values: encounter where the offender takes responsibility for their wrongs before participation; repair of the relationship between the victim and the offender, but also the whole community involved; and finally, reform which includes pinpointing the root cause of crime, systemic and structural issues to foster a more just system.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Americans