On Justice.

On earth as it is in heaven.

My feelings on justice are that I'm sitting on a fence. With one side being condemnation, and the other being justice itself. It would be so easy and satisfying to just let wrath loose. It's so satisfyingly consuming to let dark thoughts reign supreme because it gives feelings of righteous superiority. But righteous superiority is a poison balm. It feels good in the moment but does nothing for healing, and grieving, and mending the wound that has been made. It's fickle in that it keeps you locked in a grim loop of hatred, with a closed heart, full of bitterness and a desire for revenge masking itself as good.

Can revenge be made and still be called justice? I'd argue no. And I'd argue this because an eye for an eye does leave the world blind, as the expression goes. Because vengeance by nature is heavy handed — even if it feels in equal measure, you lose a lot more than an eyeball. You lose sight. You lose an aspect of yourself. A way of life. 

We can't be just in rage. 

You can't be just in wishing two decades of prison on somebody — sometimes longer sentences are handed down than the years the person has been living. Decades long prison sentences is revenge. 

Justice made in rage always has an element of vengeance and therefore it is a corruption of the true sense of the word. The act of slashing back is never right, even if it appears fair.

Confucius said 'when you seek revenge, first dig two graves' — because harm answered with harm doesn't end the cycle, it restarts it. The wrongdoer will perceive your retaliation as excessive, disagree that their wrong was entirely wrong, and strike back. On a larger scale, when we first seek revenge as a society, we still dig two graves: one for the prisoner, the other socially. We bury them behind walls out of sight without restoring anything to the bereaved or wronged. The best a victim can hope for is satisfaction served cold and bureaucratically.

Yes, it's hard to find even sympathy for a wrongdoer — especially one who's hurt you — and it's harder still to forgive them. But for justice to be true, the path requires to see them as a whole, complex individual with their own inner life and their own sequence of events. The temptation to turn to wrath is natural. It's so instinctive we see it in the animal kingdom. It must feel like closure to have the other behind bars — but it's not healing. That comes from within. After time, practice, and patience. After growth. After recovery.

The problem with the court of public opinion is we often cling to our dagger of conjecture and refuse point blank any empathy for the accused. Justice should not see with one eye and pass judgment from there, always in favour of one side. She should be blind and hear only the truth — but another problem is that people lie. Well-intentioned or not, it always makes things worse.

Justice would be much easier if at least one party could own up to their mistakes before the judge and jury and witnesses, because being as honest as you can is how you win the favour of justice.

Here’s one thing that always struck me: certainty of a crime committed is arbitrary. 

We can't be 99% certain somebody committed a crime — even if they confess. Evidence can only paint a picture, witness statements are always accounts, and confessions can be false. If people were honest, they would never be able to say 'beyond all reasonable doubt' — because if you weren't there, you can never be certain. If all the pieces don't fit perfectly, you still cannot be certain. If you haven't heard everybody, the same uncertainty remains. Because we are human.

On top of that, justice is a rare virtue to find in any one individual — let alone 12 randomly selected members of the public.

Justice should look like a balancing of scales. We should be adding to the harmed instead of removing from the perpetrator — because two wrongs famously don't make a right.

I think justice looks like learning. It looks like healing. Like being able to integrate and accommodate the wound that was inflicted into your daily life. It's not about the wrongdoer giving you anything, but rather the perpetrators or the broader society providing for the person who's been wronged so they can flourish in the future. Not as an obligation in equal measure, but giving opportunities for them to grow bigger than they could have if it wasn't for the wound — restoring what the damage did, and maybe even more.

Wrongdoers can confess and directly contribute — but not all wrongdoers will. And that should not be relied upon for justice to prevail. Restorative justice can and should happen regardless of a confession.

Once I thought: in heaven, a true jury nullifies every time. Nobody is guilty.

Nobody is found guilty because we are imperfect conduits of justice as humans — we can't know all. We can't balance to the gram by eye alone.

If we were perfectly just, we would condemn nobody, because a perfect exemplar of justice as a virtue would focus first on the person who had been wronged rather than on the wrongdoer. What's more reliable than certainty of crime is measuring harm done to an individual — how they've changed, how they perceive the grievance — and providing for that instead.

Justice is not about a perfectly just system. It's about perfectly just people. And perfectly just people probably don't exist. Most of us fall back on conjecture.

And for prisoners, Institutionalisation happens at the 7-year mark. It’s on little use to them or society to imprison for longer durations. The punishment is already having freedom stripped from you in prison, and where is the rehabilitation?

Long prison sentences are only vengeance in legal format.

And a life in prison — you might as well execute the individual. But then we'd be killing people for being killers. The same thing they did to end up there in the first place. Just an eye for an eye.

It's hypocritical for a state to ban murder and then murder its own people. Either we agree that taking the life of another human being is legal, or it's not. There shouldn't be any hypocrisy in the law.

Restorative justice is harder than retribution on the individual who's been wronged because it delays gratification and instead asks for patience. It also asks that the hurt caused dies with the wronged — which asks a lot of a person in pain, and can feel in itself like an additional injustice. But that's how the retributive cycle stops. Somebody has to take the bigger place and accept the wound as it is.

If anybody needs to hear this — for as long as you seek vengeance, you'll be forsaken in yourself.

If you've ever thought to yourself 'I'll spit on his grave' — swallow instead. Spit on the devil in yourself.