Justice

There is no such thing as justice.

Yes, I did just type that.

In our world today, the justice system is preoccupied with catching criminals and making them pay for their crimes. Murder gets 25 years in prison; armed robbery around 10. The convicted do their time, and at the end are released. The world would have us believe that this is justice.

I can understand that a family shattered by an untimely death suffers loss. But suppose that the murderer is caught, convicted, and is then forced to spend the remainder of his life in prison: does the family gain any direct benefit from this action? As the saying goes, two wrongs do not make a right.

The family may get feelings of joy and peace to see someone pay for their crimes. But the family isn’t the one on the receiving end—the criminal does not pay years of his life to the family. If anything, the whole justice system experience teaches the family how to extract happiness from someone else’s suffering, a trait that is hardly positive.

True “justice” would mean for the murder victim to be restored to the family. Anything else is not justice but a twisted, evil idea that has somehow wormed its way into human thought for the last few thousand years as a positive trait.

Vengeance is not justice. Forcing someone who has wronged you into the dust at your feet is a manifestation of every evil that has plagued the Earth for the duration of human existence—pride, anger, materialism. Justice makes us lesser people.

You may argue that without the justice system, there would be no deterrent for breaking the law, and therefore no one would keep it: and this is a point that I will not contest. But don’t call it justice—once a wrong has been done, it cannot be made right short of undoing it.

Shoving someone into the dirt only lowers the mean height of all humanity.

"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." (Mahatma Gandhi)