a conclusion about justice

Essays About Justice: Top 5 Examples and 7 Prompts

Discover our guide with examples of essays about justice and prompts for your essay writing and discuss vital matters relating to a person’s or nation’s welfare.

Justice, in general, refers to the notion that individuals get what they deserve. It includes fundamental moral values in law and politics and is considered an act of fairness, equality, and honesty. Four types of justice deal with how victims can solicit a verdict. They are procedural, distributive, retributive, and restorative. There are many pieces with justice as the subject. It’s because justice is a broad subject encompassing many human values.

5 Essay Examples

1. juvenile justice system of usa essay by anonymous on ivypanda.com, 2. wrongful convictions in criminal justice system by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 3. racial profiling within the criminal justice system by anonymous on papersowl.com, 4. criminal justice: the ban-the-box law by anonymous on ivypanda.com, 5. the special needs of the criminal justice on mental illness cases by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 1. what is justice, 2. is justice only for the rich and powerful, 3. the importance of justice, 4. the justice system in mainstream media, 5. justice: then vs. now, 6. justice system around the world, 7. obstructions to justice.

“No doubt, familiarity about the nature of juvenile crimes and how juvenile justice structures function across the world will offer an insight to policy makers, social scientists and for gullible citizens. Thus, a comparative analysis will throw light on how well or how poorly one nation is exercising relative to other nations.”

The essay delves into the justice system process for teenagers who are 18 years and below who commit wrongful acts. Most teenagers involved in juvenile crimes do not have a strong foundation or parental support. The author also talks about the treatments, boot camps, and retreat houses available for teenagers serving in juvenile prisons.

The ever-increasing number of juvenile crimes in the world reflects the mismanagement and lack of juvenile courts, sentencing programs, rehabilitation, and age-appropriate treatment. The writer believes that if mistrials remain in the juvenile system, the problem will continue. They suggest that the government must initiate more system reforms and provide juvenile offenders with proper ethical education.

“The justice system is composed of various legal groups and actors, making a miscarriage possible at any stage of the legal process, or at the hands of any legal actor. Eyewitness error, police misconduct, or falsification of evidence are examples of factors that may lead to a wrongful conviction.”

In this essay, the author uses various citations that show the justice system’s flaws in the process and criteria of its rulings. It further discusses the different instances of unfair judgments and mentions that at least 1% of all convicts serving prison time were wrongfully accused.

The writer believes that changing the way of addressing different cases and ensuring that all legal professionals do their assigned duties will result in fair justice. You might also be interested in these essays about choice .

“Here in the 21st century, we don’t exactly have ‘Black Codes’ we have what is known as Racial Profiling. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) defines racial profiling as ‘the discriminatory practice by law enforcement officials of targeting individuals for suspicion of crime based on the individual’s race ethnicity, religion or national origin.’”

This essay investigates the involvement of race in the criminal justice system, whether they are victims or perpetrators. The author claims that some law enforcement officers mistreat and misjudge people because of their race and presents various cases as evidence of these discriminatory actions. One example is the case of an unarmed black teenager, Jordan Edwards , who was shot because former officer Roy Oliver thought his partner was in danger.

Unfortunately, law enforcement officials use their power and position in society to deny any act of racial profiling, rendering the said law useless. The author declares that while their paper may not prove racial bias in the criminal justice system, they can prove that a person’s color plays a role and can cause harm.

“I think the Ban-the-Box law is the best way of creating employment opportunities for ex-convicts without discrimination. Criminal offenses vary in the degree of the crime, making it unfair to treat all ex-convicts the same. Moreover, some felons learn from their mistakes during detention and parole, creating a better and law-abiding citizen with the ability to work faithfully.”

The essay explains how ex-convicts or current convicts are consistently discriminated against. This discrimination affects their lives even after serving their sentence, especially in their rights to vote and work.

Regarding job hunting, the author believes the Ban-the-Box law will effectively create more employment opportunities. The law allows employers to see an ex-convict’s skills rather than just their record. The essay concludes with a reminder that everyone is entitled to a civil right to vote, while private enterprises are free to run background checks.

“Case management focuses on incorporating key elements that focus on improving the wellbeing of individuals that are being assessed. Mental illness within the criminal justice system is treated as a sensitive issue that requires urgent intervention in order to ensure that an inmate is able to recover.”

This essay pries into one of the most delicate areas of ruling in the justice system, which is leading mentally ill convicts. Offenders who were deemed mentally ill should be able to receive particular treatments for their health while serving time.

The author mentions that every country must be able to provide mental health services for the inmates to prevent conflicts inside the prison. In conclusion, they suggest that reviewing and prioritizing policies related to mental illness is the best solution to the issue.

Are you interested in writing about mental illnesses? Check out our guide on how to write essays about depression.

7 Prompts for Essays About Justice

Justice is a vast subject, and its literal meaning is the quality of being just. This process often occurs when someone who has broken the law gets what they should, whether freedom or punishment. Research and discuss everything there is to know about justice so your readers can fully understand it. Include a brief history of its origins, types, and uses.

Several situations prove that justice is only for the rich. One of the main reasons is the expensive court fees. Research why victims settle outside the court or just let their abusers get away with crimes.

Include data that proves justice is a luxury where the only ones who can ask for equal treatment are those with resources—present situations or well-known cases to support your statements. On the other hand, you can also provide counter-arguments such as government programs that help financially-challenged individuals.

Every citizen has the right to be protected and treated fairly in court. Explain the importance of justice to a person, society, and government. Then, add actual cases of how justice is applied to encourage reform or chaos. Include relevant cases that demonstrate how justice impacts lives and legal changes, such as the case of Emmett Till .

Talk about how justice is usually depicted on screen and how it affects people’s expectations of how the justice system works. Popular television shows such as Suits and Law and Order are examples of the justice system being portrayed in the media. Research these examples and share your opinion on whether movies or television portray the justice system accurately or not.

In this essay, research how justice worldwide has changed. This can include looking at legal systems, human rights, and humanity’s ever-changing opinions. For instance, child labor was considered normal before but is viewed as an injustice today. List significant changes in justice and briefly explain why they have changed over time. You might also be interested in these essays about violence .

Essays About Justice: Justice system around the world

Countries have different ways of instilling justice within their societies. For this prompt, research and discuss the countries you think have the best and worst legal systems. Then, point out how these differences affect the country’s crime rates and quality of life for its citizens.

Examine why people tend to take justice into their hands, disobey legal rules, or give up altogether. It can be because seeking justice is an arduous process resulting in emotional and financial burdens. Often, this occurs when a person feels their government is not providing the support they need. Take a look at this social issue, and discuss it in your essay for a strong argumentative.

If you are interested in learning more, check out our essay writing tips !

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

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Justice as a Virtue

The notion of justice as a virtue began in reference to a trait of individuals, and to some extent remains so, even if today we often conceive the justice of individuals as having some (grounding) reference to social justice. But from the start, the focus on justice as a virtue faced pressures to diffuse, in two different ways.

First, “justice as a virtue” is ambiguous as between individual and social applications. Rawls and others regard justice as “the first virtue of social institutions” (1971, p. 3), but Rawls is not the first to think of justice as a virtue of social institutions or societies — Plato was there long before him. However, justice as a virtue of societies, polities, and their institutions is addressed elsewhere , so the focus in this essay will be on justice as a virtue in individuals. That said, individuals typically live as members of political communities, so the societal dimension of justice as a virtue will never be long out of view (Woodruff 2018).

Second, from the start the effort to analyze the virtue of justice has led to attempts to formalize the requirements (or norms) of justice, and at times the latter project has threatened to swallow the first in ways that make thinking of a virtue of justice gratuitous or otiose. We might be tempted to think that the virtue of justice consists simply in compliance with the norms of justice our theory specifies: a just person will be one who complies with the norms of justice, whether those are narrowly interpersonal or more broadly social or political in scope. In this way the virtue becomes subsidiary to norms of justice independently specified (Anderson 2010, p. 2; LeBar 2014). Doing so threatens to lose the force that the notion of virtue had in the earliest thinking about justice.

A further complication is that even the idea of justice as a virtue of individuals seems ambiguous in regard to scope. Plato in the Republic treats justice as an overarching virtue of both individuals and societies, so that almost every issue he (or we) would regard as ethical comes in under the notion of justice. But in later usages justice covers only part of individual morality, and we don’t readily think of someone as unjust if they lie or neglect their children — other epithets more readily spring to mind. Individual justice first and most readily regards moral issues having to do with distributions of goods or property. It is, we say, unjust for someone to steal from people or not to give them what he owes them, and it is also unjust if someone called upon to distribute something good (or bad or both) among members of a group uses an arbitrary or unjustified basis for making the distribution. Discussion of justice as an individual virtue often centers on questions, therefore, about property and other distributable goods, though the broader sense broached by Plato never entirely disappears. Still there is disagreement over whether the broader distributive questions associated with political morality have subordinated or obscured the earlier Greek concerns with justice as a virtue of individual character (Hursthouse 1999, pp. 5–6; Coope 2007; Lu 2017).

1.1 Ancient

1.2 medieval and modern, 2. social psychology and justice, 3. justice as a virtue of societies.

4. Justice and other Virtues

5. Recent Developments

6. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries.

Philosophical discussion of justice begins with Plato, who treats the topic in a variety of dialogues, most substantially in Republic . There Plato offers the first sustained discussion of the nature of justice ( dikaiosune ) and its relation to happiness, as a departure from three alternatives receiving varying degrees of attention. First, there is a traditionalist conception of justice (speaking the truth and paying your debts). Second, Plato has Socrates rebut the Sophist conception of justice which built on a distinction between nature ( phusis ) and convention ( nomos ) As Plato has this conception articulated by Thrasymachus in Book I, justice is simply the “advantage of the stronger,” not tracking anything like the sort of value attributed to it by traditionalists. Finally, Plato has Socrates confront a conventionalist conception of justice that anticipates modern contractarian views, in which justice — forbearing preying on others in exchange for not being preyed on by them — is a “second-best alternative,” not as good as being able to prey at will upon others, but better than being the prey of others. These last two challenges give rise to the central question of the book: to whose advantage is justice? Would we really be better off being unjust if we could get away with it? Plato’s negative answer to that question is the project of the balance of the work.

Plato’s method involves the provocative idea that justice in the city ( polis ) is the same thing as justice in the individual, just “writ large.” There are good reasons to worry about that assumption (Williams 1973; Keyt 2006). But in Plato’s sociology of the city, there are three classes engaged in a kind of division of labor. There is a guardian class which rules, a class of “auxiliaries” that provide the force behind the ruling, and the class of merchants that produce to satisfy the needs and desires of the city. Similarly, the psyche of the individual has three parts: a reasoning part to rule, a “spirited” part to support the rule of reason, and an appetitive part. Plato finds justice in the city to consist in each part “having and doing its own,” and since the smaller is just like the larger, justice in the individual consists in each part of the psyche doing its own work. (This grounds the idea, later enshrined by Justinian, that justice is “giving every man his due;” Justinian I.i). Further, Plato argues, justice is a master virtue in a sense, because in both the city and the psyche, if each part is doing its own job, both city and psyche will also have wisdom, courage, and moderation or self-discipline. This conception of justice sustains the contrast with the conventionalist view advocated by the Sophists. On the other hand, at least initially it leaves it an open question whether the just individual refrains from such socially proscribed actions as lying, killing, and stealing. Plato eventually seeks to show that someone with a healthy, harmonious soul wouldn’t lie, kill, or steal, but it is not clear that argument succeeds, nor, if it does, that that is the right understanding of why we ought not to lie, kill, or steal (Sachs 1963; LeBar 2013, ch. XII).

Plato gives a somewhat different treatment of justice in Crito , in which Socrates’ eponymous friend attempts to persuade Socrates to accept his (Crito’s) offer to bribe a way out of the death sentence Socrates is waiting to have executed. Here Plato’s arguments first associate the just life with the good life, thus the life Socrates has most reason to live. And justice, he then argues, requires not only not inflicting wrong or injury on others, even in response to wrongs from them, but fulfilling one’s agreements, and — in particular — abiding by one’s (tacit or explicit) agreement to abide by the laws of the city unless one can persuade it to change them. Of course, justice cannot require one to abide by laws that require one to act unjustly, as Socrates’ own case (as characterized in Apology ) shows (Kraut 1984).

It is worth noting (as Johnston 2011 observes) that even if Plato’s is the first philosophical discussion of justice, a concern with what an individual is due as a matter of justice is a driving issue in Homer’s Iliad , though there is no counterpart concern there with justice as a property of a society or tribe. So even Plato’s philosophical concerns are building on well-established questions about what justice requires of us in our treatment of one another.

Aristotle does not see the virtue of justice in quite the comprehensive sense Plato does; he treats it as a virtue of character (in the entirety of one of the ten books of the Nicomachean Ethics , also common to the Eudemian Ethics ), and as a virtue of constitutions and political arrangements (in Politics ). The question naturally arises as to the relation between these forms of justice. Aristotle seems to think they are closely related, without being synonymous applications of the same concept. As the latter is a conception of political justice, we will focus here on the former. Justice as a personal virtue follows Aristotle’s model for virtues of character, in which the virtue lies as an intermediate or mean between vices of excess and defect ( Nicomachean Ethics V). While he grants that there is a “general” sense of justice in which justice is coincident with complete virtue, there is a “particular” sense in which it is concerned with not overreaching ( pleonexia ). It is not clear, however, exactly how Aristotle understands this arrangement, or the nature of the vices of excess and defect which this “particular” justice is to counteract. One very plausible reading has it that justice is opposed to a desire for maldistribution of “goods of fortune” such as money, fame, or honor (Williams 1980; Curzer 1995). On another it is opposed to an insufficient attention to others’ rights (Foot 1988, p. 9). On still another it focuses on the goods of others, or common goods (O’Connor 1988; Miller 1995).

These issues remain open in part because Aristotle seems most interested in establishing a conception of the formal structure of “particular” justice, which seems to reflect a conception of desert. He distinguishes between justice in distribution and justice in rectification. The former, he claims, adheres to a kind of proportionality, in which what each deserves is proportional to the relationship between the contributions. If A contributes twice as much as B (of whatever the metric of merit is relevant in some particular case), then A’s return ought also to be twice B’s. This conception of distributive justice obviously lends itself to “goods of fortune” — and to some goods, like wealth, more obviously than others — but it need not in principle be confined to such goods, although the examples Aristotle provides suggest such applications. Similarly, justice in rectification involves a sort of “arithmetical proportion.” If C defrauds D by amount X, then justice requires depriving C of X and restoring X to D, as a matter of reestablishing a kind of equality between them. These structural devices are elegant and attractive, but they leave open a number of questions (LeBar, forthcoming). First, as indicated, to what are we to suppose they apply? Second, in what way do they figure into the nature of the person who is just in the particular sense? (That is, how are they related to justice as a virtue?) Does a model of particular justice as a virtue fit the general model of virtue as a mean, and if so, what sort of mean is it? Aristotle seems torn between a conception of justice as a virtue in his distinctive understanding of what a virtue is — with a requirement that one have all the virtues to have any ( Nicomachean Ethics VI.13), and rooted in the doctrine of the mean — and justice as having the form of a formal normative structure, to which the virtue threatens to become subsidiary. All this is to leave aside questions of the relation between this “particular” sense of justice and political justice, and the role of the virtue of justice in the individual as it contributes to justice in the polis.

Epicurus’ conception of the role of justice was more central to his eudaimonism perhaps than its counterpart in Plato and Aristotle, but that reflects in part his distinctive understanding of eudaimonia , or happiness. For Epicurus this consisted in ataraxia — tranquility, or freedom from disturbance. Given that the good life is the life without disturbance, justice plays a key instrumental role. One might, Epicurus thinks, withdraw entirely from human society to avoid disturbance, but the alternative is to live socially under terms which secure the avoidance of disturbance. This is the structure of the ideal Epicurean community, in which each forbears aggression (Armstrong 1997, Thrasher 2013). Justice is a matter of keeping agreements generally, and in particular the agreement not to harm or transgress social norms.

In this way Epicurus offers a conception of the virtue of justice that harmonizes both its personal and its political dimensions. The personal virtue consists in the motivation to abide by a contract not to aggress or harm others. The political virtue inheres in a polity in which such norms regulate the conduct of its citizens, and these two dimensions of justice as a virtue reinforce each other.

The other great ethical tradition of antiquity (Stoicism) had remarkably little to say about justice (Annas 1993, p. 311), so we pass on to the medieval and modern periods.

The legacy of the ancients — Aristotle in particular — continued into the medieval period, notably in the work of Thomas Aquinas, who appropriated much of Aristotle’s philosophy while setting it into a Christian theological framework. As in Aristotle, virtue and virtues are prominent parts of his ethical theory. And, like Aristotle justice is an important virtue, though for Aquinas it less important than the virtue of charity, a Christian virtue that did not appear among the virtues recognized by Aristotle. There are other elements of his account that situate it in an interesting way in the transition from ancient eudaimonist accounts of virtue, to virtue as it appears in the modern era, before it recedes from prominence in ethical theory.

But to the extent Christian writers allied themselves with Plato and Aristotle, they were downplaying another central element in Christian thought and morality, the emphasis on agapic love. Such love seems to be a matter of motivationally active feeling rather than of being rational, and some writers on morality (eventually) allowed this side of Christianity to have a major influence on what they had to say about virtue.

Significant elements of the Aristotelian account of justice reappear in Aquinas’. First, justice is first and foremost a virtue of character rather than institutions, although Aquinas draws a distinction among such virtues not found in Aristotle. For Aquinas, justice as a virtue is a matter of perfection of the will, rather than the passions (ST II-II 58.4). Aquinas offers no account of justice as a virtue of societies or institutions, though he interprets the “general” sense of justice he borrows from Aristotle as being a matter of individual willing and action for the common good. “Particular” justice, which as in Aristotle’s account is most of his focus, has to do with relationships -- in particular but not limited to exchange -- between individuals as individuals (ST II-II 58.8).

Second, Aquinas grounds the norms for these exchanges in the ancient formula of Justinian, which hearkens back to Plato: justice is giving each his own. But his interpretation of this formula situates him astride a deep but subtle divide between ancient and modern thought. To some extent this effect is an upshot of his inheriting not only the Greek eudaimonist tradition, but also a Roman jurisprudential tradition in which notions like standing and right as claim (rather than, say, fairness) had begun to emerge (Porter 2016, p. 143). As a result, Aquinas’ synergistic account has some novel complications.

One major complication, relative to the ancient accounts, is that what is ours by right is a recognition of a kind of status, as an effect of the order among people ordained by God ( ST I-II 100.8). As Jean Porter points out, this establishes a normative standard for justice that does not grow out of the agent’s own perfection or eudaimonia (Porter 2016, p. 157). There are two significant follow-on implications.

First, the fabric of the eudaimonist approach to practical reasoning and life — inherited from the Greeks — begins to fray. For better or worse, on the Greek eudaimonist views (including here Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Epicurus) our reasons for action arise from our interest in a happy life. If the reason-giving nature of others arises from a different source, as this reading of Aquinas suggests, then practical reason seems to have a duality of ultimate sources, with the complications that kind of duality brings.

Second, this is the first step in the diminution of the theoretical significance of the virtues — a process that will not begin to be reversed until the middle of the 20th century. On Aristotle’s view, for example, the virtuous person sees reasons for acting that the non-virtuous do not (and that arguably are not there to be seen absent the effects of virtue — LeBar 2013; Berryman 2019). Virtue is no longer the normative epicenter of the theory, as it was for the Greeks. To the extent that this aspect of Aquinas’s view has virtue responsive to value or reasons that is accounted for in some way other than the work of virtue, it is the leading edge of process that will result in a much-reduced role for virtue in later ethical accounts

Hume is an excellent exemplar of this point, in both the Treatise and the Enquiries . Virtue, Hume maintains, is a matter of “some quality or character,” produced in one by “durable principles of the mind” ( T III.iii.I, p. 575). We deem such qualities virtues not, as on the ancient Greek view, because they conduce to the happiness of the person who has them, but because they have a “tendency to the good of mankind” or society. ( T III.iii.I). This service renders them pleasing to our “moral tastes:” our approbation, Hume tells us, has its source in “view of a character, which is naturally fitted to be useful to others, or to the person himself, or which is agreeable to others, or to the person himself” ( T III.iii.I, 591). We can think of that as the criterion some quality of character must have to be deemed a virtue. In consequence, what counts as virtuous is an upshot of, and not the source of, the normative foundations of this view.

By Hume’s time the content of justice as a virtue has shifted as well. In Hume’s treatment, the focus of justice is property — relations of “mine and thine.” It is a “cautious, jealous” virtue in the sense that it is focused on the sorts of exclusionary powers that are characteristic of property rules and relations. We may always be aspiring for more but justice aims at the preservation and security of what one has already ( E III.1, p. 184). So the virtue of justice, as Hume thinks of it, will in the main consist of a quality in one which disposes one to observe and uphold these rules.

What Hume wants to show is, first, that we can have such a disposition or quality (that is, that it is possible for us to have a quality or character to observe the rules of justice), and, second, that such a quality would count as a virtue, given his criteria. His approach to these questions in the Treatise is framed by a problem he has set up himself. To appreciate that problem, we have to step back to Hume’s broader view about moral motivation. Hume had argued that moral principles “are not conclusions of our reason” ( T III.i.I); instead, they are “more properly felt than judg’d of” ( T III.i.II). Morality, and virtue, is a matter of sentiments or passions. Why? Hume marshals a number of arguments to this effect which are not relevant to our purposes. The basic reason is that the functional roles of reason and the passions are markedly different, in Hume’s view. The task of reason is to discover truth or falsehood, in “relations of ideas” or “matters of facts” ( T III.i.I); as such, it utterly lacks the capacity to move us to action. Only the passions can do that ( T II.iii.III). The passions, on the other hand, have no representational content whatsoever; they are “original existences” ( T II.iii.III; III.i.I). Virtue is paradigmatically a practical matter: it is a property of what we do, and to act we must be motivated. That means any successful account of virtue must find it in our passions, not in any aspect of our reason ( T III.i.I). So far so good.

However, when we come to justice, we look in vain for a passion that can supply motive power for us to act justly. If anything, our natural motives move us away from justice ( T III.ii.II). Self-love requires “correcting and restraining” ( T III.ii.I). And only a passion can do that. But which? Hume himself dismisses the possibilities of public or private beneficence or universal love. In the end he concludes that there is no natural passion to explain it. Instead, it is in a certain crucial sense artificial ( T III.ii.VI). Under certain conditions, given that we are sensible of the advantages of living in human society, our self-love or self-interest may be given an “alteration of its direction,” and induce us to respect the rules of justice. These Hume thinks of primarily as involving honesty and “particular” property rules ( T III.ii.II). That “alteration” needs explanation.

Two facts about the conditions in which we act — one about us, one about our environment — set this alteration in motion. First, Hume maintains, we are limited in our generosity or benevolence. And second, we live in conditions of scarcity ( T III.ii.II). We have to work to make a go of it, and we cannot count on others to do so for us. We need control of our world to meet our needs, but we are vulnerable to the selfishness and predation of others.

The solution, Hume argues, is that we naturally fall into a “convention” by which we observe that rules of property — the observance of which is key to the virtue of justice — is good for all of us. This convention is no formal agreement; Hume argues that it cannot be something like the product of promise or compact ( T III.ii.II). Instead, “it arises gradually, and acquires force by a slow progression, and by our repeated experience of the inconveniences of transgressing it” ( T III.ii.II, p. 490). Much as two men pulling the oars in a boat together need no explicit agreement to find they prosper by such an arrangement, so do we generally. (Wilson 2018 explores support for Hume’s hypothesis through work in experimental economics.) So in the end it is self-interest that drives us to comply with the requirements of justice, though Hume adds that sympathy with the public interest induces our endorsement of it once justice has become established. This endorsement, however, is reserved for a scheme of property rules taken generally; as Hume observes, individual instances of compliance may frequently be “contrary to public interest,” though such compliance is still required of us. Hume believes the benefit of the system overall, both to society and to individual, requires that rules not admit of exceptions ( T III.ii.II, E Appendix III, §256). Self-interest accounts for the possibility of our being motivated to act as the virtue of justice requires, and both the utility and the agreeableness, both to ourselves and others, of a resulting social order with respected property rules, leads to our approbation of that motivation as a virtue.

In fact, this point — that “public utility is the sole origin of justice” — is the point of Hume’s discussion of justice in the Enquiries (III.I, ¶145). Scarcity imposes a need for us to distinguish mine from thine, and we have not sufficient generosity in our natures to do without property rules (as we might, say, in our families). And once again Hume argues that our recognition of the utility and necessity of justice provides “entire command over our sentiments” ( E III.II, ¶163).As David Johnston observes (Johnston 2011, p. 138), Hume’s understanding of the value of justice as instrumental in the promotion of utility marks a sharp shift from earlier understandings which invoked various forms of reciprocity in understanding that value.

Such a sentimentalist account of justice is also found in Adam Smith; in fact, a focus on the sentiments almost completely swamps concern for virtue. Our judgments of virtue and vice, he says, are compounded by consideration of two different “relations” in a sentiment: “the cause or object which excites or causes it, and … the end which it proposes” (TMS II.i.introduction). His focus on those two “relations” obviates any independent discussion of virtue per se. He does however explicitly countenance a virtue of justice, developed in contrast with the virtue of beneficence. In Smith, even more clearly than in Hume, one can see that this virtue consists in conformity to “rules” or “laws” of justice that appear to exist antecedently to the realization of the virtue itself, unlike ancient accounts. Smith indicates that justice merits resentment when absent, that it may be “extorted by force,” and that in the main it requires forbearing from harming others.. Smith calls justice a “negative virtue” in this respect: often all it requires is that we sit still and do nothing (Smith 1759, II.ii.I.5, 9). It is essential to the subsistence of society, Smith tells us (Smith 1759, II.ii.3.3-4), but — in contrast to Hume — is not reducible in its motivational basis to regard for society. Instead, our just concern for “multitudes” is compounded of our concern for individuals, which arises from “fellow-feeling,” which is yet short of “love, esteem, and affection” (Smith 1759, II.ii.3.7).

In Kant, finally, along with a movement away from sentimentalism we see the completion of the distinction between justice as a virtue and justice as a norm to which a virtue may or may not correspond. While Kant has a theory (or “doctrine”) of virtue, he distinguishes that theory precisely against a counterpoised theory of justice. The two are complementary elements in the “metaphysics of morals.” Moreover, the doctrine of justice itself has two parts, roughly corresponding to the distinction present since Plato’s work, between the role of justice in the individual and the role of justice in the state. Kant calls these “private right” and “public right,” respectively. But right in either case is not how Kant at least conceives of virtue; instead, right is a “condition” that can obtain between the moral agents comprising a moral or legal community, in virtue of their principles of choice in acting (Kant 1797). Little remains here of the notion of justice as a virtue of individuals as it began with the ancient Greeks.

20th-century developmental psychology drew deeply on the Kantian legacy. Piaget (1932/1948) treated moral development as principally involving increasing cognitive sophistication. More particularly, Piaget saw that sophistication as a matter of taking more and more general or universal views of moral issues, and endorsed the Kantian and rationalist idea that morality rests on and can be justified in terms of considerations of justice. Piaget saw a “law of evolution” in moral development, from an understanding of rules (including moral rules) as being “heteronomous” impositions of authority, to which one is objectively responsible, to a grounding in mutual respect, accompanied by subjective responsibility to others (Piaget 1932/1948, p. 225). This transition is fostered through social interaction, and attention to norms of equality and reciprocity replace those of mere obedience.

Educational psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg was inspired by Piaget to propose a conception of moral development that postulated six stages of human moral development. In his earliest work, Kohlberg identified the highest stage of such development with a concern for justice and human rights based on universal principles. Concern for relationships and for individual human well-being was embedded in a framework of conformity to social norms, at lower stages of the process. Moreover, he saw the ordering of the different stages in Piagetian fashion as basically reflecting differences in rational understanding: those whose moral thinking involved the invoking of universal principles of justice and rights were thought to show a more advanced cognitive development than those whose moral thought appeals primarily to the importance of relationships and of human well-being or suffering. The paradigm of moral development involves judgments that are “reversible,” in the sense that each party to the issue can accept the correct judgment by reversing his or her perspective and taking up the viewpoint of the other (Kohlberg 1981). The sophisticated moral reasoner will engage in a process of “moral musical chairs,” taking up the positions of the parties to the conflict successively. It is, on this version of Kohlberg’s thought, that formal feature of the deliberative process that is characteristic of greatest moral development. As his research and thought progressed, however, Kohlberg increasingly acknowledged that these formal features were less characteristic of overall moral development and thought than of the deployment of specifically justice-based concepts. In fact, Kohlberg was impressed by the work of Rawls, and thought that the nature of Rawls’ “original position of equality” exemplified the kind of reversibility that is paradigmatic of the highest form of moral thought (Kohlberg 1981, p. 204). However, his approach treats utilitarianism as less cognitively advanced (more primitive) than rationalist views like Kant’s, and utilitarians (like R.M. Hare) naturally called into question the objectivity and intellectual fairness of Kohlberg’s account.

More significantly, perhaps, the evidence for Kohlberg’s stage sequence was drawn from studies of boys, and when one applies the sequence to the study of young girls, it turns out that girls on average end up at a less advanced stage of moral development than boys do. In her 1982 book In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development , Carol Gilligan responded to Kohlberg’s views by questioning whether a theory of moral development based solely on a sample of males could reasonably be used to draw conclusions about the inferior moral development of women. Gilligan argued that her own studies of women’s development indicated that the moral development of girls and women proceeds and ends in a different fashion from that of boys and men, but that that proves nothing about inferiority or superiority: it is merely a fact of difference. In particular, Gilligan claimed that women tend to think morally in terms of connection to others (relationships) and in terms of caring about (responsibility for) those with whom they are connected; men, by contrast and in line with Kohlberg’s studies, tend to think more in terms of general principles of justice and of individual rights against (or individual autonomy from) other people. But Jean Hampton, among others, responded that Gilligan’s critique was itself a distortion, and that concerns for justice and individual rights are as significant for and in the moral lives of women as for men (Hampton 1993).

In recent years, a variety of social sciences have intensified investigation into aspects of our natures that are plausibly important for a virtue of justice. For example, Widlok 2018 surveys cross-cultural anthropological work examining the development of “ethical skill” in rightful and just sharing practices.

For a variety of reasons, many ethical thinkers have thought that justice cannot be based in sentiment but requires a more intellectually constructive rational(ist) basis, and in recent times this view of the matter seems to have been held, most influentially, by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice . Rawls makes clear his belief in the inadequacy of benevolence or sympathetic human sentiment in formulating an adequate conception of social justice. He says in particular that sentiment leaves unanswered or indeterminate various important issues of justice that a good theory of justice ought to be able to resolve.

Rawls’s positive view of justice is concerned primarily with the justice of institutions or (what he calls) the “basic structure” of society: justice as an individual virtue is derivative from justice as a social virtue defined via certain principles of justice. The principles, famously, are derived from an “original position” in which (very roughly) rational contractors under a “veil of ignorance” decide how they wish to commit themselves to being governed in their actual lives. Rawls deliberately invokes Kantian rationalism (or anti-sentimentalism) in explaining the intellectual or theoretical motivation behind his construction, and the two principles of justice that he argues would be agreed upon under the contractual conditions he specifies represent a kind of egalitarian political liberalism. Roughly, those principles stress (equality of) basic liberties and opportunities for self-advancement over considerations of social welfare, and the distribution of opportunities and goods in society is then supposed to work to the advantage of all (especially the worst-off members of society). He also says that the idea of what people distributively deserve or merit is derivative from social justice rather than (as with Aristotle and/or much common-sense thinking) providing the basis for thinking about social justice.

According to Rawls, individual justice is theoretically derivative from social justice because the just individual is to be understood as someone with an effective or “regulative” desire to comply with the principles of justice. However, it is not merely social justice that Rawls understands in (predominantly) rationalist fashion. When he explains how individuals (within a just society) develop a sense and/or the virtue of justice, he invokes the work of Piaget. Rawls lays more stress than Piaget does on the role our affective nature (sympathy and the desire for self-mastery) plays in the acquisition of moral virtue. But, like Piaget, he stresses the need for a sufficiently general appreciation and rational understanding of social relations as the grounding basis of a sense of duty or of justice and he explicitly classifies his account of moral development as falling within the “rationalist tradition.”

4. Justice and Other Virtues

Few would doubt that justice is a virtue of character. But there are other moral virtues. How is justice related to them? Is it more important? Even in Republic , in which Plato makes justice a “master virtue” of sorts, there are other virtues (wisdom, courage, and self-discipline), and elsewhere (notably Gorgias ) Plato makes self-discipline ( sophrosune ) the “master virtue,” so it is not clear that justice has any sort of priority over these other virtues. Likewise, though the texts we have show Aristotle devoting more space to justice, it is not clear that the particular form of the virtue of justice has any sort of pre-eminence. On the other hand, Cicero claims that justice is the “crowning glory” of the virtues ( De Officiis I.7). If we take virtue of character to have the moral centrality the ancients (perhaps in contrast to the moderns), how much importance should we accord to justice among the virtues?

Aquinas cites Cicero as a target in developing a sophisticated view of the relationships among the virtues ( ST II-II 58.12). On Aquinas’ view, Cicero is half right, for Aquinas distinguishes between virtues as responsive to appetites of our animal nature (moral virtues) and as responsive to appetites of our intellect (virtues of the will). He takes it that justice is preeminent over the moral virtues because it inheres in the rational part of the soul, and because its object is more noble (the good of others, or the common good, rather than the individual good). On that point he can agree with Cicero. However, these virtues themselves are not as excellent as the theological virtues, of which the greatest is love (or charity -- caritas; ST II-II 23.6). There are several arguments for this claim but it is grounded in Paul’s admonition to the Corinthians, that love is the greatest among the virtues of faith and hope (1 Corinthians 13:13).

In recent decades there have been secular challenges to the primacy of justice among virtues. Recall that Carol Gilligan had argued for a “different voice” for women in coming to grips with moral problems. Instead of a rights-based understanding of morality that gave special consideration to the individual, women saw relationships between people as primary (Gilligan 1983, pp. 19, 29). Kohlberg had offered a thought experiment about a man (“Heinz”) tempted to steal a life-saving drug to save his sick wife (Kohlberg 1981, p. 12). Whereas boys are more likely to think of Heinz’ dilemma in terms of what is the right thing to do, girls, Gilligan argues, see the world as “a world of relationships and psychological truths where an awareness of the connection between people gives rise to a recognition of responsibility for one another” (Gillian 1983, p. 30). Gilligan carefully frames this contrast as one between voices, not a matter of ranking of dispositions or virtues, but her work can and did provide a basis for making that sort of assessment between virtues, one on which (as in Aquinas’ case) love and care for others turns out to be more important than considerations of justice.

In some ways, Nel Nodding’s pioneering work in laying out an “ethic of care” takes such a step. Following Gilligan, she sees much ethical theory as missing a feminine voice, one which grounds moral concern for the concrete other in caring for them and their needs, and thus as relational rather than individualistic (Noddings 1983, 1999). Yet some caution is required before seeing her as taking up something like a Thomistic stance on the priority of love over justice. For one thing, to a significant degree she wants to emphasize the importance of the concrete and particular as opposed to the abstract and general (or the reliance on universal principles) in thinking and acting morally. But that is an emphasis which animates some particularistic forms of virtue ethics, and does not distinguish justice from love or other virtues. Moreover, where she explicitly argues that care “‘picks up’ where justice leaves off” (Noddings 1999, p. 12), she is thinking of justice as a property of institutions (e.g. Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness), and institutional implementations of those theories, not a virtue of character. She is clearly concerned about the limits of “rights-talk,” but that at least historically has not been a prominent part in thinking about justice as a virtue of character. Thus she does not clearly take a side in this matter.

Like Noddings, Virginia Held frames much of the point of the ethics of care against a historical theoretical backdrop of attention to justice (Held 1995, 2004, 2006). To some extent, like Noddings, for Held the relevant notion of justice is not a virtue of character but a concern with fairness, equality, and individual rights, or perhaps more generally impartial universal principles (Held 2004, p. 144; 2006, p. 14). In fact, Held more clearly poses an ethics of care as an alternative to virtue ethics (Held 2004, 143; 2006, 14). This is for two reasons. First, virtue ethical theories focus on dispositions and traits of individuals, whereas an ethics of care focuses on relations between individuals. Second, an ethics of care sees people as partially constituted by their relations with others, as opposed to the individualism characteristic of virtue ethics. Held does not think an ethics of care can do without a concern for justice as a value, however (Held 1995, 129). More generally, she believes, caring provides a “wider network” within which concerns for justice and virtue (as well as utility) should be fitted (2004, 147; 2006, 72). Margaret McLaren (2001), on the other hand, responds on the basis of commonalities between care ethics and virtue ethics that care ethics actually is most attractive when situated as an ethics of virtue. Marilyn Friedman (1987) similarly seems accepting of the general framework of virtue ethics, and of crucial places for virtues of both caring and justice within such a framework, responsive to different degrees and in different ways to gender differences she believes actually do hold, though not falling along a caring/justice fault line.

Michael Slote also accepts care ethics as well-situated as a virtue ethical theory, but argues for the necessity of conceiving such a theory as “agent-based” -- holding that motivation or motives are “the ultimate bases for evaluation of action, institutions, laws, and societies” (Slote 1998, p. 173). As he has developed his view, empathic motivation has come to take an increasing role (Slote 2010, p. 124). As with Noddings and Held, for Slote the relevant questions about justice are about forms of social organization, the allocation of rights, and so on. If there is a vestige of the Platonic/Justinian model of justice as a virtue, it would appear to figure in only as a rationale for the shape of some social policies reflecting e.g. social (or perhaps global) distributive justice. But empathy is the focal normative concern throughout. The justice of a society constitutively depends on the motives of the individuals who make it up (Slote 1998, p. 187; 2010, p. 128). If the relevant motives are caring or empathic ones, then Slote’s analysis would seem to collapse the distinction between caring and justice as virtues of individual character (or motivation). That is, individuals would count as just exactly to the degree that their motivations are empathic, and they thus contribute to the laws, policies, institutions, and so on in ways that are reflective of similar motivations across society. But that is just to say that they are caring motivations as well.

A somewhat different feminist critique of a focus on a virtue of justice comes from Robin Dillon. Like Slote, her concern is more with social institutions, structures, and hierarchies than with traits of character, and in fact these priorities lead her to be critical of virtue ethical theories which, she believes, cannot ask the right questions about virtues and vices (Dillon 2012, p. 86). However, she does accept the point that character traits matter, though she believes attending to the vices that allow and support social structures that allow for oppression and domination is more pertinent to feminist moral philosophy.

Lisa Tessman, on the other hand, accepts the basic framework of Aristotelian thinking about virtues of character, and with it the virtue of justice (Tessman 2005). However, she argues that oppressive social conditions can interfere in ways Aristotle did not anticipate with the formation of virtues of character and consequently (given Aristotle’s framework) with prospects for happiness (eudaimonia). One point of amendment, then, to Aristotelian thought is to recognize that oppressive social conditions may make other traits — traits that are important for liberatory struggle — into virtues. Another, congruent with other lines of feminist critique, is that Aristotle is insufficiently appreciative of the need for sensitivity to and response to suffering, so that something like the kind of supplementation recommended by care ethics is appropriate. A different model of response to the development of the virtue of justice specifically under non-ideal or unjust social conditions, one modeled on Kohlberg’s original architectonic understanding of the virtue, is defended by Jon Garthoff (Garthoff 2018).

Finally, in recent work Talbot Brewer has argued that a “revisionist” version of Aristotelian virtue ethics does a better job than competitors (including Kantian and contractualist theories) at recognizing the “irreplaceable value” of each human being (Brewer 2018). Brewer believes that a robust conception of the virtue of justice does important work for such a theory, not just focusing on distribution and allocation, but more generally establishing the space for virtuous recognition of ways that others can demand that we treat them (Brewer 2018, p. 25). Still, Brewer invokes Aquinas to argue that such justice is not enough, that that what is required is a recognition of a virtue of love to unify and perfect the other virtues of character.

While Rawls’ work has sparked an explosion of work in distributive justice and social justice more generally, in recent years a variety of strategies to return to a focus on justice as a personal virtue has emerged. These strategies vary across both dimensions we have considered, taking with various degrees of seriousness the connection between institutional and personal forms of justice, and focusing on the latter as a virtue, among (and like) other virtues.

One such strategy is that of Jon Drydyk, who builds on the “capability approach” to human welfare to make a case for a capabilities-based account of the justice of individual agents, in particular as against an “Aristotelian” approach that stresses justice as a matter of response to merit. Acting justly involves “striving to reduce and remove inequalities in people’s capabilities to function in ways that are elemental” to a truly human life (Drydyk 2012, pp. 31, 33). This is a “subsidiary” virtue account, in that we begin with a prior conception of the content of the requirements of justice, and conform the virtue to this conception. However, Drydyk emphasizes justice as a virtue of individuals, rather than institutions or societies. Drydyk’s strategy offers a counterpoint both to the Rawlsian way of thinking about just societies and to the ancient Greek way of thinking about justice as a virtue of individuals.

John Hacker-Wright argues that what is needed to replace a “legalistic” concern with moral status (as on modern liberal conceptions of justice) is instead an ethic of virtue with a different conception of the virtue of justice. Instead of a concern for the resolution of claims in something like reciprocal, contractual relations, Hacker-Wright’s conception of the virtue of justice is a matter of sensitivity to “vulnerability of value” in things, animate and otherwise. Thus, the threat of unjust — vicious -- wronging hangs not only over people who are sufficiently cognitively impaired so as not to perceive insults, but also corpses, animals, and even rare and valuable rock formations (p. 463). This counts as a sense of justice in that, on Hacker-Wright’s view it is not merely that we can act wrongly or viciously toward such entities, but (following Midgley 1983) that they can be wronged by us by our doing so. However, while Hacker-Wright claims that on a virtue ethic “The character of the agent is recognized as ineliminable in picking out facts as they figure in our moral deliberation,” this does not strictly speaking seem to be true, as prior to virtue there is value which it is up to the just or virtuous person to respond with sensitivity (Hacker-Wright 2007, pp. 461, 463, 464).

David Schmidtz and John Thrasher suggest rethinking the relationship between social justice and individual justice (Schmidtz and Thrasher 2014). Turning Plato’s account of justice in Republic on its head, they depict justice as a bridge between a virtue of the soul and of the polis : because we are essentially social, we need community, and justice is a matter of harmony with the community. On their view this is (largely) a matter of compliance with rules and institutions that enable people to live in harmony and flourish together.

An alternative proposal for thinking of the justice as a personal virtue ties it intimately to the experiences we have as emotional creatures. On this approach, instead of justice standing as distinct from “natural virtues” motivated by passions (as on Hume’s account), or needing to be replaced by sentimentally-driven attitudes such as care or compassion, justice is to be seen as a virtue largely constituted by emotion (Solomon 1994, Roberts 2010). The virtue amounts to a stable disposition of character to respond in the relevant ways to instances of injustice, perhaps consisting in those occasions in which one does not receive his or her due, and on the other hand to be disposed to a “will to give each his due” (Roberts 2010, p. 38). For Roberts, this is a will to realize “objective justice,” and as on other recent accounts, the virtue (and the passion) are theoretically subsidiary to this primary notion of “objective justice.”

There are also recent ventures in the spirit of the ancient Greek thinking about the individual virtue of justice. Rasmussen and Den Uyl (2005) argue for two interpersonal senses of justice (pp. 160-63). One is the familiar Aristotelian virtue. The second is a “metanormative” principle governing the institutions and legal frameworks in which individual agents (just and otherwise) live their lives and exercise their practical agency. The second of these senses of interpersonal justice does not draw its content from the exercise of virtue, but rather makes a place for it. The former does depend on virtue overall (including the exercise of practical wisdom) for its demands, but these are construed broadly in the traditional way of rendering to each his due. Bloomfield (2011) similarly suggests extending the Aristotelian virtue of justice, but in an inward direction, arguing that self-respect is necessary for happiness, and treating oneself fairly requires treating oneself fairly, as one treats others fairly, as a property of justice as individuals.

On the other hand, Wolterstorff (2008) argues that the eudaimonism of Greek thought prevents a proper appreciation for the nature and significance of justice and rights. Whether there is theoretical space remaining for a virtue of justice is not a question Wolterstorff considers, but he does believe there is no hope for an adequate grip on justice in an Aristotelian or Stoic framework.

Recent thinkers have grappled with the question of priority between formal principle and virtue that vexed Aristotle, and offered solutions that for the most part subordinate the virtue of justice to the prior notion of the justice of distributions, as Aristotle himself seems to have suggested. Bernard Williams claims explicitly that this is so (Williams 1980, p. 197), as does David Wiggins, in an attempt to bring a “pre-liberal,” Aristotelian conception of justice to bear on modern liberal conceptions, a la Kant and Rawls (Wiggins 2004). To do so, Wiggins distinguishes three senses of justice: (A) a matter of outcomes or states of affairs in which each gets what is due; (B) a disposition to promote justice (A); (C) a condition of the polis in virtue of which (A) is realized. Wiggins claims that the proper outcome of this collision of conceptions is one that recognizes a form of logical priority of justice (A) over justice (B) (p. 489). At the same time, against Williams he insists that the normative demands of justice (A) are “comprehensible” only within the perspective of a person with justice (B). And in fact he claims that a necessary condition on acts and outcomes satisfying the norms of justice (A) is that they be recognized to be so by those with the virtue of justice (B). Wiggins’ thinking here is not transparent, but perhaps the thought is that the logical point is purely formal: someone with justice (B) must, in act or judging justly, be responding to some norm which counts as justice (A). But, as merely formal, that tells us nothing about the substantive content of that norm. To get that, we have ineliminable need to refer to the judgment of the person with justice (B). That marks a way perhaps of restoring Aristotle’s focus on virtue in coming to understand the virtue of justice.

LeBar (2013, 2014) takes a similar tack in attempting to incorporate Kantian and post-Kantian insights into just demands on the treatment of others into an Aristotelian virtue framework. On his view, there is no way to specify the contents of the demands of justice, or to spell out its norms, independently of the wider possession and exercise of the virtues, including the virtue of practical wisdom. At the same time, what the virtuous and just person sees, in inhabiting a social world with equals in moral standing, are the norms which have become associated with the liberal conception: the standing to obligate others and hold them accountable, for example.

Finally, all of these are Western treatments of an individual virtue of justice. May Sim (Sim 2007, 2018) makes the case that there are informative parallels between the Confucian treatment of the virtues (in particular, yi) and the virtue of justice as adumbrated in Plato and Aristotle.

There are many different conceptions of the virtue of justice, and only some of them are distinctively virtue ethical. Many non-virtual ethical approaches put forward theories of virtue, and what distinguishes them from virtue ethics is that the given theory of virtue comes later in the order of explanation, rather than itself serving as the basis for understanding (all of) morality. This is especially the case with justice, where (as we have seen) it is naturally tempting to account for the norms of justice first and derive an account of the virtue in light of those norms. The question of the priority of norms of justice or the virtue of justice is likely to continue to generate exploration and debate, as is the question of how our lives as social and political animals contributes to understanding the virtue of justice. These vexed questions have inspired a profusion of views and no doubt will continue to do so.

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Reason and Meaning

Philosophical reflections on life, death, and the meaning of life, summary of justice in plato’s republic.

Bust of Pythagoras based on traditional iconography at the Museum Capitolini, Rome.

Justice in the Individual

… According to Plato, the human soul is comprised of three parts — an appetitive, a spirited and a rational part — all of which pull individuals in differing directions. As Plato expresses this in the Republic , he asks us to envisage humans as comprised of a multi-headed beast, a lion, and a human. Each of these pulls the human soul in a different direction, as they vie for dominance. However, it is ultimately our choice to feed one or the other. We can choose to feed the multi-headed beast. But a life in which we do so becomes one where we consume ourselves, in which we are never satisfied, but always at war with ourselves. We can choose to feed the lion, but then we become a victim of our own desire for honor or pride. It is only by feeding the human that we will gain a harmonious soul, a fulfilled nature, and a happy human life.

The wise who pursue such virtue will not thereby fail to acknowledge the value of the other parts of the soul. But they will know to meet the needs of the lower soul in appropriate measure. Through the cultivation of a virtuous character, individuals are able to bring the lower parts of their souls under the control of their rational soul.

In contrast then to Glaucon who affirms a social contract perspective that justice is not intrinsically valuable but only valuable because it prevents individuals from being punished for being unjust. Plato argues that virtue is good in itself because it creates a harmony of the soul that is lacking among the vicious. Those with vices in fact lack control of the self. They become enslaved to their lower desires. So enslaved, they lack true sovereignty, the control of the self that comes with virtue alone.

The appetites and spirited part of the soul, in fact, are parts of the soul that humans share with other animals. What is really defining for humans qua humans, however, is the rational soul. To cultivate habits that subject our reason to the whims of our appetites, or to the desire for social recognition or honor that appeals to our spirited part of the soul, is to cultivate a character that is less the fully human. We only really fulfill ourselves, our natures, if we feed our rational soul more than any of our other parts.

Justice in society

Plato imagines the polity to have a similar tripartite structure to the individual. He argues that there just as an individual has a rational, a spirited, and an appetitive part, so does the polity. In a polity, classes of individuals occupy natural strata of society — the king, the aristocrats, and the workers. Each of these strata is an expression of individuals who are dominated by a differing part of the soul. A just society would be one dominated by the wise, who are dominated by their rational souls. Plato imagines rule by philosopher kings, who others obey out of an understanding of their own rightful place in society. An oligarchy would be ruled by multiple individuals, but individuals who were not wise but dominated by their desire for honor and social recognition. This would lead to certain compromises injustice as those pursuing honor would at times overlook the true needs of those in society. Finally, a democracy would be ruled by the multitude, but of those dominated by appetites.

Democracy, in Plato’s view, is the worst form of government and would have a tendency toward self-dissolution. Since individuals, dominated by their own desires and lusts, would vie for power and become embroiled in political conflict, democracy would tend toward entropy. A just society, by contrast, would be one in which the wise ruled and members of other strata knew their place.

Plato’s entire discussion of justice in the polity is very involved. Here I can do no more than point to some very general similarities between that view and the view of justice in the individual. In both cases, the rational part should rule the others. In Plato’s view, this is the only path to harmonious relations between an individual, who has a conflict-ridden soul and the polity, which, unless guided wisely, otherwise also tends toward disharmony.

Though Plato draws out similarities between justice of the individual and justice of the polity, this is, of course, quite a large assumption. Many may be attracted to his view that a certain sovereignty comes in gaining control of the self and living moderately, rather than controlled by one’s passions or emotions. Yet this would not commit them to an acceptance of his views on the virtues of hierarchical forms of government.

For most of Western history, however, many thought these views did pair well together. It was thought that the aristocratic rulers should have nobility of spirit, which would make them suitable for rule. The majority, the rabble, would always be unfit for self-rule. Only in the Enlightenment do we begin to see strong shifts away from this and does support democratic forms of government begin to become the norm rather than the exception.

Justice for All

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”

It would be easy to fault the Founders for not mentioning women in that statement, unless we remember that to their way of thinking, “men” and “mankind” were acceptable ways to describe groups that include men, women, and children. We might also fault them for allowing slavery to persist, even as they wrote a document about human freedom. What we should keep in mind, however, is that we base our belief that slavery is wrong on the very ideas embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution.

Even though some of their beliefs don’t fit our modern sensibilities, the Founders embraced world-changing ideas about justice and freedom. To appreciate this, it is helpful to understand how people were governed in the centuries before America’s Founding.

Chapter 1 justice scales and gavel option 2

The scales of justice are a symbol for the justice system in the United States.

Throughout history, most people have been treated unequally by their rulers. Unless one were born into a privileged family or tribe, there was little access to the precious resources that are taken for granted in a prosperous society—things like meat, well-defended shelter, and education. In many cases people might be enslaved, or something close to it. People were treated unequally, both so that the powerful could have more comfort, and because rulers believed most people couldn’t be trusted to make decisions about how society should operate.

As we have seen, the Founders declared that no one has a right to rule others simply because of the family into which he’s born. Instead, they believed that everyone is born with certain rights and that the law should equally protect people’s freedoms and property.

“That alone is a just government,” wrote James Madison, “which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own” (James Madison, “On Property,” 1792).

This was important to the Founders because they believed government exists not only to make rules; but also to ensure justice.

The Constitution protects justice for all citizens in the United States.

As American ideas about equality changed, we enacted laws to free American slaves and to extend voting rights to women and those without property. We moved to stop government agencies from treating African Americans unequally, whether by denying them the right to vote, denying them access to city-owned hospitals, or simply failing to extend to them the same police protection enjoyed by other citizens.

A long period of mistreatment had contributed to substantial poverty in African-American communities, and this was not the only inequality in the United States. A growing economy presents numerous opportunities for people to start new businesses, or find ways to earn money using their particular skills and ideas. Just as varied abilities (and sometimes luck) ensure that different players on a baseball team will score different numbers of runs—even when they’re all playing by the same rules—a free economy yields different rewards. It offers substantial benefits to everyone participating in it, but especially large rewards for people whose luck, skill, or perseverance makes them exceptional.

Despite the Great Depression and two world wars, Americans—even the poorest Americans—saw their standard of living rise tremendously during the twentieth century. Our understanding of equality and fairness was changing, however. While the Founders believed government should protect everyone’s rights impartially, many Americans came to believe that outcomes should be more equal. We began to take money from some individuals to give to others, and to offer special benefits, like preferential treatment for minority-owned firms seeking government contracts. In order to achieve more equitable outcomes, in other words, our government began to treat people unequally.

Some people see this as necessary to pursue equal treatment. Their point is that if the game has been rigged to keep some people from scoring, it is not fair to just start treating everyone equally, because some are now behind in the game. Efforts to redistribute wealth and adjust racial, ethnic, and gender proportions in workplaces and even sports teams are, they believe, necessary to achieve the Founders’ vision of a society where everyone has equal protection under the law.

This statue on front of a courthouse is holding the scales of justice and her eyes are covered. What do you think her blindfold represents?

Others argue that two wrongs do not make a right, and that we are punishing people who did nothing wrong for the sins of their ancestors. People are getting accustomed to living on government programs, they say, creating long-term dependency.

Americans disagree about what our government should do—if anything—given the unequal outcomes that naturally occur in a free society. Thankfully, the Founders crafted a political system we can use to work out our disagreements. What we should avoid, meanwhile, is taking for granted that we will always enjoy the equality our Founders promoted. We each depend on our government to protect our rights equally, but we have to remember that this depends, in turn, on citizens upholding that ideal.

For example, if we see someone who is charged with governing others—whether a senator, a mayor, or even a homeowners association president—allow favored members of the community to get by without following rules, or, worse still, make rules designed to hurt those they disfavor, we should question the justice of this.

Even if we turn out to be mistaken, citizens must be willing to ask such questions, if only to remind ourselves—and our elected officials—that equal treatment before the law is essential to freedom.

Essay on Justice

Students are often asked to write an essay on Justice in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

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100 Words Essay on Justice

Understanding justice.

Justice is a key principle that ensures fairness and equality. It’s about treating everyone the same, regardless of their background or status. This principle is vital in maintaining peace and harmony in society.

Forms of Justice

There are different types of justice. Social justice deals with equality and fairness in society. Criminal justice involves punishing those who break the law. Distributive justice focuses on fair allocation of resources.

Importance of Justice

Justice is important because it promotes equality, creates trust, and upholds the rule of law. Without justice, there would be chaos and inequality, leading to societal unrest.

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Speech on Justice

250 Words Essay on Justice

Introduction.

Justice, a concept that has been the backbone of civilizations, is often seen as the balancing scale of society. It is a principle that ensures fairness, equality, and moral rightness, serving as the cornerstone of legal systems worldwide.

The Concept of Justice

Justice is not a one-dimensional concept; it is multifaceted and complex. It encompasses distributive justice, which deals with the fair allocation of resources, and retributive justice, which seeks to punish wrongdoers proportionately to their crimes. Justice, in essence, is about maintaining a balance, ensuring that everyone is treated equally and fairly, regardless of their social, economic, or cultural status.

Justice in Society

In society, justice plays a critical role in maintaining order and harmony. It serves as a deterrent to unlawful behavior, fostering a sense of security and trust among individuals. However, the concept of justice is not static; it evolves with societal changes and advancements. What is deemed just in one era or culture may not hold the same significance in another, reflecting the dynamic nature of justice.

In conclusion, justice is an indispensable component of any society. It is an evolving concept that reflects societal values and norms. As we continue to advance as a society, it is crucial that our understanding and application of justice evolve too, ensuring it remains a true embodiment of fairness and equality.

500 Words Essay on Justice

Justice is a multifaceted concept that provides the fundamental basis for a harmonious and equitable society. It is the cornerstone upon which legal systems, ethical theories, and social contracts are built. At its core, justice is about fairness, impartiality, and the equitable distribution of rights and responsibilities.

The Philosophical Perspective of Justice

From a philosophical perspective, justice has been a topic of discourse since ancient times. Plato, in his work ‘The Republic’, proposed the idea of justice as harmony, where each individual plays their part in society for the common good. In contrast, Aristotle saw justice as proportionate equality, where individuals receive benefits in proportion to their contribution.

Modern philosophers have also grappled with the concept of justice. John Rawls, for instance, proposed the theory of justice as fairness, arguing that a just society is one that the least advantaged members would choose under a veil of ignorance. Robert Nozick, on the other hand, advocated for a minimalist state, arguing for justice as entitlement, where individuals are entitled to their acquisitions, provided they were obtained fairly.

Justice in Legal Systems

In legal systems, justice is the principle that guides the creation of laws and their enforcement. It aims to ensure that individuals are treated fairly and that their rights are protected. The concept of justice in legal systems is often divided into three categories: distributive justice, retributive justice, and restorative justice.

Distributive justice concerns the fair allocation of resources within a society. It argues for societal benefits and burdens to be distributed according to relevant criteria such as need, merit, or equality. Retributive justice, on the other hand, is about punishment for wrongdoing. It advocates for penalties that are proportionate to the crime. Lastly, restorative justice focuses on healing and rehabilitation. It seeks to repair the harm caused by criminal behavior through reconciliation and reintegration of offenders into society.

Justice as a Social Virtue

As a social virtue, justice plays a crucial role in maintaining social order and harmony. It ensures that individuals are treated fairly and equitably, fostering trust and cooperation among members of society. A just society is one where individuals are not only accountable for their actions but also have an equal opportunity to participate in social, economic, and political life.

In conclusion, justice is a complex and multifaceted concept that permeates various aspects of human life. Whether from a philosophical perspective, within legal systems, or as a social virtue, justice is fundamentally about fairness, equity, and the protection of rights. It is a cornerstone of a harmonious society and a guiding principle for ethical behavior. As we strive to create a more just world, it is imperative that we continue to critically engage with the concept of justice, challenging and refining our understanding of what it truly means to be just.

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Social Justice Reflections and Conclusion

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Les Brown

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We shall return first to the formal notions of justice, morality and education as a means of showing that the principle of equality of educational opportunity is related to all three, and that with this composite moral foundation it points unequivocally to social justice. Then we shall reflect finally on the main emphases we have made, using ‘reflect’ first in a literal or review sense, second in a contemplative sense.

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Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment , Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1951, Part II, p.119, trans. D. Magarshack.

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Brown, L. (1985). Social Justice Reflections and Conclusion. In: Justice, Morality and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18002-8_8

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Home » Political Science » Political Philosophy » Plato’s Theory of Justice Explained

Plato’s Theory of Justice Explained

Introduction to plato’s theory of justice or architectonic theory of justice.

Plato’s theory of Justice, also known as the Architectonic theory of justice, has been an essential part of every society in every age since ancient times. The ancient Greek Philosophic tradition considers ethics to be the foundation of justice. Justice is the most critical part of a person’s morality. Plato’s theory of justice is somewhat seeking the same question of morality in his ideal theory of justice.

Why is Plato’s Theory of Justice called the Architectonic theory of justice?

Plato explains that during the construction of a building, each part is assigned to different artisans, but the architect combines it to contribute to the final outlay of the building and add to its splendor. Similarly, the three cardinal virtues – Temperance, Courage, and Wisdom – would be cultivated by Traders, Soldiers, and the Philosopher class, respectively, and Justice, the fourth virtue, would act as the architect of establishing a perfect state. Due to this inference between architecture and the organization of society, his theory is also called the Architectonic Theory of Justice.

According to Plato’s Theory of Justice, Justice does not consist in mere adherence to the laws, for it is based on the inner nature of the human spirit. It is also not the triumph of the stronger over the weaker, for it protects the weaker against the stronger.

A just state, Plato argues, is achieved with an eye to the good of the whole. In a just society, the rulers, the military, and the artisan all have to perform their prescribed duties. In such a society, the rulers are wise, the soldiers are brave, and the producers exercise self-control or temperance.

Essence of Ethics in Plato’s Theory of Justice

Ethics is the central theme of Plato’s theory of justice. It is a branch of philosophy that studies morality and seeks answers to questions of good or bad.

In other words, an individual with good moral character can create a society with good moral values and a just and rightful state at large.

The Greeks have considered ethics to be the foundation of politics and justice. According to Greek philosophy, the state comes into existence for the sake of life and continues for the sake of a good life, which makes it essential to have a “just society and a just state.”

The concept of “justice” is the central theme of Plato’s Republic ; its sub-title is entitled “Concerning Justice.” For Plato, justice is a moral concept.

Barker says : “Justice is, for Plato, at once a part of human virtue and the bond that joins men together in the states. It makes man good and makes him social.”

Sabine has expressed a similar view. He says: “Justice (for Plato) is a bond that holds a society together.”

Justice resembles what is used in the Greek language, “Dikaiosyne,” a word that has a more comprehensive meaning than the word “justice.” “Dikaiosyne” means “just” and “righteousness.”

That is why Plato’s theory of justice is not regarded as legal or judicial, nor is it related to the realms of “rights” and “duties.” It does not come within the limits of law: it is, as such, related to “social ethics.”

Characteristics of Plato’s Theory of Justice

Justice is another name for righteousness.
It is more the performance of duties than the enjoyment of rights.
It is an individual’s contribution to society according to their abilities, capacities, and capabilities (refer to the three Cardinal Virtues).
It is a social morality: a person’s obligation.
It is the strength of the social fabric as it involves a web of the social system.

Plato Rejects Prevailing Theories of Justice

Plato rejected the traditional theory of justice, which holds that people should do what is proper or “do good to friends and harm enemies.” He believed that justice is good for all people, including both the giver and the receiver, and that it should not be used as a means of benefiting some while harming others.

Plato also rejected Thrasymachus’ radical idea that justice is always in the interest of the stronger. Instead, he argued that the ruler does not make all the laws that benefit him, and that justice is an art that is known and practiced by the ruler.

Glaucon’s Conventional Theory of Justice

Glaucon , one of Plato’s brothers, proposed a conventional theory of justice in which it is seen as artificial and the product of customs and conventions. He argued that justice is in the interest of the weaker, and that it is a means of preventing injustice through social contracts and laws.

Plato recognized the limitations of this theory, however, and saw justice as natural and universal rather than artificial and based on conventions.

What is the Essence of Plato’s Theory of Justice?

According to Plato, justice is the principle that each person should pursue a function for which they are fitted by nature, and that this should be done for the good of both the individual and society as a whole. He saw justice as a virtue that is both private (aiming at the highest good of the individual) and public (aiming at the highest good of society).

Plato believed that justice is necessary for living a good life, and that it helps to bring individuals, classes, and states together in harmony. He saw it as a bond that holds society together, and as a means of achieving specialization and excellence.

The Characteristics of the Just Society

In Plato’s philosophy , human behavior is characterized by three main sources: desire (or appetite), emotion (or spirit), and knowledge (or intellect). According to Plato, the perfect individual is one who has the ideal combination of these three qualities, and the just society is one that has individuals with the right balance of these traits in each social class.

Social Classes and Corresponding Virtues

Plato identified four virtues that correspond to each social class:

Temperance is the befitting virtue of traders, whose dominant trait is desire.
Courage is the befitting virtue of soldiers, whose dominant trait is spirit or emotion.
Wisdom is the befitting virtue of philosophers, whose dominant trait is knowledge or intellect.
Justice is the befitting virtue of the state, which creates harmony among all three social classes and is a necessary condition for human happiness.

Plato’s theory of justice is a comprehensive theory of individual and social virtue. It is a theory of moral excellence that is essential for the individual and for the state. It is a theory of individual and social responsibility that is based on the principle of specialization, the division of labor, the common good, the social contract, and equality.

Plato’s theory of justice is a moral and philosophical theory that is based on the concept of ethics and the importance of virtue. It is a theory that is relevant to all societies and all ages, as it is concerned with the foundations of justice and the good life.

Plato’s theory of justice is a valuable contribution to the understanding of justice and the good life. It is a theory that is essential for the development of a just and righteous society.

For more information on Plato’s philosophy , you may also want to read his works “The Allegory of the Cave ,” “ The Theory of Forms ,” “ The Ideal State ,” and “The Republic.”

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A better path forward for criminal justice

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George Floyd’s death at the hands of police in May 2020 and frequent events like it across America have added new urgency and momentum to the drive to reform our criminal justice system. Unfortunately, the debate has too often collapsed into an unhelpful binary: “support the blue” or “abolish the police.” Either of these poles would tend to have a negative impact on the very communities that have suffered disproportionately under our current criminal justice and law enforcement policies. Excessive policing and use of force, on one hand, and less public safety and social service resources on the other, can both be detrimental to communities that are exposed to high levels of criminal activity and violence. We must find a path of genuine reform, even transformation, that fosters safer, more peaceful, and more resilient communities.

In this volume, available to be downloaded as a full PDF here or to be read online as individual chapters below, experts from a broad spectrum of domains and policy perspectives offer policymakers with research-grounded analysis and recommendations to support sustained, bi-partisan reforms to move the criminal justice system toward a more humane and effective footing.

Read the introduction

Police reform

Authors: Rashawn Ray , Clark Neily

The deaths of unarmed Black Americans, including George Floyd, Elijah McClain, Breonna Taylor, and many others, at the hands of police are leading to calls for sweeping police reform . In Chapter 1, our experts lay out a series of sensible police reform ideas shared across the political spectrum, including reforming qualified immunity, addressing officer wellness, and changing the culture of “us versus them” policing.

Read Chapter 1

Download a PDF of this chapter.

Reimagining pretrial and sentencing

Authors: Pamela K. Lattimore , Cassia Spohn , Matthew DeMichele

America’s incarceration rate is the highest in the world, a condition rooted in policies and practices that result in jail for millions of individuals charged with but not convicted of a crime and lengthy jail or prison sentences for those who are convicted. In Chapter 2, our experts argue that there is an urgent need for a pretrial justice and sentencing strategy that will reduce crime and victimization, ameliorate unwarranted racial and income disparities, and reclaim human capital lost to incarceration.

Read Chapter 2

Changing prisons to help people change

Authors: Christy Visher , John Eason

Most imprisoned people will be released into society, but are they prepared to rejoin their communities and avoid a return to prison? In Chapter 3, our experts note that the lack of vocational training, education, and reentry programs makes reintegration difficult for the formerly imprisoned. They propose programming such as cognitive behavioral therapy, education, and personal development to help ease this transition.

Read Chapter 3

Reconsidering police in schools

Authors: Ryan King , Marc Schindler

Although rates of juvenile crime and arrests have declined in recent decades, the rash of school shootings since Columbine in 1999 has catalyzed federal funding for more police in schools. But these school police officers have been linked with increased arrests for non-criminal, youthful behavior. In Chapter 4, our experts offer ways to reimagine public safety in schools and change the dominant but increasingly unpopular law enforcement paradigm.

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Fostering desistance

Authors: Shawn D. Bushway , Christopher Uggen

What makes people returning to civilian life from incarceration desist from committing crime? In Chapter 5, our experts review the literature on “desistance,” the study of why and how people stop committing crimes. They note that many people who become involved in the criminal justice system had never fully entered a pro-social adult life to begin with, and so programs designed to foster their “re-entry” into society should focus on fostering adult development .

Read Chapter 5

Training and employment for correctional populations

Authors: Grant Duwe , Makada Henry-Nickie

People involved in the criminal justice system tend to be undereducated and underemployed compared to the general population, and post-release employment rates eventually return to pre-prison levels. In Chapter 6, our experts call the employability of returning citizens a “moral imperative,” and so recommend policies designed to increase educational attainment and employment training for incarcerated individuals.

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Prisoner reentry

Authors: Annelies Goger , David J. Harding , Howard Henderson

Over 640,000 people return to their communities from prison each year, but more than half of the formerly incarcerated do not find stable employment in their first year of return, and three-quarters are rearrested within three years. In Chapter 7, our experts offer a range of policies to improve reentry outcomes and increase racial equity in the criminal justice system.

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Authors: Rashawn Ray , Brent Orrell

As we prepare to exit pandemic conditions, it is a crucial time to address criminal justice reform in America. In the Conclusion to “A better path forward for criminal justice,” our experts recommend a strategic pause to gather data that will help us understand why criminal activity has gone up in recent months and inform both immediate responses as well as longer-term initiatives.

Read the conclusion

The editors would like to thank Samantha Elizondo for her work on the project, particularly with chapter summaries and editing of the report.

Support for this publication was generously provided by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. The views expressed in this report are those of its authors and do not represent the views of the Foundation, their officers, or employees.

The Brookings Institution is a nonprofit organization devoted to independent research and policy solutions. Its mission is to conduct high-quality, independent research and, based on that research, to provide innovative, practical recommendations for policymakers and the public. The conclusion and recommendations of any Brookings publication are solely those of its authors, and do not reflect the views of the Institution, its management, or its other scholars.

The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research is a nonpartisan, nonprofit 501(c)(3) educational organization. The views expressed in this report are those of the authors. AEI does not take institutional positions on any issues.

Governance Studies

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November 7, 2023

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June 30, 2023

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June 29, 2023

Proactive Policing: Effects on Crime and Communities (2018)

Chapter: 8 conclusions and implications for policy and research, 8 conclusions and implications for policy and research.

Proactive policing is a relatively new phenomenon in the United States. It developed from a crisis in confidence in policing that began to emerge in the 1960s because of social unrest, rising crime rates, and growing skepticism regarding the effectiveness of standard approaches to policing. In response, beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, innovative police practices and policies that took a more proactive approach began to develop. In this report, the committee used the term “proactive policing” to refer to all policing strategies that have as one of their goals the prevention or reduction of crime and disorder and that are not reactive in terms of focusing primarily on uncovering ongoing crime or on investigating or responding to crimes once they have occurred. Specifically, the elements of proactivity include an emphasis on prevention, mobilizing resources based on police initiative, and targeting the broader underlying forces at work that may be driving crime and disorder. This contrasts with the standard model of policing, which involves an emphasis on reacting to particular crime events after they have occurred, mobilizing resources based on requests coming from outside the police organization, and focusing on the particulars of a given criminal incident.

Proactive policing in this report is distinguished from the everyday decisions of police officers to be proactive in specific situations and instead refers to a strategic decision by police agencies to use proactive police responses in a programmatic way to reduce crime. This report has documented that proactive policing strategies are used widely in the United States. They are not isolated programs used by a select group of agencies but rather a set of approaches that have spread across the landscape of policing.

The United States has once again been confronted by a crisis of confidence in policing. Instances of perceived or actual police misconduct have given rise to nationwide protests against unfair and abusive police practices. Although this report was not intended to respond directly to the crisis of confidence in policing that can be seen in the United States today, it is nevertheless important to consider how proactive policing strategies may bear upon this crisis. It is not enough to simply identify “what works” for reducing crime and disorder; it is also critical to consider issues such as how proactive policing affects the legality of policing, the evaluation of the police in communities, potential abuses of police authority, and the equitable application of police services in the everyday lives of citizens.

Proactive policing has taken a number of different forms over the past two decades, and these variants often overlap in practice. The four broad approaches to proactive policing described in this report are place-based interventions, problem-solving interventions, person-focused interventions, and community-based interventions (see Table 2-1 in Chapter 2 ). Place-based interventions capitalize on the growing research base that shows that crime is concentrated at specific places within a city as a means of more efficiently allocating police resources to reduce crime. Its main applications have been directed at microgeographic hot spots. Person-based interventions also capitalize on the concentration of crimes to proactively prevent crime, but in this case it is concentration among a subset of offenders. Person-based interventions focus on high-rate criminals who have been identified as committing a large proportion of the crime in a community. Problem-solving innovations focus on specific problems that are viewed as contributing to crime incidence and that can be ameliorated by the police. In this case, a systematic approach to solve problems is used to prevent future crime. Finally, community-based interventions emphasize the role of the community in doing something about crime problems. Community approaches look to strengthen collective efficacy in the community or to strengthen the bonds between the police and the community, as a way of enhancing informal social controls and increasing cooperation with the police, with the goal of preventing crime.

In this concluding chapter, the committee summarizes the main findings for each of the four areas on which the report has focused: law and legality, crime control, community impacts, and racial disparities and racially biased behavior. For each area, we list the main conclusions reached (the conclusions are numbered according to the report chapter in which they were developed) and then provide a final, summary discussion of the findings. We then turn to the broader policy implications of the report as a whole. Finally, we offer suggestions for filling research gaps in order to strengthen the knowledge base regarding proactive policing and its impacts.

LAW AND LEGALITY

CONCLUSION 3-1 Factual findings from court proceedings, federal investigations into police departments, and ethnographic and theoretical arguments support the hypothesis that proactive strategies that use aggressive stops, searches, and arrests to deter criminal activity may decrease liberty and increase violations of the Fourth Amendment and Equal Protection Clause; proactive policing strategies may also affect the Fourth Amendment status of policing conduct. However, there is not enough direct empirical evidence on the relationship between particular policing strategies and constitutional violations to draw any conclusions about the likelihood that particular proactive strategies increase or decrease constitutional violations.

CONCLUSION 3-2 Even when proactive strategies do not violate or encourage constitutional violations, they may undermine legal values, such as privacy, equality, and accountability. Empirical studies to date have not assessed these implications.

However effective a policing practice may be in preventing crime, it is impermissible if it violates the law. The most important legal constraints on proactive policing are the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the Equal Protection Clause (of the Fourteenth Amendment), and related statutory provisions.

Although proactive policing strategies do not inherently violate the Fourth Amendment, any proactive strategy could lead to Fourth Amendment violations to the degree that it is implemented by having officers engage in stops, searches, and arrests that violate constitutional standards. This risk is especially relevant for stop, question, and frisk (SQF); broken windows policing; and hot spots policing interventions if they use an aggressive practice of searches and seizures to deter criminal activity.

In addition, in conjunction with existing Fourth Amendment doctrine, proactive policing strategies may limit the effective strength or scope of constitutional protection or reduce the availability of constitutional remedies. For example, when departments identify “high crime areas” pursuant to place-based proactive policing strategies, courts may allow stops by officers of individuals within those areas that are based on less individualized behavior than they would require without the “high crime” designation. In this way, geographically oriented proactive policing may lead otherwise identical citizen-police encounters to be treated differently under the law.

The Equal Protection Clause guarantees equal and impartial treatment of citizens by government actors. It governs all policies, decisions, and acts taken by police officers and departments, including those in furtherance

of proactive policing strategies. As a result, Equal Protection claims may arise with respect to any proactive policing strategy to the degree that it discriminates against individuals based on their race, religion, or national origin, among other characteristics. Since most policing policies today do not expressly target racial or ethnic groups, most Equal Protection challenges require proving discriminatory purpose in addition to discriminatory effect in order to establish a constitutional violation.

Specific proactive policing strategies such as SQF and “zero tolerance” versions of broken windows policing have been linked to violations of both the Fourth Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause by courts in private litigation and by the U.S. Department of Justice in its investigations of police departments. Ethnographic studies and theoretical arguments further support the idea that proactive strategies that use aggressive stops, searches, and arrests to deter criminal activity may decrease liberty and increase Fourth Amendment and Equal Protection violations. However, empirical evidence is insufficient—using the accepted standards of causality in social science—to support any conclusion about whether proactive policing strategies systematically promote or reduce constitutional violations. In order to establish a causal link, studies would ideally determine the incidence of problematic behavior by police under a proactive policy and compare that to the incidence of the same behavior in otherwise similar circumstances in which a proactive policy is not in place.

However, even when proactive strategies do not lead to constitutional violations, they may raise concerns about deeper legal values such as privacy, equality, autonomy, accountability, and transparency. Even procedural justice policing and community-oriented policing, neither of which are likely to violate legal constraints on policing (and, to the extent that procedural justice operates as intended, may make violations of law less likely), may, respectively, undermine the transparency about the status of police-citizen interactions and alter the structure of decision making and accountability in police organizations.

CRIME AND DISORDER

The available scientific evidence suggests that certain proactive policing strategies are successful in reducing crime and disorder. This important conclusion provides support for a growing interest among American police in innovating to develop effective crime prevention strategies. At the same time, there is substantial heterogeneity in the effectiveness of different proactive policing interventions in reducing crime and disorder. For some types of proactive policing, the evidence consistently points to effectiveness, but for others the evidence is inconclusive. Evidence in many cases is

restricted to localized crime prevention impacts, such as specific places, or to specific individuals. There is relatively little evidence-based knowledge about whether and to what extent the approaches examined in this report will have crime prevention benefits at the larger jurisdictional level (e.g., a city as a whole, or even large administrative areas such as precincts within a city) or across all offenders. One key problem that needs to be examined in this regard, but which has not been studied so far, is the degree to which specific policing programs create “opportunity costs” in terms of the allocation of police or policing resources in other domains. Furthermore, the crime prevention outcomes that are observed are mostly observed in the short term, and the evidence seldom addresses long-term crime-prevention outcomes.

It is important to note here that, in practice, police departments typically implement crime-reduction programs that include elements typical of several prevention strategies, as those strategies are defined for this report (see Chapter 2 ). Given this hybridization of tactics in practice, the committee’s review of the evidence was often hindered by the overlapping character of the real-world proactive policing interventions evaluated in many of the published research studies.

Place-Based Strategies

CONCLUSION 4-1 The available research evidence strongly suggests that hot spots policing strategies produce short-term crime-reduction effects without simply displacing crime into areas immediately surrounding targeted locations. Hot spots policing studies that do measure possible displacement effects tend to find that these programs generate a diffusion of crime-control benefits into immediately adjacent areas. There is an absence of evidence on the long-term impacts of hot spots policing strategies on crime and on possible jurisdictional outcomes.

CONCLUSION 4-2 At present, there are insufficient rigorous empirical studies on predictive policing to support a firm conclusion for or against either the efficacy of crime prediction software or the effectiveness of any associated police operational tactics. It also remains difficult to distinguish a predictive policing approach from hot spots policing at small geographic areas.

CONCLUSION 4-3 The results from studies examining the introduction of closed circuit television camera schemes are mixed, but they tend to show modest outcomes in terms of property crime reduction at high-crime places for passive monitoring approaches.

CONCLUSION 4-4 There are insufficient studies to draw conclusions regarding the impact of the proactive use of closed circuit television on crime and disorder reduction.

Policing has always had a geographic or place-based component, especially in how patrol resources are allocated for emergency response systems. However, over the past three decades scholars and the police have begun to recognize that crime is highly concentrated at specific places. Following this recognition, a series of place-based strategies have been developed in policing. In contrast to the focus of the standard model of policing, proactive place-based policing calls for a refocusing of policing on very small, “microgeographic” units of analysis, often termed “crime hot spots.” A number of rigorous evaluations of hot spots policing programs, including a series of randomized controlled trials, have been conducted.

The available research evidence suggests that hot spots policing interventions generate statistically significant short-term crime-reduction impacts without simply displacing crime into areas immediately surrounding the targeted locations. Instead, hot spots policing studies that do measure possible displacement effects tend to find that these programs generate a diffusion-of-crime-control benefit into immediately adjacent areas. While the evidence base is strong for the benefits of hot spots policing in ameliorating local crime problems, there are no rigorous field studies of whether and to what extent this strategy will have jurisdictionwide impacts.

Predictive policing also takes a place-based approach, but it focuses greater concern on predicting the future occurrence of crimes in time and place. It relies upon sophisticated computer algorithms to predict changing patterns of future crime, often promising to be able to identify the exact locations where crimes of specific types are likely to occur next. While this approach has potential to enhance place-based crime prevention approaches, there are at present insufficient rigorous empirical studies to draw any firm conclusions about either the efficacy of crime prediction software or the effectiveness of any associated police operational tactics. Moreover, it remains difficult to distinguish the police actions used in a predictive policing approach from hot spots policing at small geographic areas.

Another technology relevant to improving police capacity for proactive intervention at specific places is closed circuit television (CCTV), which can be used either passively or proactively. The results from studies examining the introduction of CCTV camera schemes are mixed, but they tend to show modest outcomes in terms of property crime reduction at high-crime places for passive monitoring approaches. Again, the committee did not find evidence that would allow us to estimate whether CCTV implemented as a jurisdictionwide strategy would have meaningful impacts on crime in that jurisdiction. As far as the proactive use of CCTV is concerned, there

are insufficient studies to draw conclusions regarding the impact of this strategy on crime and disorder.

Problem-Solving Strategies

CONCLUSION 4-5 There is a small group of rigorous studies of problem-oriented policing. Overall, these consistently show that problem-oriented policing programs lead to short-term reductions in crime. These studies do not address possible jurisdictional impacts of problem-oriented policing and generally do not assess the long-term impacts of these strategies on crime and disorder.

CONCLUSION 4-6 A small but rigorous body of evidence suggests that third party policing generates short-term reductions in crime and disorder; there is more limited evidence of long-term impacts. However, little is known about possible jurisdictional outcomes.

Problem-solving strategies such as problem-oriented policing and third party policing use an approach that seeks to identify causes of problems that engender crime incidents and draws upon innovative solutions to those problems to assess whether the solutions are effective. Problem-oriented policing uses a basic iterative process of problem identification, analysis, response, assessment, and adjustment of the response (often called the SARA [scanning, analysis, response, and assessment] model). This approach provides a framework for uncovering the complex mechanisms at play in crime problems and for developing tailored interventions to address the underlying conditions that cause crime problems in specific situations. Despite its popularity as a crime-prevention strategy, there are surprisingly few rigorous program evaluations of problem-oriented policing.

Much of the available evaluation evidence consists of non-experimental analyses that find strong associations between problem-oriented interventions and crime reduction. Program evaluations also suggest that it is difficult for police officers to fully implement problem-oriented policing. Many problem-oriented policing projects are characterized by weak problem analysis and a lack of non-enforcement responses to targeted problems. Nevertheless, even these limited applications of problem-oriented policing have been shown by rigorous evaluations to generate statistically significant short-term crime prevention impacts.

Third party policing draws upon the insights of problem solving, but also leverages “third parties” who are believed to offer significant new resources for preventing crime and disorder. Using civil ordinances and civil courts or the resources of private agencies, police departments engaged in third party policing recognize that much social control is exercised by

institutions other than the police (e.g., public housing agencies, property owners, parents, health and building inspectors, and business owners) and that crime can be managed through coordination with agencies and in ways other than enforcement responses under the criminal law. Though there are only a small number of program evaluations, the impact of third party policing interventions on crime and disorder has been assessed using randomized controlled trials and rigorous quasi-experimental designs. The available evidence suggests that third party policing generates statistically significant crime- and disorder-reduction effects. Related programs that employ Business Improvement Districts also show crime-prevention outcomes with long-term impacts, though research designs have been less rigorous in establishing causality.

Person-Focused Strategies

CONCLUSION 4-7 Evaluations of focused deterrence programs show consistent crime control impacts in reducing gang violence, street crime driven by disorderly drug markets, and repeat individual offending. The available evaluation literature suggests both short-term and long-term areawide impacts of focused deterrence programs on crime.

CONCLUSION 4-8 Evidence regarding the crime-reduction impact of stop, question, and frisk when implemented as a general, citywide crime-control strategy is mixed.

CONCLUSION 4-9 Evaluations of focused uses of stop, question, and frisk (SQF) (combined with other self-initiated enforcement activities by officers), targeting places with violence or serious gun crimes and focusing on high-risk repeat offenders, consistently report short-term crime-reduction effects; jurisdictional impacts, when estimated, are modest. There is an absence of evidence on the long-term impacts of focused uses of SQF on crime.

In the standard model of policing, the primary goal of police was to identify and arrest offenders after crimes had been committed. But beginning in the early 1970s, research evidence began to suggest that the police could be more effective if they focused on a relatively small number of chronic offenders. These studies led to innovations in policing based on the logic that crime prevention outcomes could be enhanced by focusing policing efforts on the small number of offenders who account for a large proportion of crime.

Offender-focused deterrence strategies, also known as “pulling levers,” attempt to deter crime among a particular offending population and are

often implemented in combination with problem-solving tactics. Offender-focused deterrence allows police to increase the certainty, swiftness, and severity of punishment in innovative ways. These strategies seek to change offender behavior by understanding the underlying crime-producing dynamics and conditions that sustain recurring crime problems and by implementing a blended strategy of law enforcement, community mobilization, and social service actions.

A growing number of quasi-experimental evaluations suggest that focused deterrence programs generate statistically significant crime-reduction impacts. Robust crime-control impacts have been reported by controlled evaluations testing the effectiveness of focused deterrence programs in reducing gang violence and street crime driven by disorderly drug markets and by non-experimental studies that examine repeat individual offending. It is noteworthy that the size of the effects observed are large, though the committee observed that many of the largest impacts are in studies with evaluation designs that are less rigorous. The committee did not identify any randomized experiments in this program area. Nonetheless, many of the quasi-experiments have study designs that create highly credible equivalence between their treatment and comparison conditions, which supports interpreting their results as evidence of causation.

While SQF has long been a law enforcement tool of policing, the landmark 1968 Supreme Court decision Terry v. Ohio provided a set of standard criteria that facilitated its use as a strategy for crime control. According to that decision, police may stop a person based upon a “reasonable suspicion” that that person may commit or is in the process of committing a crime; if a separate “reasonable suspicion” that the person is armed exists, the police may conduct a frisk of the stopped individual. While this standard means that Terry stops could not be legally applied without reference to the behavior of the individual being stopped, interpretation of that behavior gave significant leeway to the police. As a proactive policing strategy, departments often employ SQF more expansively and to promote forward-looking, preventive ends.

Non-experimental analyses of SQF broadly applied across a jurisdiction show mixed findings. However, a separate body of controlled evaluation research (including randomized experiments) that examines the effectiveness of SQF and other self-initiated enforcement activities by officers in targeting places with serious gun crime problems and focusing on high-risk repeat offenders consistently reports statistically significant short-term crime reductions.

Community-Based Strategies

CONCLUSION 4-10 Existing studies do not identify a consistent crime-prevention benefit for community-oriented policing programs. However, many of these studies are characterized by weak evaluation designs.

CONCLUSION 4-11 At present, there are an insufficient number of rigorous empirical studies on procedural justice policing to draw a firm conclusion about its effectiveness in reducing crime and disorder.

CONCLUSION 4-12 Broken windows policing interventions that use aggressive tactics for increasing misdemeanor arrests to control disorder generate small to null impacts on crime.

CONCLUSION 4-13 Evaluations of broken windows interventions that use place-based, problem-solving practices to reduce social and physical disorder have reported consistent short-term crime-reduction impacts. There is an absence of evidence on the long-term impacts of these kinds of broken windows strategies on crime or on possible jurisdictional outcomes.

The committee also reviewed the crime-prevention impacts of interventions using a community-based crime prevention approach. Such strategies include community-oriented policing, broken windows policing, and procedural justice policing. The logic models informing these community-based strategies seek to enlist and mobilize people who are not police in the processes of policing. In this case, however, the focus is generally not on specific actors such as business or property owners (as in the case of third party policing) but on the community more generally. In some cases, community-based strategies rely on enhancing “collective efficacy,” which is a community’s ability to engage in collective action to do something about crime (e.g., community-oriented policing and broken windows policing). In other cases, community-based models seek to change community members’ evaluations of the legitimacy of police actions (e.g., procedural justice policing) with the goal of increasing cooperation between the police and the public or encouraging law-abiding behavior. These goals are often intertwined in a real-world policing program.

As a proactive crime-prevention strategy, community-oriented policing tries to address and mitigate community problems (crime or otherwise) and, in turn, to build social resilience, collective efficacy, and empowerment to strengthen the infrastructure for the coproduction of safety and crime prevention. Community-oriented policing involves three core processes

and structures: (1) citizen involvement in identifying and addressing public safety concerns; (2) the decentralization of decision making to develop responses to locally defined problems; and (3) problem solving. Problem solving and decentralization acquire a community-oriented policing character when these process elements are embedded in the community engagement (often called “partnership”) element.

Although the committee identified a large number of studies of community-oriented policing programs, many of these programs were implemented in tandem with tactics typical of other approaches, such as problem solving. This was not surprising, given that basic definitions of community policing used by police departments often included problem solving as a key programmatic element. The studies also varied in their outcomes, reflecting the broad range of tactics and practices that are included in community-oriented policing programs, and many of the studies were characterized by weak evaluation designs. With these caveats, the committee did not identify a consistent crime prevention benefit for community-oriented policing programs.

Procedural justice policing seeks to impress upon citizens and the wider community that the police exercise their authority in legitimate ways. When citizens accord legitimacy to police activity, according to this logic model, they are more inclined to defer to police authority in instances of citizen-police interaction and to collaborate with police in the future, even to the extent of being more inclined not to violate the law. There is currently only a very small evidence base from which to support conclusions about the impact of procedural justice policing on crime prevention. Existing research does not support a conclusion that procedural justice policing impacts crime or disorder outcomes. At the same time, because the evidence base is small, the committee also cannot conclude that such strategies are ineffective.

Broken windows policing shares with community-oriented policing a concern for community welfare and envisions a role for police in finding ways to strengthen community structures and processes that provide a degree of immunity from disorder and crime in neighborhoods. Unlike the community-oriented policing strategy, it does not emphasize the coproductive collaborations of police and community as a mode of intervention; rather, it focuses on what police should do to establish conditions that allow “natural” community entities to flourish and promote neighborhood order and social/economic vitality. Implementations of broken windows interventions vary from informal enforcement tactics (warnings, rousting disorderly people) to formal or more intrusive ones (arrests, citations, stop and frisk), all of which are intended either to disrupt the forces of disorder before they overwhelm a neighborhood’s capacity for order maintenance

or to restore afflicted neighborhoods to a level where intrinsic community sources of order can manage it.

The impacts of broken windows policing are mixed across evaluations, again complicating the ability of the committee to draw strong inferences. However, the available program evaluations suggest that aggressive, misdemeanor arrest–based approaches to control disorder generate small to null impacts on crime. In contrast, controlled evaluations of place-based approaches that use problem-solving interventions to reduce social and physical disorder provide evidence of consistent crime-reduction impacts.

COMMUNITY IMPACTS

There is broad recognition that a positive community relationship with the police has value in its own right, irrespective of any influence it may have on crime or disorder. Democratic theories assert that the police, as an arm of government, are to serve the community and should be accountable to it in ways that elicit public approval and consent. Given this premise and the recent conflicts between the police and the public, the committee thought it very important to assess the impacts of proactive policing on issues, such as fear of crime, collective efficacy, and community evaluation of police legitimacy.

Place-Based, Problem-Solving, and Person-Focused Interventions

CONCLUSION 5-1 Existing research suggests that place-based policing strategies rarely have negative short-term impacts on community outcomes. At the same time, such strategies rarely improve community perceptions of the police or other community outcome measures. There is a virtual absence of evidence on the long-term and jurisdiction-level impacts of place-based policing on community outcomes.

CONCLUSION 5-2 Studies show consistent small-to-moderate, positive impacts of problem-solving interventions on short-term community satisfaction with the police. There is little evidence available on the long-term and jurisdiction-level impacts of problem-solving strategies on community outcomes.

CONCLUSION 5-3 There is little consistency found in the impacts of problem-solving policing on perceived disorder, quality of life, fear of crime, and police legitimacy, except for the near-absence of backfire effects. The lack of backfire effects suggests that the risk is low of harmful community effects from tactics typical of problem-solving strategies.

CONCLUSION 5-4 Studies evaluating the impact of person-focused strategies on community outcomes have a number of design limitations that prevent causal inferences to be drawn about program effects. However, the studies of citizens’ personal experiences with person-focused strategies do show marked negative associations between exposure to stop, question, and frisk and proactive traffic enforcement approaches and community outcomes. The long-term and jurisdictionwide community consequences of person-focused proactive strategies remain untested.

Place-based, person-focused, and problem-solving interventions are distinct from community-based proactive strategies in that they do not directly seek to engage the public to enhance legitimacy evaluations and cooperation. In this context, the concerns regarding community outcomes for these approaches have often focused not on whether they improve community attitudes toward the police but rather on whether the focus on crime control leads inevitably to declines in positive community attitudes. Community-based strategies, in contrast, specifically seek to reduce fear, increase trust and willingness to intervene in community problems, and increase trust and confidence in the police.

A body of research evaluating the impact of place-based strategies on community attitudes is only now emerging; this research includes both quasi-experimental and experimental studies. However, the consistency of the findings suggests that place-based proactive policing strategies rarely have negative short-term impacts on community attitudes. At the same time, the evidence suggests that such strategies rarely improve community perceptions of the police or other community outcome measures. Moreover, existing studies have generally examined the broader community and not specific individuals who are the focus of place-based interventions at crime hot spots. As noted below, more aggressive policing tactics that are focused on individuals may have negative outcomes on those who have contact with the police. Existing studies also generally measure short-term changes, which may not be sensitive to communities that become the focus of long-term implementation of place-based policing. Finally, there has not been measurement of the impacts of place-based approaches on the broader community, extending beyond the specific focus of interventions.

The research literature on community impacts of problem-solving interventions is larger. Although much of the literature relies on quasi-experimental designs, a few well-implemented randomized experiments also provide information on community outcomes. Studies show consistent positive short-term impacts of problem-solving strategies on community satisfaction with the police. At the same time, however, the research base lacks estimates of larger jurisdictional impacts of these strategies.

Because problem-solving strategies are so often implemented in tandem with tactics typical of community-based policing (i.e., community engagement), it is difficult to determine what role the problem-solving aspect plays in community outcomes, compared to the impact of the community engagement element. Although this fact makes it difficult to draw strong conclusions about “what” is impacting community attitudes, as we note below, it may be that implementing multiple approaches in tandem can also have more positive outcomes for police agencies.

While there is evidence that problem-solving approaches increase community satisfaction with the police, we found little consistency in problem-solving policing’s impacts on perceived disorder/quality of life, fear of crime, and police legitimacy. However, the near-absence of backfire (i.e., undesired negative) effects in the evaluations of problem-solving strategies suggests that the risk of harmful community effects from problem-solving strategies is low. As with place-based approaches, community outcomes generally do not examine people who have direct contact with the police, and measurement of impacts is local as opposed to jurisdictional.

The body of research evaluating the impact of person-focused strategies on community outcomes is relatively small, even in comparison with the evidence base on problem-solving and place-based strategies; the long-term community consequences of person-focused proactive strategies also remain untested. These studies involve qualitative or correlational designs that make it difficult to draw causal inferences about typical impacts of these strategies. Correlational studies do find strong negative associations between exposure to the strategy and the attitudes and orientations of individuals who are the subjects of aggressive law enforcement interventions (SQF and proactive traffic enforcement). Moreover, a number of ethnographic and survey-based studies have found negative outcomes, especially for Black and other non-White youth who are continually exposed to SQFs. The studies that measure the impact on the larger community show a more complicated and unclear pattern of outcomes.

Community-Based Interventions

CONCLUSION 6-1 Community-oriented policing leads to modest improvements in the public’s view of policing and the police in the short term. (Very few studies of community-oriented policing have traced its long-term effects on community outcomes or its jurisdictionwide consequences.) These improvements occur with greatest consistency for measures of community satisfaction and less so for measures of perceived disorder, fear of crime, and police legitimacy. Evaluations of community-oriented policing rarely find “backfire” effects on community attitudes. Hence, the deployment of community-oriented policing

as a proactive strategy seems to offer prospects for modest gains at little risk of negative consequences.

CONCLUSION 6-2 Due to the small number of studies, mixed findings, and methodological limitations, no conclusion can be drawn about the impact of community-oriented policing on collective efficacy and citizen cooperative behavior.

CONCLUSION 6-3 The committee is not able to draw a conclusion regarding the impacts of broken windows policing on fear of crime or collective efficacy. This is due in part to the surprisingly small number of studies that examine the community outcomes of broken windows policing and in part to the mixed effects observed.

CONCLUSION 6-4 In general, studies show that perceptions of procedurally just treatment are strongly and positively associated with subjective evaluations of police legitimacy and cooperation with the police. However, the research base is currently insufficient to draw conclusions about whether procedurally just policing causally influences either perceived legitimacy or cooperation.

CONCLUSION 6-5 Although the application of procedural justice concepts to policing is relatively new, there are more extensive literatures on procedural justice in social psychology, in management, and with other legal authorities such as the courts. Those studies are often designed in ways that make causal inferences more compelling, and results in those areas suggest that the application of procedural justice concepts to policing has promise and that further studies are needed to examine the degree to which the success of such strategies in those other domains can be replicated in the domain of policing.

The available empirical research on community-oriented policing’s community effects focuses on citizen perceptions of police performance (in terms of what they do and the consequences for community disorder), satisfaction with police, and perceived police legitimacy. The evidence suggests that community-oriented policing leads to modest improvements in the community’s view of policing and the police in the short term. This occurs with greatest consistency for measures of community satisfaction and less so for measures of perceived disorder, fear of crime, and perceived legitimacy. Evaluations of community-oriented policing rarely find “backfire” effects from the intervention on community attitudes. Therefore, the deployment of community-oriented policing as a proactive strategy seems to offer prospects of modest gains at little risk of negative consequences.

Broken windows policing is often evaluated directly in terms of its short-term crime control impacts. We have emphasized in this report that the logic model for broken windows policing seeks to alter the community’s levels of fear and collective efficacy as a method of enhancing community social controls and reducing crime in the long run. While this is a key element of the broken windows policing model, the committee’s review of the evidence found that these outcomes have seldom been examined. The evidence was insufficient to draw any conclusions regarding the impact of broken windows policing on community social controls. Studies of the impacts of broken windows policing on fear of crime do not support the model’s claim that such programs will reduce levels of fear in the community, at least in the short run.

While there is a rapidly growing body of research on the community impacts of procedural justice policing, it is difficult to draw causal inferences from these studies. In general, the studies show that perceptions of procedurally just treatment are strongly correlated with subjective evaluations of police legitimacy. The extant research base on the impacts of procedural justice proactive policing strategies on perceived legitimacy and cooperation was insufficient for the committee to draw conclusions about whether procedurally just policing will improve community evaluations of police legitimacy or increase cooperation with the police.

Although this committee finding may appear at odds with a growing movement to encourage procedurally just behavior among the police, the committee thinks it is important to stress that a finding that there is insufficient evidence to support the expected outcomes of procedural justice policing is not the same as a finding that such outcomes do not exist. Moreover, although the application of procedural justice to policing is relatively new, there is a more extensive evidence base on procedural justice in social psychology and organizational management, as well as on procedural justice with other legal authorities such as the courts. Those studies are often designed in ways that make causal inferences more compelling, and results in those areas suggest meaningful impacts of procedural justice on the legitimacy of institutions and authorities involved. Thus, the application of procedural justice ideas to policing has promise, although further studies are needed to examine the degree to which the success of such implementations in other social contexts can be replicated in the arena of policing.

RACIAL BIAS AND DISPARITIES

CONCLUSION 7-1 There are likely to be large racial disparities in the volume and nature of police–citizen encounters when police target high-risk people or high-risk places, as is common in many proactive policing programs.

CONCLUSION 7-2 Existing evidence does not establish conclusively whether, and to what extent, the racial disparities associated with concentrated person-focused and place-based enforcement are indicators of statistical prediction, racial animus, implicit bias, or other causes. However, the history of racial injustice in the United States, in particular in the area of criminal justice and policing, as well as ethnographic research that has identified disparate impacts of policing on non-White communities, makes the investigation of the causes of racial disparities a key research and policy concern.

Concerns about racial bias loom especially large in discussions of policing. The interest of this report was to assess whether and to what extent proactive policing affects racial disparities in police–citizen encounters and racial bias in police behavior. Recent high-profile incidents of police shootings and abusive police–citizen interaction caught on camera have raised questions regarding basic fairness, racial discrimination, and the excessive use of force of all forms against non-Whites, and especially Blacks, in the United States. In considering these incidents, the committee stresses that the origins of policing in the United States are intimately interwoven with the nation’s history of racial prejudice. Although in recent decades police have often made a strong effort to address racially biased behaviors, wide disparities remain in the extent to which non-White people and White people are stopped or arrested by police. Moreover, as our discussion of constitutional violations in Chapter 3 notes, the U.S. Department of Justice has identified continued racial disparities and biased behavior in policing in a number of major American police agencies.

As social norms have evolved to make overt expressions of bigotry less acceptable, psychologists have developed tools to measure more subtle factors underlying biased behavior. A series of studies suggest that negative racial attitudes may influence police behavior—although there is no direct research on proactive policing. There is a further growing body of research identifying how these psychological mechanisms may affect behavior and what types of situations, policies, or practices may exacerbate or ameliorate racially biased behaviors. In a number of studies, social psychologists have found that race may affect decision making, especially under situations where time is short and such decisions need to be made quickly. More broadly, social psychologists have identified dispositional (i.e., individual characteristics) and situational and environmental factors that are associated with higher levels of racially biased behavior.

Proactive strategies often facilitate increased officer contact with residents (particularly in high-crime areas), involve contacts that are often enforcement-oriented and uninvited, and may allow greater officer discretion compared to standard policing models. These elements align with

broad categories of possible risk factors for biased behavior by police officers. For example, when contacts involve stops or arrests, police may be put in situations where they have to “think fast” and react quickly. Social psychologists have argued that such situations may be particularly prone to the emergence of what they define as implicit biases.

Relative to the research on the impact of proactive policing policies on crime, there is very little field research exploring the potential role that racially biased behavior plays in proactive policing. There is even less research on the ways that race may shape police policy or color the consequences of police encounters with residents. These research gaps leave police departments and communities concerned with bias in police behavior without an evidence base from which to make informed decisions. Because of these gaps, the committee was unable to draw any concrete conclusions about the role of biased behavior in proactive policing. Consequently, research on these topics is urgently needed both so that the field may better understand potential negative consequences of proactive policing and so that communities and police departments may be better equipped to align police behaviors with values of equity and justice.

Inferring the role of racial animus, statistical prediction, or other dispositional and situational risk factors in contributing to observed racial disparities is a challenging question for research. Although focused policing approaches may reduce overall levels of police intrusion, we also detailed in Chapter 7 the very large disparities in the stops and arrests of non-White, and especially Black Americans, and we noted that concentrating enforcement efforts in high-crime areas and on highly active individual offenders may lead to racial disparities in police–citizen interactions. Although these disparities are often much reduced when taking into account population benchmarks such as official criminality, the committee also noted that studies that seek to benchmark citizen–police interactions against simple population counts or broad, publicly available measures of criminal activity do not yield conclusive information regarding the potential for racially biased behavior in proactive policing efforts. Identifying an appropriate benchmark would require detailed information on the geography and nature of the proactive strategy, as well as localized knowledge of the relative importance of the problem. Such benchmarks are not currently available. The absence of such benchmarks makes it difficult to distinguish between accurate statistical prediction and racial profiling.

Some of the most illuminating evidence on the potential impact of proactive policing and increased citizen–police contacts on racial outcomes relates to the use of SQF in New York City. This research seeks to model the probabilities that police suspicion of criminal possession of a weapon turns out to be justified, given the information available to officers when deciding whether to stop someone. This work finds substantial racial and

ethnic disparities in the distribution of these probabilities, suggesting that police in New York City apply lower thresholds of suspicion to blacks and Hispanics. We do not know whether this pattern exists in other settings.

Per the charge to the committee, this report reviewed a relatively narrow area of intersection between race and policing. This focus, though, is nested in a broader societal framework of possible disparities and biased behaviors across a whole array of social contexts. These can affect proactive policing in, for example, the distribution of crime in society and the extent of exposure of specific groups to police surveillance and enforcement. However, it was beyond the scope of this study to review them systematically in the context of the committee’s work.

POLICY IMPLICATIONS

In its review of the evidence, the committee tried to identify the most credible evidence on whether particular types of proactive policing strategies have been shown to affect legality, crime, communities, racial disparities, and racially biased behavior. A strategy is said to have “impact” if it affects outcomes compared with what they would have been at that same time and place in the absence of the implementation of a specific strategy. The strongest evidence often derives from randomized field trials and natural experiments in the field, typically implemented through a change in the activities of a police department structured so as to create a credibly comparable control condition with which to compare the “treatment” condition. However, as we have emphasized throughout the report, other methodological approaches can also provide rigorous evidence for the types of outcomes that we have examined. In turn, ethnographic studies have provided important information for the committee in understanding the processes that lead to such outcomes. Nonetheless, the emphasis in many sections of our report is on the “internal validity” of the evaluation: how strong is the evidence that a particular treatment implemented in a particular place caused the observed impact? And this assessment of validity has important implications for the strength of policy recommendations that we can draw from our review.

We want to emphasize that even a well-designed experimental trial implemented with fidelity may yield biased effect estimates if the outcomes data are not reliable. Most of the studies of crime outcomes examined in this report used crime data collected by the police department that is responsible for implementing the program. With the exception of homicide and perhaps motor-vehicle theft, the police only know of a fraction of all serious crimes. Less than one-half of robberies, aggravated assaults, and burglaries are reported to the police, and of course, reporting is a precondition for inclusion in the departmental statistics. That fact does not

negate the usefulness of these data in measuring impact, but it does compel consideration of whether the intervention is likely to affect the likelihood that a crime will be reported to and recorded by the police. For example, if a community-based policing intervention has the effects of both reducing crime and increasing the percentage of crimes reported to the police, the result might be that the latter will mask the former and obscure the crime-reduction effect. We note this possibility as a potential challenge to the internal validity of even well-designed and faithfully implemented experimental interventions, if they rely solely on police data.

Data that are collected by researchers may also have serious weaknesses. In some of the community surveys reviewed in this report, response rates were exceptionally low. A number of studies that we examined also used laboratory data; the laboratory environment allows a great deal of control over the research process but can be criticized as artificial and as a poor indicator of what actually happens in the field in policing.

More generally, we want to point to three specific limitations when it comes to the usefulness of this review in informing policy choice. First, the literature that we reviewed typically lacks much information on the magnitudes of the effects of the strategies evaluated. A clear demonstration that the “treatment effect” is greater than would be expected by chance—that is, that the estimated effect is statistically significantly different from zero—helps establish that the program “worked” but not that it was “worthwhile” from a policy perspective. A more complete evaluation would require a comparison of the estimated magnitude of the effect with an estimate of the costs of the program. How many serious crimes were prevented by the candidate program for every $100,000 worth of resources devoted to it, and what are the effects of removing that $100,000 from what it would otherwise have been used for? For a police chief or city mayor, resources are limited and must be accounted for in making well-informed choices about policing practice. This problem becomes even more difficult when one is trying to calculate costs and benefits for such outcomes as community satisfaction or perceived legitimacy. The literature rarely provides such a cost-effectiveness analysis, and hence this committee cannot provide policy proscriptions that would give specific advice about the costs or cost savings.

Second, and closely related, is that the evaluation evidence, because it typically does not account for cost, may actually provide a misleading impression of whether a program “worked”—whether in reducing crime or improving community attitudes for the entire jurisdiction—as opposed to having an effect only for the segment of the city represented by the treatment group. As we have noted throughout the report, most evaluations provide a local estimate of program impacts. They do not report how the program affected the jurisdiction overall. Absent such reports, or at least

evidence-grounded estimates of jurisdiction-level impact, it is very difficult to provide guidance to police executives about how redeployment of resources will impact overall trends across a city. Since most of the evaluations we reviewed assess local impacts only, we often do not know what the impacts of a program will be on the broader community when a program is broadly applied, as opposed to when it is implemented on a small scale.

Third, a police chief who is considering adopting a particular innovation may be able to make a prediction about whether it will reduce crime or improve community attitudes, based on evaluations of one or more similar programs, but that prediction must always be hedged by the constraint that making inferences about “here and now” based on “there and then” is a tricky business. A well-known example comes from the “coerced abstinence” program for drug-involved convicts known as HOPE. The program originated and was carefully evaluated in courts in Honolulu, Hawaii, where it appeared very effective. It has been replicated a number of times on the mainland United States, with at best mixed results. The variability in results may reflect differences in the quality of implementation by the law enforcement agencies, the modal type of drug of abuse (which differs among jurisdictions), or other factors. 1 To the extent that programmatic effects are moderated by the characteristics of the target population and the implementing agency, then importing a program that appears promising into another setting can lead to disappointment. The uncertainties created by this “external validity” problem for evaluating field trials cannot be readily quantified. A common-sense view is that a single evaluation is not enough to establish a strong case for adoption in a different time and place and that understanding potential modifiers of the effects is important for evidence-based policy.

However, while acknowledging these caveats, the committee thinks that we can provide broad policy guidance regarding what the science of policing is today and how that might affect the choices that police executives make. Waiting until the evidence base is fully developed to draw from science in policy making is not only unrealistic—it also means that practitioners will not benefit from what is known already. Our report provides important knowledge for policing, knowledge that can help inform the debate about what the police should be doing. Nonetheless, as we have noted, there are important limitations in how existing knowledge can be used, and those limitations should be considered when drawing upon the science in this report.

A number of identifiable policing strategies provide evidence of consistent short-term crime-prevention benefits at the local level. These in-

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1 For a discussion of HOPE, see the special issue of Criminology & Public Policy (November 2016), Volume 15, Issue 4.

clude hot spots policing, problem-oriented policing, third party policing, SQF targeted to violent and gun-crime hot spots, focused deterrence, and problem-solving efforts incorporated in broken windows policing. What these approaches have in common is their effort to more tightly specify and focus police activities. Police executives who implement such strategies are drawing upon evidence-based approaches. At the same time, the ability to generalize from existing evaluations to the broader array of at least larger American cities is sometimes limited by the limited number and scope of studies that are available, though in the case of hot spots policing a larger number of studies across diverse contexts have been carried out. We also find that these strategies, with the important exception of SQF, do not lead to negative community outcomes. With the caveats noted above, it appears that crime-prevention outcomes can be obtained without this type of unintended negative consequence. Albeit preliminary, this finding reinforces the policy relevance of these evidence-based approaches.

At the same time, the results of our review suggest that police executives should not view certain proactive policing approaches as evidence based, at least at this time. For instance, SQF indiscriminately focused across a jurisdiction or broken windows policing programs relying on a generalized approach to misdemeanor arrests (“zero tolerance”) have not shown evidence of effectiveness. This caveat, combined with research evidence that documents negative individual outcomes for people who are the subject of aggressive police enforcement efforts, even in the absence of clear causal interpretation, should lead police executives to exercise caution in adopting generalized, aggressive enforcement tactics. Moreover, our review of the constitutional basis for focusing police resources on people or places suggests that issues of legality are particularly relevant in the case of such strategies. Even in the case of focused programs for which there is evidence of crime-control success, when aggressive approaches such as SQF are employed, police executives must consider and actively try to prevent potential negative outcomes on the community and on legality, and they should cooperate with researchers attempting to quantify and evaluate these issues. This means not only that police executives should proceed with caution in adopting such strategies but also that agencies that are already applying them broadly and without careful focus should consider scaling down present efforts.

The committee’s findings regarding community-based strategies raise important questions about whether such approaches will yield crime-prevention benefits. Many scholars and policy makers have sought to argue that community-oriented policing and procedural justice policing will yield not only better relations with the public but also greater crime control. We do not find consistent evidence for this proposition, and police executives

should be accordingly wary of implementing community-based strategies primarily as a crime-control approach.

The committee also concluded that community-oriented policing programs were likely to improve evaluations of the police, albeit modestly. Accordingly, if the policy goal of an agency is to improve its relationship with the communities it serves, then community-oriented policing is a promising strategy choice, although we are unable to offer a judgment on whether the benefits are sufficient to justify the expected costs. Our review of policing programs with a community-based approach also suggests that police executives may want to consider applying multiple strategies as a more general agency approach. The difficulty of distinguishing the effects of community-based and problem-solving approaches that are often implemented together has been noted numerous times in this report. However, we also think that better outcomes may be obtained when programs are hybridized across the approaches defined in this report. If, for example, an agency seeks to improve both crime prevention and community satisfaction with the police, it seems reasonable to combine practices typical of community-oriented policing with evidence-based crime-prevention practices typical of strategies such as hot spots policing or problem-oriented policing. This has already been done in problem-solving approaches that emphasize community engagement, where these dual benefits have been observed.

Existing studies do not provide evidence of crime prevention effectiveness in the case of proactive procedural justice policing. Accordingly, the committee believes that caution should be used in advocating for such approaches on the ground that they will reduce crime. At the same time, studies reviewed by the committee did not find that procedural justice policing has the expected positive community outcomes. Does this mean that police should not encourage procedural justice policing programs? We think that this would be a serious mistake for two reasons. The first is simply that procedural justice reflects the behavior of police that is appropriate in a democratic society. Procedural justice encourages democratic policing even if it may not change citizen attitudes. The second reason relates to the state of research in this area. While it is a mistake to draw strong conclusions that procedural justice policing will improve community members’ evaluations of police legitimacy or cooperation with the police, it is equally wrong to draw the conclusion that it will not do so. Again, the evidence base here is too sparse to support either position.

RESEARCH GAPS

While there is a large body of evaluation research in policing today, as contrasted with two or three decades ago, the committee identified a

number of key gaps in what is known about proactive policing. Filling such gaps in the evidence base is critical for developing the type of knowledge that, as we noted earlier, is necessary to inform policy decisions for policing. Policing in the United States represents a large commitment of public resources; it is estimated to cost federal, state, and local governments more than $125 billion per year ( Kyckelhahn, 2015 ). Given that investment, the extent of the research gaps on proactive policing is surprising. For the police to take advantage of the revolution in police practices that proactive policing represents, they will need the help of the federal government and private foundations in answering a host of questions regarding effectiveness, community outcomes, legality, and racially biased behavior. The committee also noted an imbalance in the evidence base across the areas of the committee’s charge. While far from complete, there is a large body of credible causal evidence on the impact of proactive policing on crime rates. However, social science research of a similar form on other equally important outcomes of policing is only beginning to occur.

We think it also important to note at the outset that more research needs to be focused on the standard model of policing. The 2004 National Research Council report, Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing: The Evidence , argued that there was little evidence supporting such standard police practices as random police patrol across large areas, follow-up investigations, and rapid response to citizen calls for service. However, a number of new studies have been carried out since the 2004 study, and this recent research suggests that the view of the standard model of policing in that report may need to be reassessed (see, e.g., Chaflin and McCrary, 2017 ; Evans and Owens, 2007 ; Cook, 2015 ). In order to estimate the benefits of proactive policing efforts, more information is needed on whether standard policing practices are generating crime-prevention benefits, as well as sustaining and perhaps improving the community’s trust in and regard for the police.

Improving the Quality of Data and Research on Proactive Policing

Drawing conclusions about the efficacy of proactive policing strategies or about policing innovations more broadly is complicated by the absence of comprehensive data on police behavior in the field. Just because a policy has been formally adopted does not mean that officers on the beat behave according to the tenets of that policy. The impact of the adoption of a policy on any outcome is, essentially, a combination of the actual impact of a police agency adopting, for example, a place-based intervention, and the probability that officers actually implement this intervention as they engage in targeted patrol in particular places. Identifying ways to measure what police officers actually do is, therefore, a central problem for evaluat-

ing the impact of proactive policing strategies on crime, communities, and the legality of officer behavior.

To be useful for evaluating the impact of a proactive policing strategy on what officers do in the field, it is necessary for the data to, at minimum, measure officer behavior both before and after the policy change. Ideally, the data would span multiple agencies, thereby allowing for a more credible analysis of what officers might have done in the absence of the policy change. There have been some examples of efforts by governments to proactively develop such data sources. Such efforts include the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Use-of-Force Data Collection project, the Police Data Initiative in the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office) in the U.S. Department of Justice, and the proactive efforts in California to require local agencies to report information on all stops to that state’s Office of the Attorney General (CA AB 953). 2 Similarly, there are a number of academic and nonprofit efforts to augment police data collection efforts and thereby provide enhanced analytic capacity, such as the Center for Policing Equity’s National Justice Database and the Stanford Open Policing Project. 3 Substantially more effort needs to be devoted to collecting reliable data on how proactive policing is carried out in the field. 4 Without the routine collection of such data, it is not possible to assess the prevalence and incidence of proactive policing or to characterize the content of such strategies.

The committee also noted more general weaknesses in existing studies that limit the conclusions that can be drawn. One important limitation is that proactive policing interventions often overlap in terms of the strategies represented by the elements of the intervention. For example, many place-based policing interventions include elements of a problem-solving approach, as do many community-based programs. While we recognize that the police and program developers are focused on crime prevention and not on identifying the specific components of a program that have impact, the mixing of elements from different approaches makes it extremely difficult to draw strong conclusions about which element(s) in a program had a crime-prevention impact. Therefore, it is very important in future research to develop study designs that allow identification of the specific mechanisms that produce impacts.

2 See https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201520160AB953 [November 2016].

3 See http://mashable.com/2017/02/23/google-racial-justice-commitment/#8KbrqmHvKkqjhttp://observer.com/2016/02/traffic-stops-database/ [November 2016].

4 Interesting new opportunities for such data collection have been taken advantage of by researchers. For example, S. Weisburd (2016) used GPS data on exactly where police cars are in Dallas, Texas, at small intervals of time to draw inferences about the effectiveness of police patrol in small areas.

More generally, it is important for evaluations to focus on the underlying logic models that are proposed to account for (or promise) program impacts. Broken windows policing, for example, was conceived as a method for increasing community social controls in the long run. However, very few studies of broken windows policing actually examine how police activities in reducing disorder will impact such long-term attitudes. This is true for many of the proactive policing strategies examined in this report. Research funding agencies should require the incorporation of tests of the validity of underlying logic models in their study solicitations.

The focus on short-run, rather than long-run, impacts also pervades the evaluation of crime incidence, which is the most researched outcome the committee examined. Seldom do researchers look at program impacts extending for more than a year after program initiation, and only a handful of the studies identified by the committee look at crime prevention in the long run. While research indicates that many proactive practices seem to create a crime-reduction effect in the short term, the long-term impacts of these programs also should be an important focus of study. And whereas most of the available research that measures community effects does so over a relatively short term (a year or less), it is likely that community effects—especially those involving people who have little or no direct contact with the police—require much longer to register. Some research suggests that community effects are dynamic, but that research has generally not examined effects over several years. For all these reasons, more research is needed that tracks the effects of proactive policing over several years.

With regard to the types of research conducted, more implementation and process evaluations are needed to better understand the challenges of getting programs and policies translated into police practice, as well as to better understand the actual practices that are being evaluated in terms of community outcomes. The standardization of measures of implementation and dosage for specific strategies will improve the capacity of systematic reviews of these studies to interpret an array of findings. In turn, in many areas there is a need for more rigorous evaluation designs—and especially the development of well-implemented randomized trials.

In looking at the studies reviewed in this report, the committee notes that most are concentrated in large, urban jurisdictions. Smaller, suburban, and rural jurisdictions are understudied, but they should be included in the mix of funded evaluations. Community dynamics in such jurisdictions may vary in ways not revealed in the studies of larger communities. Evaluations should also control for the larger organizational context in which policing programs operate. Little is known about how the structure of a department and, for example, its management style affects its ability to develop and sustain proactive policing programs that reduce crime while enhancing the legitimacy and legality of police officers’ actions. Further research is also

needed on how these outcomes are affected by police oversight and accountability mechanisms, including review boards, lawsuits, data disclosure requirements, and the standardized collection of data on officer activities (as recommended above).

Finally, the committee notes the absence of rigorous research on training of police. Training has been shown to change behavior in other settings, particularly management. Police training programs for proactive policing are recent, and there is very little evidence at this time about their long-term effects. Several recent studies suggest that training programs can influence officers’ attitudes toward, and behavior within, communities. Studies need to examine the impact of training on police officers’ orientations and behaviors. Expanding the Census of Law Enforcement Training Academies, and in particular identifying which agencies hire graduates, as opposed to simply how many agencies, is a possible first step that would facilitate linking officer training to actual field outcomes. It is especially important for future research to evaluate which training approaches and methods prove most effective for imparting the necessary will and skill required to implement a given proactive strategy well.

Proactive Policing and the Law

There is less research on how proactive policies influence the legality of officer behavior than on how those policies affect crime or community perceptions of crime. One of the hurdles is the absence of a clear measure of what, exactly, constitutes legal behavior on an officer’s part. Research on how to quantify the legality of police officer behavior in a way that is consistent with the law and lends itself to causal analysis is a necessary first step. Because of the complex issues involved, such research is likely to be most productive if conducted by members of the legal, social science, and police leadership communities in collaboration.

Researchers studying the impacts of proactive policies on citizen lawbreaking, using experimental or quasi-experimental designs and administrative data, also should identify the relevant legal standards for officer behavior and include measures of officer behavior that are affected by these standards as one of their assessed outcomes. Ethnographic, qualitative, and mixed methods social science research, as well as legal scholarship, should inform how quantitative researchers conceptualize these measures. Given that officer law-breaking is as important, if not more so, in a general evaluation of such policies as undesirable behavior on the part of citizens, researchers who have access to administrative data that measure and make reliable legal judgments about officer behavior, including data collected by body-worn cameras, should include assessment of such outcomes in their analysis of the policies’ impacts on crime by citizens.

Crime-Control Impacts of Proactive Policing

As noted above, while the committee has provided a series of conclusions regarding the crime- and disorder-control impacts of proactive policing, there are significant caveats that limited our ability to develop specific policy prescriptions. Given the importance of the policing enterprise and its impacts on U.S. society, we think that a major investment in research on proactive policing is warranted, with a complementary investment in assessing standard policing practices.

A better understanding is needed of the crime-prevention effects of proactive policing programs relative to each other and relative to such activities as crime investigation, response to 911 calls, and routine patrol. For example, which types of proactive activities create a greater deterrent effect in a crime hot spot: foot patrol, technological surveillance (such as CCTVs), problem-solving projects, enforcement activities, or situational crime-prevention strategies? Can gun crimes be best reduced through focused deterrence/pulling levers, pedestrian and traffic stops, or crime prevention through environmental design?

Equally important to the relative deterrent effect of proactive policing approaches are the social costs and collateral consequences of those approaches. At the most basic level, identifying other effects than crime reduction of proactive policing approaches—positive or negative—is needed. Once identified, measuring for these effects when testing for the crime prevention effects of proactive policing should be included in study designs.

A key issue in place-based studies is whether crime displaces to other areas. There is now a strong literature showing that immediate geographic displacement is not common, and studies instead point to a diffusion of crime control benefits to areas near targeted hot spots. However, little is known about displacement to more distal areas and whether such displacement affects the crime prevention benefits of place-based strategies. Study of distal displacement needs to be a central feature of the next generation of research on place-based policing. Most evaluations also provide only local estimates of impacts, and it is critical to examine whether place-based strategies implemented across cities will have jurisdictional impacts. Estimating the size of jurisdictional impacts for strategies such as hot spots policing is critical for police executives and policy makers as they consider the wider benefits of these approaches.

More research is also needed on how technology contributes to the crime prevention effects of proactive policing strategies. There has been relatively little research on the impacts of technology in policing beyond technical, efficiency, or process evaluations. More studies of the crime-control impacts of license plate readers, body-worn cameras, gun-shot detection technologies, forensic technologies, and CCTV are needed. Furthermore,

the effectiveness of analytic technologies such as crime analysis and predictive policing software applications also remains under-researched. Given their increased use in proactive policing strategies, much more needs to be known.

To date, there are no rigorous outcome evaluations of law enforcement proactive interventions designed to reduce and prevent technology-related crime, such as cybercrime, fraud and theft using the Internet, or hacking. Proactive activities by federal agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the U.S. Department of Homeland Security remain completely immune from public-domain evaluation in this and all other aspects of their proactive efforts.

Finally, it is important to determine whether community-oriented or procedural justice approaches can produce crime prevention effects. While improving citizen reaction to police activity is an important goal in and of itself, equally important—and connected to this goal—is the detection, prevention, reduction, and control of crime. Perhaps community-oriented or procedural justice approaches can be combined with other effective practices from the place-based, person-focused, or problem-solving approaches to attain both goals. But to date, the effectiveness of community-oriented and procedural justice interventions in crime control is uncertain.

Community Impacts of Proactive Policing

While there is broad recognition of the importance of community impacts of proactive policing strategies, there are only a few studies available on the community impacts of place-based and person-focused strategies, and the results for most types of outcomes are varied. A more extensive menu of observational, quasi-experimental, and experimental evaluations is needed. Systematic assessment of the contingent nature of outcomes is needed. Moreover, although a variety of logic models propose to account for the role that various community outcomes play in the process of affecting crime and disorder levels and community perceptions and behaviors, these logic models have not been subjected to rigorous empirical tests.

A gap noted throughout the research on community impacts is the lack of studies of the long-term effects of proactive strategies. Regardless of the rigor of the evaluation design in terms of inferring causal linkages between strategies and community outcomes, the extant literature provides only an ahistorical, incomplete, and potentially misleading perspective on what the consequences of proactive strategies will be. Future research should take into account both the long-term exposure of research subjects to proactive policing and the need to track the community consequences of those strategies over years, not months. Both variation in the accumulation of dosage over extended time and the consequences of this extended exposure are

virtually unexplored. Whether and how much a pattern of consequences is sustained or decays is also important to know.

One approach to changing community perception of police legitimacy is to change police behavior during contacts with the public. There is considerable evidence in the social psychology literature suggesting that personal contacts can change attitudes. However, there is insufficient research on the likelihood that one personal contact with a police officer can change orientations that have built up over a lifetime, irrespective of how the police behave during that single contact. Studies of the impact of a single experience with the police on a person’s general orientation toward the police are relatively few, and the results are mixed. Research is needed that tests the ability of a single interaction to shape general views about police legitimacy. This work needs to consider different types of encounters. It also needs to take account of characteristics of the person being stopped (race, age, gender, trust in the police) and that person’s history of encounters with the police. Finally, there needs to be a broader consideration of impacts on communities and the inevitable interactions between what the police do in a community and how that activity affects the development trajectory of that community, not only with respect to crime but also for housing, economic development, and other social outcomes.

Racial Bias and Disparities in Proactive Policing

The committee believes that the area of racial disparity and racially biased behavior is a particularly important one for enhancing the rigor and quantity of research on proactive policing. The committee identified five areas where research is most urgently needed with regard to racially biased behavior and proactive policing: (1) psychological risk factors, (2) training on bias reduction, (3) attention to behavioral bias as an important outcome of research on crime reduction, (4) an emphasis on assessing “downstream” consequences of proactive policing on racial outcomes, and (5) an emphasis on “upstream” influences regarding how proactive policing approaches are adopted.

First, a focus is needed on the psychological mechanisms of racially biased police behavior in actual field contexts, not only in laboratory simulations. As we reviewed in Chapter 7 , research in social psychology has identified a number of risk and protective factors that in laboratory settings are associated with either an increase or decrease in racially biased behaviors, even in subjects who do not appear to harbor racial animus. Many situations common in proactive policing map onto these factors. In spite of the potential relevance of the laboratory findings, there is virtually no evidence about whether or not police contexts or trainings produce sufficient protections against those risks in the field. A systematic approach to

these risk factors in proactive policing would be an important step toward producing an evidence base for evaluating racial disparities in proactive policing.

Second, rigorous research is needed on whether police training in this area affects actual police behavior. Even though there have been large investments in police training to address racial bias and disparate treatment, there are at present no rigorous studies that inform these efforts.

Third, the incidence of racially biased behavior and of racial disparities in outcomes should become an important outcome metric for research on proactive policing. To date, outcome evaluations in policing have focused primarily on crime control and at times on community satisfaction or perceived legitimacy. Seldom have studies assessed racial outcomes of proactive policing, despite the fact that these outcomes constitute a key issue for policy in American society. Assessing disparate impacts in policing in an informative way will require spatially detailed demographic information about the population at risk of encountering the police when the policy is in place, in order to identify an appropriate benchmark and identify the marginal person affected by the policy. Until standardized metrics for measuring racially biased behavior are available, along with measures of the populations exposed to proactive policing policies, thorough assessments of proactive policing efforts will likely require formal empirical analysis, as well as qualitative and ethnographic analysis, of proactive strategies, their implementation, and their impacts.

Fourth, understanding the downstream consequences of racial disparities is an urgent research need. Does proactive policing have a long-term impact on racial disparities or race relations in communities? What are the costs of such impacts, and can and should they be compared to the crime-control benefits of proactive policing? As we argued in Chapter 7 , proactive policing may lead to long-term decreases in inequalities in communities because of the benefits of lowered crime and related social consequences of crime. But little is known about such issues to date. To weigh these potential costs of proactive policing against the crime-reducing benefits, researchers must develop some metric for quantifying and estimating the cost of racial disparities, racially biased behavior, and racial animus. Survey techniques commonly used for cost-benefit research in environmental economics may be a useful guide.

Finally, the committee identified very little research on what drives law enforcement agencies to adopt proactive police policies. The history of criminal justice and law enforcement in the United States, along with ethnographic evidence on how police actions are perceived in communities, suggests that the role of race and ethnicity in the adoption of policing practices should be carefully assessed. However, scholars of proactive policing have yet to study carefully how race may influence the adoption of specific

proactive policing policies. It is critically important to understand not only the impacts of proactive policing on racial outcomes but also how race may affect the adoption of specific types of proactive policing. This was a concern raised to us by representatives of such groups as The Movement for Black Lives and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (see Chapter 7 and Appendix A ). Are more aggressive proactive policing strategies more likely to be chosen when Black or disadvantaged communities are the focus of police enforcement? This question needs to be addressed systematically in future research.

THE FUTURE OF PROACTIVE POLICING

Proactive policing has become a key part of police efforts to do something about crime in the United States. This report supports the general conclusion that there is sufficient scientific evidence to support the adoption of some proactive policing practices. Proactive policing efforts that focus on high concentrations of crimes at places or among the high-rate subset of offenders, as well as practices that seek to solve specific crime-fostering problems, show consistent evidence of effectiveness without evidence of negative community outcomes. Community-based strategies have also begun to show evidence of improving the relations between the police and public. At the same time, there are significant gaps in the knowledge base that do not allow one to identify with reasonable confidence the long-term effects of proactive policing. For example, existing research provides little guidance as to whether police programs to enhance procedural justice will improve community perceptions of police legitimacy or community cooperation with the police.

Much has been learned over the past two decades about proactive policing programs. But now that scientific support for these approaches has accumulated, it is time for greater investment in understanding what is cost-effective, how such strategies can be maximized to improve the relationships between the police and the public, and how they can be applied in ways that do not lead to violations of the law by the police.

Proactive policing, as a strategic approach used by police agencies to prevent crime, is a relatively new phenomenon in the United States. It developed from a crisis in confidence in policing that began to emerge in the 1960s because of social unrest, rising crime rates, and growing skepticism regarding the effectiveness of standard approaches to policing. In response, beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, innovative police practices and policies that took a more proactive approach began to develop. This report uses the term "proactive policing" to refer to all policing strategies that have as one of their goals the prevention or reduction of crime and disorder and that are not reactive in terms of focusing primarily on uncovering ongoing crime or on investigating or responding to crimes once they have occurred.

Proactive policing is distinguished from the everyday decisions of police officers to be proactive in specific situations and instead refers to a strategic decision by police agencies to use proactive police responses in a programmatic way to reduce crime. Today, proactive policing strategies are used widely in the United States. They are not isolated programs used by a select group of agencies but rather a set of ideas that have spread across the landscape of policing.

Proactive Policing reviews the evidence and discusses the data and methodological gaps on: (1) the effects of different forms of proactive policing on crime; (2) whether they are applied in a discriminatory manner; (3) whether they are being used in a legal fashion; and (4) community reaction. This report offers a comprehensive evaluation of proactive policing that includes not only its crime prevention impacts but also its broader implications for justice and U.S. communities.

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A Balancing Act: The Right to Peace and Justice

Sep 30, 2019 | Comment , Content , Online Scholarship

By: Lisa J. Laplante

Introduction

The Judicialization of Peace offers an important empirical analysis of whether and how the involvement of international courts can alter the form and substance of accountability brokered through peace agreements. Specifically, authors Courtney Hillebrecht, Alexandra Huneeus, with the collaboration of Sandra Borda, offer this analysis through the case study of Colombia, which recently negotiated the 2016 Peace Accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (“FARC”). To assess the international-national dynamic of law formation, the authors divert from a traditional approach of analyzing court judgments and compliance, and instead employ a “symbolic-interactive perspective” to bring a magnifying glass to the local impact made by international courts during a peace negotiation process. Gathering rich data from a wide variety of sources that captured local debates, they illustrate how local stakeholders navigated the complicated process of brokering peace against the seemingly rigid normative backdrop that demands full criminal accountability for human rights crimes –an obligation enforced by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (“IACtHR”) and the International Criminal Court (“ICC”). They conclude that the IACtHR and ICC exerted the most influence through their “shadow effects.”

The authors provide several illustrations of how local actors operate under this shadow. They contend that the influence of these courts arises out of the “imprint of prior litigation and the threat of future litigation” and that this in turn exerts pressure to shape domestic decision-making so as to have “judicialized” the Colombia’s peace process—all without issuing a single judgment. This judicialized process occurs through three “paths”: first, the international courts “signal” their expectations to the domestic audiences; second, state and non-state local actors bargain in the shadow of the law by using international law as political cover and to legitimate their policy preferences, while wielding the threat of international litigation to win concessions; and third, other domestic actors push back to curb or channel the influence of the international courts and even try to influence the direction of the international courts. [1]

The authors conclude that while the Colombian peace process was deeply influenced by the normative framework championed by the ICC and the IACtHR, the final outcome ran contrary to what would be expected. The Colombian Peace Accord contains a much less punitive approach to transitional justice than international law would seem to require. Although the Colombians felt compelled to abide by international law and guarantee criminal investigations and prosecutions for serious human rights violations, their “solution to the peace/justice dilemma” was to offer a bifurcated accountability process by including the possibility of lighter punishment even for the most serious crimes in exchange for the perpetrators’ involvement in satisfying the rights of victims to the truth, reparations, and non-repetition. [2] The authors state that “unprecedented concession to the politics of peacemaking represents a significant shift in TJ practice.” [3] In other words, the Colombian case represents a situation of what may be viewed as compromised justice, falling short of the absolute justice that may be expected by international law.

While this conclusion may leave the Transitional Justice (TJ) field concerned, I will offer some perspective as to why the development when viewed historically is actually encouraging. In particular, the pressure felt by local actors is a remarkable advancement from the state of affairs only thirty years ago when such actors did whatever it took to broker peace, often at the cost of any type of accountability. At the same time, I contextualize this outcome against the backdrop of a vibrant international debate on amnesties and accountability that could suggest that the case of Colombia may not be such an outlier despite the Inter-American trend to the contrary. In fact, the Colombian Peace Accords may even present a more robust accountability model than is currently accepted practice in other corners of the world.

My commentary picks up where the authors conclude in recognizing how “legal globalization” consists of a recursive cycle of integrating global norm making and national law-making. This in turn creates intersections in which new evolutions in the law occur “where national experiences influence global norm making and global norms constrain national lawmaking, in an asymmetric but mutual fashion.” [4] As the authors recognize, the Colombian peace accords were not the result of a top down process with “pre-set constraints on peace-making” with blueprints to follow or discard. [5] Instead, Colombians constructed their own sophisticated blueprint “within bounds of reasonable if untried interpretation of the existing law and norms.” [6] In my analysis below, I unpack what I consider to be the heart of what makes the Colombian experience so impactful in the field of TJ.

I argue that the less punitive outcome in Colombia resulted not in spite of the presumed demands of the IACtHR but because of it. In response to the signaling of the IACtHR, Colombia suggested that it was poised to adjust its decade-long stance on amnesty and move toward better alignment with the growing global consensus which embraces a more nuanced approach to criminal justice in contexts where transitional justice might be adopted. What is remarkable, and not fully discussed by the authors, is that the IACtHR gave the Colombians a novel legal basis for creating a less punitive version of TJ that does not depend entirely on IHL or the initial self-identification of an internal armed conflict. Instead, it is framed by another human right—the right to peace. Thus, it is not just the fact that Colombia opted for a less punitive approach that presents a radical shift in the TJ paradigm, but rather that it did so relying entirely on dicta from the IACtHR 2012 Mozote Massacre Case . [7] Indeed, the Colombians ran with the IACtHR’s invitation to justify its compromised justice based on the right to peace, which until now has never factored into a transitional justice process as an explicit goal and is not even hard law.

While the authors make parenthetical reference to this development, they contend that it merely illustrates the influence of politics in approaching the question of justice. Instead, I argue that on the contrary the introduction of this new right into the TJ paradigm further legalizes the balancing test between peace and justice. [8] As I will discuss, it took human rights (particularly the victims’ right to justice) to sway the pendulum of the peace v. justice debate towards justice, and the only way that it could legitimately swing back towards the middle is through a competing human right, which in this case is the right of every member of society to peace.

Historical Perspective: The Peace v. Justice Debate

It is easy to lose sight of historical advances in the evolution of international law, especially concerning the ideals of justice. It is worth pausing for a moment to appreciate that Colombia reached a negotiated peace agreement without resort to blanket amnesties. This development signals a remarkably fast movement toward new customary international law as well as the dynamic, fast evolving nature of the field of TJ given that only three decades ago most governments could issue any kind of amnesty without worrying about international legal consequences.

Indeed, the field of TJ arose largely in response to criminal justice being foreclosed for the many thousands of victims of serious human rights violations living under the fist of repressive regimes in the Southern Cone. Criminal prosecutions of perpetrators were crippled or blocked by amnesty laws in Argentina and Chile, [9] followed by a long line of other countries in the region making amnesties a signature feature of political transitions in Latin America. [10] At that time, political leaders never questioned their unqualified right to issue these types of laws nor did they worry that they would ever be held accountable for their crimes or be challenged by international enforcement bodies. Impunity was a normal state of affairs.

This comfort with impunity was reasonable given that amnesties constituted a sovereign right from time immemorial, with roots tracing back to biblical and medieval historical accounts. [11] Amnesties even played a role in the formation of the modern nation state system through the 1648 Westphalian peace agreements which provided that all “Violences, Hostilitys, Damages and Expences, without any respect to Persons or Things, shall be entirely abolish’d in such a manner that all that might be demanded of, or pretended to, by each other on that behalf, shall be bury’d in eternal Oblivion.” [12] Certainly, the Westphalian notion of statehood rests on the core principle that sovereign states enjoy the presumption against intervention and the unfettered prerogative to manage their internal affairs—which includes facilitating or blocking criminal justice. For most of history, no positive international law prohibited resort to amnesties and by default permitted impunity.

Not all sectors of these societies accepted justice foreclosed as a forgone conclusion. Rather, victims, their families, and advocates took to the streets in protest to demand justice. Academics and practitioners began a systematic attack against the normative reality of using amnesty laws in the name of peace. Interestingly they dedicated less energy to contesting the assumption that amnesties were required for peace and focused instead on how international law limited the State’s discretion to apply amnesties. They argued that human rights law established a state duty to investigate and prosecute which corresponded to a victim’s rights to justice. [13] This strategic challenge to the status quo gave rise to what famously came to be known as the peace v. justice debate that largely shaped the field’s discourse, and which Hillebrecht and Huneeus use to frame their own understanding of the significance of Colombia’s less punitive approach to justice. [14]

The peace v. justice debate is best captured by the now famous exchange in 1991 between Diane F. Orentlicher and Carlos S. Nino in the Yale Law Journal. Each present two equally valued realities that were viewed as diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive. [15] While Orentlicher systematically presented the human rights law justification for the State’s duty to prosecute serious human rights violations, Nino stated that if we want peace in turbulent, fragile, post-conflict settings, we need amnesties. In teaching this debate, I have often been struck by the differences of approach of each esteemed jurist. Orentlincher appears to work much harder to make her case through many more pages and footnotes given that at the time her argument was largely aspirational and, from Nino’s viewpoint, unrealistically idealistic. Indeed, Nino’s position, argued in far fewer pages, is soberingly persuasive given the stark challenges of post-conflict peacemaking. He comes across as more at ease and certain of his position. Certainly, Nino wrote from a more comfortable place than Orentlincher given that the history of amnesties had been an acceptable state practice for as long as the modern international law system had existed.

Remarkably, Nino most likely never predicted how international treaty-based bodies would erode this entrenched normative reality only a decade after he wrote his article. He may have underestimated the impact of victims and their advocates taking their street protest to the relatively new international realm of human rights enforcement bodies to demand that their quest for justice be recognized as a right. This pushback led to one of the most important international decisions on the matter issued by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2001. The Barrios Altos Case analyzed the amnesty laws passed by former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori to shield himself and his co-conspirators from prosecution. [16] The IACtHR famously declared:

… all amnesty provisions, provisions on prescription and the establishment of measures designed to eliminate responsibility are inadmissible, because they are intended to prevent the investigation and punishment of those responsible for serious human rights violations such as torture, extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary execution and forced disappearance, all of them prohibited because they violate non-derogable rights recognized by international human rights law. [17]

As I argued in 2009, this international human rights body contributed significantly to shaping the TJ field by tipping the scales in the peace v. justice debate towards accountability. Criminal law became not only an accepted feature of transitional justice but also suddenly a required one. [18] The IACtHR continued to uphold this seminal holding through subsequent decisions finding similar amnesties in five other countries unlawful. [19] With amnesties rendered “unlawful” in Latin America, member states began to overturn or reform their own laws. This resulted in many human rights perpetrators being brought to justice in a phenomenon that Kathryn Sikkink referred to as a “justice cascade.” [20]

Running parallel to the development in the Americas, pronouncements, guidelines, resolutions, and other sources were issued by other regional and universal bodies also limiting the application of amnesties. [21] Significantly, many of these different norm generating institutions cited to each other, engaging in an important formation of custom that culminated into what today has hardened into positive international law restricting the unfettered use of amnesties. Finally, the quest by victims for justice is not just aspirational, it is the law. This is a remarkable achievement less than thirty years since the Orentlincher-Nino debate and fifteen years since the IACtHR Barrios Altos ruling.

The Judicialization of Peace reflects this new normative universe in which international law sets hard limits to the use of amnesties and alters the behavior of countries, like Colombia, as they embark on transitional justice processes. The article provides an invaluable peek into what it means to negotiate peace “in the shadow” of international law. The authors describe how local political actors relied on the omnipotent courts to negotiate within the parameters of what was acceptable within an “externally imposed notion of accountability.” [22] Reading this account makes one wonder if the authors were simply describing the desired effects of a well-functioning system of the rule of law, although in this case global rule of law where international courts, such as the IACtHR and the ICC, exert normative influence without ever needing to issue a decision on a particular dispute. [23] In reality, the global rule of law works best in these shadows given that most disputes will never reach an international court, as the authors recognize. It is thus more efficient to influence state behavior towards this decentralized enforcement of human rights. But, for this localized compliance to work, domestic actors must not only be cognizant of these international norms but also worry about them.

I bore witness to this kind of worry in Colombia in 2014 when I was invited by the government to deliver a talk about reparations, after which I was approached by government representatives involved in the peace negotiations in Havana, Cuba. They were working within the special unit specifically dedicated to the inclusion of a transitional justice roadmap that would assure the rights of the millions of victims in Colombia and they were eager to talk to me about the Barrios Altos case given my own writing on the case. At that time, I was struck by the fact that they were asking me about a compromised justice approach. They clearly felt bound by the international law on amnesties pronounced by the IACtHR and were trying to find some flexibility while still staying within the confines of international law.

In particular they wanted to talk to me about the recently issued IACtHR decision as a solution to the peace v. justice dilemma. Indeed, in the Mozote Case, the IACtHR created an opening in its otherwise uncompromising jurisprudence on amnesty. In that case, the IACtHR found El Salvador’s Law of General Amnesty for the Consolidation of Peace , passed following that country’s negotiated peace agreement in 1992, to be contrary to the American Convention on Human Rights. The IACtHR nevertheless recognized that the situation in El Salvador occurred during an internal armed conflict and required the application of International Humanitarian Law. [24] In particular, the Court relied on Article 6(5) of Protocol II Additional to the 1949 Geneva Conventions and interpretations of it by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which establishes that broad amnesties may follow the end of conflict except in cases of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. [25]

I realize now that my Colombian colleagues were acting within the very shadow effect that The Judicialization of Peace discusses, relying heavily on the Mozote Case to justify a less punitive approach. Yet, significantly they were not just passive subjects to the shadow effect, but rather creative norm entrepreneurs. Specifically, they focused squarely on the concurring opinion in the Mozote Case written by Judge Diego García-Sayán to justify their less punitive approach.

As a side note, Diego García-Sayán also happened to be a part of the transitional justice government in Peru serving as the Minister of Justice in 2001 when that government sought the judicialization of peace through the Barrios Altos case. Peru gambled that the Court would take a hard line on amnesties. Its strategy paid off and Peru won the remarkable declaration that amnesties were no longer available in the dictator’s toolbox. [26] In contrast with the Colombians, the Peruvians were not interested in a less punitive model of transitional justice that included amnesties, because the opponents (Shining Path) were already in jail. In fact, they were deeply afraid of calling their situation an internal armed conflict given the risk of Shining Path receiving a possible “get out of jail free” card based on Article 6.5 of Protocol II. The IACtHR did not choose to view Peru’s situation as such. It is thus perhaps ironic that Judge García-Sayán would be the one to open the door to a more flexible approach to amnesties within the Inter-American System given that he had been part of an effort to create a more rigid standard of accountability when he was a local political actor.

However, ten years later in 2012 Judge García-Sayán was not writing in a bubble, but rather wrote his opinion against the backdrop of a vibrant debate on amnesties. In fact, upon writing my own article on Barrios Altos in which I argued that amnesties were unlawful, I quickly discovered that I had joined one of the most contentious and unsettled areas of international law scholarship, and often found myself in the minority against an ever growing united front advocating for the retention of amnesties for brokering peace. Outside of the regional system that shaped my views existed a contemporary milieu of scholars who argued that some amnesties are still legal, especially in light of the lack of uniform and consistent state practice. [27] Today, legal scholars take a far more nuanced and flexible approach to the topic of amnesties, often producing criteria and factors for figuring out the right balance of peace and justice. [28]

Thus, Judge Diego García-Sayán’s concurring opinion could be viewed as a bridge to close the gap in what would arguably be regional exceptionalism. [29] It may have also been a type of system correction to address what perhaps has become too rigid a standard of accountability tipping the scales too far towards an absolutism that contradicts the very essence of TJ, which arose as a field based on the notion of flexibility and alternative paths to justice.

The New TJ Reality: Peace and Justice

In his concurring opinion in the Mozote Case , García-Sayán seeks a nuanced position with regard to compromised justice, recognizing that even if blanket amnesties, especially connected to repressive dictators, may no longer be used, more lenient criminal justice schemes may be acceptable when attempting to broker peace after a war. Yet he recognizes that “[t]here is no norm in positive international law that has explicitly prescribed any kind of amnesty.” [30] Instead, the context dictates what makes sense and what is permissible. He explains:

in the specific context of processes of widespread violence and non-international armed conflicts, amnesties may lead, at least in theory and according to the specific case or circumstance, in different directions. Consequently, this creates a whole range of possible outcomes that can delimit the exercise of assessing the interests at stake in order to combine the aim of investigating, punishing, and repairing gross human rights violations, on the one hand, with that of national reconciliation and a negotiated solution to a non-international armed conflict, on the other. There is no universally applicable solution to the dilemmas posed by these opposing forces, because it depends on the specific context, although there are guidelines that must be taken into account. [31]

This passage resonates with the Nino-like stance of needing to recognize the realities on the ground in deciding what measures of justice are possible. Judge García-Sayán’s instructions reflect the organizing principle of transitional justice that the configuration of justice is context specific, but adheres to the more recently recognized baseline rules, including accountability and justice. At the same time, he suggests that how we view justice can vary and also depends on a more balanced approach that weighs conflicting rights. [32] His rationale resonates with Nino’s as he claims this approach will assure that peace negotiations “conclude a conflict and put an end to future serious human rights violations.” [33] Yet, where he differs from Nino is that he does not frame peace as a policy preference of a government, but rather as a human right of other members of the society. In doing so, he introduces a new competing right into the TJ justice equation. As he explains:

States have a legal obligation to address the rights of the victims and, with the same intensity, the obligation to prevent further acts of violence and to achieve peace in an armed conflict by the means at its disposal. Peace as a product of a negotiation is offered as a morally and politically superior alternative to peace as a result of the annihilation of the opponent. Therefore, international human rights law should consider that peace is a right and that the State must achieve it . [34]

In his call to recognize the right to peace, Judge García-Sayán leaves ambiguous how it would become part of human rights law. Yet, he gives a provocative invitation to countries like Colombia to pursue this recommendation, and seems to suggest that if they take this path and wind up back at the IACtHR, they may encounter a friendly reception. Indeed, it is exactly that type of legal “transaction” that would be needed to transform the soft law of peace into the binding hard law that would greatly impact the field of Transitional Justice.

Judge García-Sayán employs the less mandatory word “should” when calling for the recognition of the right to peace because, as of now, the right has yet to be fully recognized in international law. In fact, for the most part, it has been overlooked by the transitional justice movement. [35] Moreover, the right to peace has been minimally studied or focused on in international law. Philip Alston is one of the few scholars to offer early commentary on the right to peace, making the case in 1980 that this often-ignored right was not only the raison d’etre of the international law system but also a recognized human right, proclaiming that the “broad outline” of the right was at that time firmly established. [36] To make this assertion, he relied on soft law instruments such as the Declaration on the Preparation of Societies for Life in Peace (Res. 33/73), adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1978, which recognizes peace as both “mankind’s paramount value” and a right. [37]

Yet, Alston interrogated the question as to whether the right to peace is “a viable juridical proposition” that could be “usefully integrated into the present framework of international law.” [38] He expressed concern that the precise content of the right had not reached a sufficient degree of certainty that would be required to guide states on how it should be protected and promoted. [39] While some elements were already discernible, he predicted that other elements would need to evolve through “lengthy and subtle process of customary formation in the international arena.” [40]

By the 1990s, Alston lamented that the right to peace had “failed to capture the global imagination” and had been “dropped like a stone” within the United Nations. [41] Focus on the right only reemerged in the last decade through the concerted advocacy work of the Spanish Society for International Human Rights Law, a Spanish NGO, [42] whose advocacy helped to push the Human Right Council (“HRC”) to create an Advisory Committee on the Right to Peace. This committee eventually drafted the UN Draft Declaration on the Right to Peace in which Article 1 establishes the peoples’ right to peace as “universal, indivisible, independent and interrelated.” [43] In July 2016, just months before the Colombian peace agreement was finalized, the HRC adopted the Declaration by a majority of its Member States and then proposed it to the United Nations General Assembly, which approved it in December of that same year. [44] After an extensive preamble, the Declaration consists of only five articles, leading with Article 1 stating: “Everyone has the right to enjoy peace such that all human rights are promoted and protected and development is fully realized.” [45]

While a significant development, this soft law instrument still leaves unsettled Alston’s original concern of whether the right is juridically viable since it had not been subject to enforcement analogous to other human rights. Worse yet, its viability as hard law could be undermined by the fact that some states continue to resist the idea that peace is a right as opposed to a political goal. [46] Most interesting for the purpose of this commentary, there is still limited jurisprudence on the right to peace coming from international human rights monitoring bodies such as the IACtHR—making the concurring opinion of Judge García-Sayán all the more relevant as a foreshadowing of what may lay ahead. The only explicit ruling on the right to peace arose in a case where the IACtHR recognized that the mismanagement of the environment can exacerbate tensions and lead to war, which would thus constitute a violation of the right to peace. [47] It has yet to rule on a case on how the right to peace impacts the use of amnesty or other measures which limit criminal investigations and trials in peacemaking processes that also involve transitional justice.

For that reason, Colombia would serve as a particularly interesting case to test the juridical viability of the right to peace, especially as to whether it legally justifies a less punitive approach to transitional justice. As I will discuss next, Colombia also presents an ideal case to test this new right given its long-standing recognition of the right to peace.

The Case of Colombia: Elevating the Right to Peace

The Colombian Constitutional Court (“CCC”) has produced what it recently characterized as “prolific constitutional jurisprudence” on the right to peace, viewing it as a “defining element” of the country’s constitutional law. [48] Indeed, this right is enshrined in Article 22 of the nation’s 1991 Constitution, which itself was conceived as a type of “peace treaty” since it emerged out of efforts at that time to bring an end to Colombia’s decades-long conflict. [49] Not long after the Constitution was promulgated, the CCC recognized the right to peace “as a right that belongs to every person” and which gives individuals the power to demand compliance from both the State and individuals. [50] This position seems to give the right to peace equal stature to other human rights.

Over the last three decades, the CCC has continued to expand upon the right to peace, particularly as it related to the country’s ongoing efforts to broker peace in order to end one of the region’s most enduring internal armed conflicts. In all of these decisions, the CCC has consistently balanced the right to peace with justice to justify arrangements that amount to a compromise to absolute criminal justice. [51] At the same time, the CCC has engaged with international law as it developed its jurisprudence on the right to peace, arguing that it could be recognized as a human right (although until recently based only on soft law instruments). [52]

One of the most recent examples of how the CCC balanced the right to peace with the right to justice occurred when reviewing the constitutionality of Justice and Peace Law 975 of 2005 , which created a legal framework to demobilize illegally armed groups through reduced and qualified punishments—an arrangement viewed as an indulto velado (veiled pardon) by the plaintiffs. [53] In Gustavo Gallón Giraldo v. Colombia , the CCC sought to resolve the inherent tension between “finding peace by establishing juridical mechanisms to disarticulate armed groups” and “the interests of justice” under human rights, international criminal law, and international humanitarian law. [54] Notably, in applying a balancing approach to reconcile the right to peace and the right to justice, the CCC avoided characterizing the right to peace as an “absolute value” which would justify no criminal justice, and instead subjected peace to the consideration of other constitutional rights like victims’ right to truth, justice, reparations and the non-repetition of violence—rights that bind the court through the international law. [55]

In regard to the assertions made by the authors in The Judicialization of Peace, the Justice and Peace Law was created in the shadow of the IACtHR but without the assurances that compromised justice would withstand the scrutiny of the international body. Indeed, in August 2005, soon after the Justice and Peace Law was signed, victims’ representatives in Mapiripán v. Colombia, which was already pending when the law passed, asked the IACtHR to consider whether Law 975/05 interfered with the victims’ right to a remedy. [56] The Court granted this motion of “supervening event,” in accordance with Article 44.3 of the court’s procedures, and responded by simply referring to its “jurisprudence constante”:

domestic legal provision of law can impede compliance by a State with the obligation to investigate and punish those responsible for human rights violations. Specifically, the following are unacceptable: amnesty provisions, rules regarding extinguishment and establishment of exclusions of liability that seek to impede investigation and punishment of those responsible for grave human rights violations—such as those of the instant case, executions and forced disappearances. The Court reiterates that the State’s obligation to adequately investigate and to punish those responsible, as appropriate, must be carried out diligently to avoid impunity and repetition of this type of acts… [57]

This pronouncement was not all that surprising given that it was issued just several years after Barrios Altos had been decided. Interestingly, the IACtHR did not discuss whether Colombia’s situation amounted to an internal armed conflict triggering the IHL framework and thus justifying a less punitive approach, nor did it discuss the right to peace. In fact, as The Judicialization of Peace notes, the IACtHR had up to seventeen opportunities in its contentious judgments concerning the human rights violations occurring during Colombia’s conflict to discuss whether IHL applied or if the right to peace should be balanced with the right to justice. [58] Yet, it always demanded full justice. Thus, up until recently, the CCC never included reference to the IACtHR jurisprudence in its decision to balance the competing rights and justify any compromise of justice. As will be discussed, only with the 2016 Peace Accords has the CCC been able to reference the IACtHR to justify a compromise between peace and justice in Colombia’s effort to broker peace.

Peace Accords and The Integral System of Truth, Justice, Reparation, and Non-Repetition

As of the time of writing, the CCC has issued five decisions regarding different aspects of The Sistema Integral de Verdad, Justicia, Reparación y no Repetición (Integral System of Truth, Justice, Reparation and Non-Repetition) created through the 2016 Peace Accords. [59] Specific to the aspect of amnesty, pardon, and special criminal treatments, the CCC issued a decision in March 2018 concerning the Law 1820 of 2016 which implements the less punitive approach discussed in The Judicialization of Peace . [60] Unlike in its past decisions on the right to peace, the CCC engages directly with the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to justify adopting a complementary approach to reconcile seemingly contradictory norms arising out of international human rights law, international humanitarian law, and international criminal law. [61] Undertaking what it deems to be an “ambitious analysis” of the question of amnesty, the CCC seeks to harmonize seemingly diverging law on amnesties in the context of peace negotiations. [62]

To begin, the CCC recognizes the baseline normative limit set by the IACtHR with regard to its general prohibition of amnesties, citing to the now famous passage of the 2001 Barrios Altos case. [63] It then refers to the more recent decision in the Mozote Case in which the IACtHR distinguishes Barrios Altos ’s bright line rule. Specifically, it notes that this ban refers to self-amnesties issued in transitions from repression and not necessarily to countries transitioning from internal armed conflict, which is instead regulated by IHL. In particular, Article 6 of Protocol II of 1977 calls for the widest possible amnesty at the cessation of hostilities. [64] The CCC seizes upon the IACtHR’s suggestion that the components of justice may be more flexible in circumstances of war in which not all amnesties or limits to prosecution are prohibited.

Significantly, the CCC clarifies that while it is bound by Article 6 of Protocol II, it does not consider the directive on amnesties to be a “peremptory norm” that obligates governments to offer amnesties, but rather is discretionary and only relevant to political crimes which can be defined by the State. [65] Thus, the CCC views amnesty as a valid tool for achieving reconciliation and stable peace, but limited in scope. IHL amnesties are valid as long as they meet two conditions. First, they are never issued for the most serious crimes such as war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity. Second, they are complemented by the most extensive rights to truth, justice, and reparations. [66] In establishing these conditions, the CCC stresses that it is adopting the IACtHR’s notion that the right to peace and the right to justice are interdependent and indivisible in nature and thus require a “holistic approach” in their application. [67] The CCC also applies the complementary approach when reviewing the Special Jurisdiction for Peace established to apply the alternative sentencing and amnesties, finding it constitutional given that it was designed to guarantee all fundamental rights, “namely, the right to peace and the rights of victims to the truth, to justice, to reparation and the non-repetition.” [68]

A Delicate Balancing Act: Reconciling the Right to Peace and the Right to Justice

The CCC’s latest jurisprudence squarely engages with and challenges the framing of Transitional Justice to suggest it is time to abandon the pretext of a peace versus justice debate and instead to recognize that it should be a dialogue about peace and justice. [69] Recognizing the historical tendency to pit justice against peace and “enter into unsalvageable tensions” because of the assumption that securing peace always means “sacrificing” justice, the CCC asserts that the demands of peace and justice are complementary and it must strive to find ways to enforce the two rights mutually. [70] As the CCC explains, “within the constitutional order it is not possible to speak of peace without justice, nor to speak of justice without peace.” [71] Yet, in asserting a modified hierarchy of TJ goals, the CCC places the right to peace at the top, naming the primary aims to be:

Respond to generalized peace and assure the right to peace
Guarantee the victims right to truth, justice, reparations, and non-repetition of violence
Strengthen the rule of law and democracy
Promote social reconciliation. [72]

Thus, although embracing a holistic approach to balance the different rights at play, the CCC suggests that peace is a condition for the exercise of all other rights, stating:

Peaceful coexistence is a basic goal of the State and must be the ultimate motive of the forces of constitutional order. Peace is also a presupposition of the democratic process, free and open, and a necessary condition for the effective enjoyment of fundamental rights. [73]

As I have noted in the past with regard to the CCC’s jurisprudence, there is great significance of elevating the right to peace to this stature since it radically alters the approach to amnesties and other measures that may compromise now well-established rights of victims to justice. [74] Namely, in the historical evolution of the peace vs. justice debate, the arguments made by the proponents of justice won mostly because victims’ rights trumped States’ political/policy aims of peace. Yet, when peace is elevated to being recognized as a right it dramatically alters the equation since it requires the balancing of competing fundamental rights. The rights of victims to justice can no longer trump a state’s political quest for peace because these rights must now be balanced with the competing human right to peace which belongs to all members of the society (victim or not). [75] Moreover, it would be unlikely that either side of this equation could “win” in favor of absolute justice or absolute impunity. A compromise must always be struck. Framing peace as a right provides a stronger normative basis for accepting compromised justice in the form of amnesties, pardons, and alternative sentencing. This reformulation presents a radical new direction in transitional justice, prompted by an international court that was once viewed as reversing the historical trend of impunity.

Indeed, one remarkable aspect of Colombia’s efforts to revise the goals of TJ and in effect dismantle the peace vs. justice debate is that it was done in the shadow of the IACtHR. The 2016 Peace Accords cite to the Mozote Case to highlight the State’s duty to protect the right to peace, even emphasizing that it should be viewed in “same intensity” to the duty to attend victims’ rights. [76] In turn, the CCC very purposefully cites to the Mozote Case to support the balancing approach struck by the 2016 Peace Accords, seeming to respond directly to Judge García-Sayán’s invitation to integrate the right to peace into the international human rights law. In a way, Colombia has presented a counter-offer to the IACtHR to bring some hard law edges to what has been a largely soft law notion of peace as a human right—should the IACtHR be called upon to review Colombia’s less punitive approach to TJ, as The Judicialization of Peace speculates may very well occur.

Prosecutorial Discretion: Balancing Justice and Peace

In promoting a balancing approach to the right to peace and the right to justice, the Colombians swung the peace vs. justice pendulum back towards the middle, away from a hard stance on criminal justice and toward a more balanced approach that renders compromises in criminal justice lawful, at least some of the time. While it goes beyond the scope of this Comment to fully explore the implications of this pendulum swing, I will speculate on some preliminary directions it might take the field.

To begin, the field of TJ has evolved to require a minimum of criminal justice to prohibit absolute impunity, as was the practice thirty years ago with the use of blanket amnesties. Now, it is understood that lasting peace may not be possible without a baseline of accountability. Yet, the ideals of criminal justice also are not absolute, despite prior interpretations of the IACtHR’s jurisprudence up until now. On this point, Judge García-Sayán observed in his concurring opinion in the Mozote Case:

…in certain transitional situations between armed conflicts and peace, it can happen that a State is not in a position to implement fully and simultaneously, the various international rights and obligations it has assumed. In these circumstances, taking into consideration that none of those rights and obligations is of an absolute nature, it is legitimate that they be weighed in such a way that the satisfaction of some does not affect the exercise of the others disproportionately. Thus, the degree of justice that can be achieved is not an isolated component from which legitimate frustrations and dissatisfactions can arise, but part of an ambitious process of transition towards mutual tolerance and peace. [77]

This approach reflects a comprehensive concept of justice that shifts away from pure retribution as the means for assuring it. Indeed, the CCC recognizes that “certain facets” of justice and peace may cause inevitable, even irresolvable, tension, when the equation of justice is strictly focused on retribution through penal punishment which overlooks the many other forms of punishment. [78] This new reality might look like reduced and alternative penalties in order to assure the victims’ rights to an effective remedy, which may entail alternative mechanisms such as truth commissions, reparations, and other TJ processes.

Along these lines, Judge García-Sayán does not abandon the three elements of a state’s obligation to take actions aimed at investigating and establishing the facts, identifying individual responsibilities, and applying punishments proportionate to the gravity of the violations. [79] Yet he recognizes that “[e]ven though the aim of criminal justice should be to accomplish all three tasks satisfactorily, if applying criminal sanctions is complicated, the other components should not be affected or delayed.” [80] He points out that the right of both victims and society to access the truth may require that justice not be antagonistic to the transitional justice required in peace and reconciliation processes. In that context, “specific guidelines can be designed for processing those responsible for the most serious violations, opening the way, for example, to giving priority to the most serious cases as a way to handle a problem which, in theory, could apply to many thousands of those held for trial, dealing with less serious cases by other mechanisms.” [81]

In particular wanting to assure that combatants choose peace and submit to justice, García-Sayán argues that it is necessary to devise ways to process those accused of committing serious crimes. He proposes that:

routes towards alternative or suspended sentences could be designed and implemented; but, without losing sight of the fact that this may vary substantially according to both the degree of responsibility for serious crimes and the extent to which responsibility is acknowledged and information is provided about what happened. This may give rise to important differences between the “perpetrators” and those who performed functions of high command and gave the orders. [82]

In essence, he is describing a situation that may be analogous with ordinary prosecutorial discretion. In fact, an emerging line of scholarship has begun to explore how the concept of prosecutorial discretion should be embraced in TJ as it is in any domestic criminal law situation where justice is nuanced. [83] Indeed, prosecutors always have discretion in any legal system. But concessions that they make such as guilty pleas, exchanges of information for lighter sentences, and other compromises to absolute justice are made within the state’s criminal justice system and thus do not undermine the rule of law. [84] Given that no TJ experience could ever possibly prosecute all the potential perpetrators (given that they are often not even identifiable), this approach assures the prioritization of the cases most likely to succeed in court while also preserving the basic rights of victims to truth and reparations.

Time will tell whether Colombia’s less punitive model of transitional justice coupled with alternative approaches to accountability struck the right balance between peace and justice. If the principle of non-repetition, commonly referred to as “nunca mas”/never again, is the measure of success, we can only continue to observe whether the longest internal armed conflict in the region has been brought to a final end. While some may argue that the only measure of success is the cessation of violence between the FARC and the government, others may demand broader measures of success, especially in light of the continued killing of human rights activists and violence in territories fueled by narcotrafficking. Arguably, guaranteeing the right to peace requires much more than a bargain between peace and justice. Indeed, it has been steadily recognized by the TJ field that lasting peace requires more systematic and structural reforms to the socio-economic realities of the country to address some of the underlying causes of the violence. With regard to these types of essential reforms, neither the IACtHR nor the ICC will have much “shadow effect” over national politics.

Lisa J. Laplante is Professor of Law and Director of the Center for International Law and Policy at New England Law in Boston. The author would like to thank Louise Mallinder for her thoughtful comments regarding this commentary.

[1] Courtney Hillebrecht & Alexandra Huneeus, with Sandra Borda, The Judicialization of Peace 59 Harv. Int’l L. J. 279, 294 (2018).

[2] Id. at 318, 322.

[3] Id. at 322.

[4] Id. at 330 (Referencing Terence Halliday & Bruce G. Carruthers, The Recursivity of Law: Global Norm Making and National Lawmaking in the Globalization of Corporate Insolvency Regime , 112(4) Am. J. Soc. 1135, 1138 (2007).)

[5] Id. at 329.

[7] Massacres of El Mozote and Nearby Places v. El Salvador, Preliminary Exceptions, Merits, Reparations and Costs, Judgment, Inter-Am. Ct. H.R. (ser. C) No. 292 (Oct. 25, 2012).

[8] Hillebrecht and Huneeus, supra note 1, at 320 (“Once you have two rights that are in tension but of equal importance, we are back in the realm of balancing, and ultimately, politics.”).

[9] In Chile, General Pinochet passed Decree no. 2191 of April 19, 1978 to grant his administration a self-amnesty for the crimes committed by the army and the security forces who helped enforce his authoritarian regime. Argentina attempted prosecutions when its conflict ended but the Ley de Punto Final in 1986 and the Ley de Obediencia Debida in 1987 severely limited prosecutions which were eventually pardoned by the subsequent administration. The experiences in these two countries is often explained as the rise of truth commissions and other non-judicial, restorative measures to assure some accountability for the past.

[10] Some examples include amnesties passed in El Salvador (Decree no. 805 of October 28, 1987), Brazil (Act no. 6683 of August 28, 1979, covering the period from 2 September 1961 to 15 August 1979), Uruguay (Act no. 15848 from 1986), Peru (General Amnesty Act no. 26479 on June 14, 1995).

[11] R.C. Slye, The Legitimacy of Amnesties Under International Law and General Principles of Anglo-American Law: Is a Legitimate Amnesty Possible? , 43 Va. J. Int’l L 173 (2002).

[12] The “Treaty of Westphalia” is the Peace Treaty Between the Holy Roman Emperor and the King of France and Their Respective Allies, Oct. 24, 1648, available at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/westphal.asp

[13] See Lisa J. Laplante, Outlawing Amnesty: The Return of Criminal Justice in Transitional Justice Schemes, 49 Va. J. Int’l 915 (2009).

[14] See Chandra Lekha Sriram, Confronting Past Human Rights Violations: Justice v. Peace in Times of Transition (2004).

[15] See generally Diane F. Orentlicher, Settling Accounts: The Duty To Prosecute Human Rights Violations of a Prior Regime , 100 Yale L. J. 2537 (1991); Carlos S. Nino, The Duty to Punish Past Abuses of Human Rights Put Into Context: The Case of Argentina , 100 Yale L. J. 2619 (1991).

[16] Barrios Altos v. Peru, Merits, Judgment, Inter-Am. Ct. H.R. (ser. C) No. 75 (Mar. 14, 2001).

[17] Id. ¶ 41.

[18] See Laplante, supra note 13.

[19] See Alexandra Huneeus, Courts Resisting Courts: Lessons from the Inter-American Court’s Struggle to Enforce Human Rights , 44 Cornell Int’L L. J. 493, 502-03 (2011).

[20] Kathryn Sikkink, The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World Politics (2011).

[21] See Reta E. Raymond, When Two Elephants Fights, It’s the Grass that Suffers: Proposed Amnesty Legislation for Peace and Justice , 40 Syracuse J. Int’l L. Comm. 407 (2013).

[22] Hillebrecht and Huneeus, supra note 1, at 303.

[23] See Lisa J. Laplante, The Domestication of International Criminal Law: A Proposal for Expanding the International Criminal Court’s Sphere of Influence 43 John Marshall L. Rev. 635 (2010).

[24] IACtHR’s reasoning rested on the fact that the General Assembly had passed the blanket amnesty law after the peace agreement and work of the truth commission and actually contradicted the provisions in the peace agreement which called for criminal investigations. See Massacres of El Mozote and Nearby Places v. El Salvador, Preliminary Exceptions, Merits, Reparations and Costs, Judgment, Inter-Am. Ct. H.R. (ser. C) No. 292 (Oct. 25, 2012) ¶¶ 287-89.

[25] Id. at ¶¶ 285-286 (referring to Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts art. 6.5, June 8, 1977 [hereinafter Protocol II]).

[26] Barrios Altos v. Peru, Merits, Judgment, Inter-Am. Ct. H.R. (ser. C) No. 75 (Mar. 14, 2001).

[27] Raymond, supra note 21, at 800.

[28] See, e.g. , The Transitional Justice Institute, The Belfast Guidelines on Amnesty and Accountability (2013).

[29] Louise Mallinder, The End of Amnesty or Regional Overreach? Interpreting the Erosion of South America’s Amnesty Laws, 65 Int’l Comp. L. Q. 645 (2016).

[30] Massacres of El Mozote and Nearby Places v. El Salvador, Preliminary Exceptions, Merits, Reparations and Costs, Judgment, Inter-Am. Ct. H.R. (ser. C) No. 292 (Oct. 25, 2012) ¶17.

[31] Id. ¶ 20.

[32] Id. ¶ 27.

[34] Id . ¶ 37 (italics added).

[35] In writing this Comment, I conducted a search of the field’s main journal, The International Journal of Transitional Justice , and I discovered only one reference to the right to peace, which appeared in a footnote. See Catherine Turner, Delivering Lasting Peace, Democracy and Human Rights in Times of Transition: The Role of International Law , 2 Int’l J. Trans. Just. 126, fn 27 (2008) (“Indeed, Franck envisaged that this could ‘readily be shown to be an important subsidiary of the community′s most important norm: the right to peace.’”).

[36] Philip Alston, Peace as Human Right, 11 Security Dialogue 319, 328 (1980).

[37] Id. at 319, 324–25.

[38] Id. at 319.

[39] Id. at 325.

[41] Philip Allston, Peoples’ Rights 279, 281 (2005). That said, attention did not totally disappear. For example, the 1984 UN General Assembly Resolution on Declaration on the Right to Peoples to Peace establishes a duty on states to fulfill the right. See G.A. Res. 39/11, Declaration on the Right to Peoples to Peace (Nov. 12, 1984). UNESCO also focused on the right in UNESCO Report by the Director-General on the Human Right to Peace, doc. 29 C/59 (1997). The U.N. General Assembly recognized the right to peace in resolutions A/RES/57/216 of February 2003, A/RES/60/163 of 2 March 2006, and A/RES/63/189 of 18 March 2009, in which the General Assembly declared “that the peoples of our planet have a sacred right to peace and that the preservation and promotion of peace constitutes a fundamental obligation of each State.”

[42] Cecilia M. Bailliet, Normative Foundation of the International Law of Peace , in Promoting Peace Through International Law 43, 56–57 (Cecilia Marcela Bailliet & Kjetil Mujezinovic Larsen eds., 2015).

[43] Right to Peace , Human Rights Council (Apr. 16, 2014), https://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/AdvisoryCommittee/Pages/RightToPeace.aspx.

[44] G.A. Res. 71/189 (Dec. 19, 2016).

[45] Id. ¶ 1.

[46] Ola Engdahl, Protection of Human Rights and the Maintenances of International Peace and Security: Necessary Precondition or Clash of Interests? in Promoting Peace Through International Law 109, 120 (Cecilia Marcela Bailliet & Kjetil Mujezinovic Larsen eds., 2015).

[47] The Environment and Human Rights (State Obligations in Relation to the Environment in the Context of the Protection and Guarantee of the Rights to Life and to Personal Integrity (Arts. 4(1) and 5(1) American Convention on Human Rights)), Advisory Opinion OC-23/18, Inter-Am. Ct. H.R., (ser. A) No. 23, ¶ 66 (Nov. 15, 2017).

[48] Corte Constitucional [C.C.] [Constitutional Court], agosto 15, 2018, Sentencia C-080/18, Gaceta de la Corte Constitucional [G.C.C.] (p. 186) (Colom.).

[49] La Constitución Política de Colombia de 1991, art. 22 (“La paz es un derecho y un deber de obligatorio cumplimiento.”).

[50] Corte Constitucional [C.C.] [Constitutional Court], marzo 10, 1993, Sentencia T-102/93, Gaceta de la Corte Constitucional [G.C.C.] (p. 13).

[51] The CCC recognizes this trend when discussing the development of its jurisprudence. See Sentence C-080/18.

[52] See Corte Constitucional [C.C.] [Constitutional Court], mayo 18, 2006, Sentencia C-370/2006, Gaceta de la Corte Constitucional [G.C.C.] ¶4.1.5. (citing UNESCO Director-General, Report of the Director-General on the Human Right to Peace, presented to the Secretary-General and the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Ministers of Education of Member States, U.N. Doc. 29 C/59 (Oct. 29, 1997)).

[53] See Lisa J. Laplante & Kimberly Theidon , Transitional Justice in Times of Conflict: Colombia’s Ley de Justicia y Paz , 28 Mich. J. Int’L L. 49, 83–85 (2006); see also Law No. 975 of July 22, 2005, arts. 3, 29; O.G. No. 45.980, July 25, 2005 (incorporating an “alternative” sentence which could include the suspension of previously existing sentences and proceedings that would be replaced with imprisonment of five to eight years for beneficiaries who comply with the basic demobilizing requirements).

[54] Sentencia C-370/2006 at 26.

[55] Corte Constitucional [C.C.] [Constitutional Court], marzo 1 2018, Sentencia C-007/18, Expediente RPZ-001, Gaceta de la Corte Constitucional [G.C.C.] ¶ 125 (“Por medio de la cual se dictan disposiciones sobre amnistía, indulto y tratamientos especiales y otras disposiciones.”).

[56] Case of the Mapiripán Massacre v. Colombia, Merits, Reparations and Costs, Judgment, Inter-Am. Ct. H.R. (ser. C) No. 134, ¶ 301 (Sep. 15, 2005).

[57] Id. ¶ 304.

[58] Hillebrecht and Huneeus, supra note 1, at 295.

[59] Corte Constitucional [C.C.] [Constitutional Court], octubre 10, 1993, Sentencia C-630/17, Gaceta de la Corte Constitucional [G.C.C.]; Corte Constitucional [C.C.] [Constitutional Court], noviembre 14, 1993, Sentencia C-674/17, Gaceta de la Corte Constitucional [G.C.C.]; Corte Constitucional [C.C.] [Constitutional Court], marzo 1, 2018, Sentencia C-007/18, Gaceta de la Corte Constitucional [G.C.C.]; Corte Constitucional [C.C.] [Constitutional Court], marzo 21, 2018, Sentencia C-017/18, Gaceta de la Corte Constitucional [G.C.C.]; Corte Constitucional [C.C.] [Constitutional Court], agosto 15, 2018, Sentencia C-080/18, Gaceta de la Corte Constitucional [G.C.C.] .

[60] See Sentencia C-007/18.

[61] Id. , at ¶¶ 130–31.

[63] Id. at ¶¶ 139–40.

[64] Id. at ¶ 144.

[65] Id. at ¶ 135–38.

[66] Id. ¶ 146.

[67] Id. ¶ 128.

[68] Corte Constitucional [C.C.] [Constitutional Court], agosto 15, 2018, Sentencia C-080/18, Gaceta de la Corte Constitucional [G.C.C] (p. 185, 274) (citing to the Declaration on the Right to Peace, among other U.N. sources).

[69] Sentencia C-007/18 ¶122.

[70] Id. ¶ 114.

[71] Sentencia C-080/18 ¶ 189–90 (citing to the Declaration on the Right to Peace, among other U.N. sources).

[72] Sentencia C-007/18 ¶ 118.

[73] Id. ¶ 104 (citing to Sentencia T-102 de 1993).

[74] Writing on this decision in 2007, my colleague Kimberly Theidon and I noted, “This treatment of the right to peace presents an interesting new angle to transitional justice paradigms. The detailed presentation of the legal doctrine underlying the right to peace suggests an intention to elevate it beyond a mere political prerogative. If given equal standing with other fundamental rights such as justice, the right to peace could trigger the application of a proportionality test. If left as only a political aspiration, the right to peace would lose out to more commonly recognized human rights.” Laplante and Theidon, supra note 53, at 100.

[75] García-Sayán also recognized this paradigmatic shift, writing, “A negotiated solution to the internal armed conflict raises several issues regarding the weighing of these rights, within the legitimate discussion on the need to conclude the conflict and put an end to future serious human rights violations. States have a legal obligation to address the rights of the victims and, with the same intensity, the obligation to prevent further acts of violence and to achieve peace in an armed conflict by the means at its disposal. Peace as a product of a negotiation is offered as a morally and politically superior alternative to peace as a result of the annihilation of the opponent.” Massacres of El Mozote and Nearby Places v. El Salvador, Preliminary Exceptions, Merits, Reparations and Costs, Judgment, Inter-Am. Ct. H.R. (ser. C) No. 292 (Oct. 25, 2012), Concurring Opinion of Judge Diego Garcia-Sayan, ¶ 17.

[76] Final Agreement to End the Armed Conflict and Build a Stable and Lasting Peace , Nov. 24, 2016, 153, available at: especiales.presidencia.gov.co/Documents/20170620-dejacion…/acuerdo-final-ingles.pdf .

[77] Massacres of Mozote, García-Sayán Concurring Opinion, ¶ 38.

[78] Corte Constitucional [C.C.] [Constitutional Court], marzo 1 2018, Sentencia C-007/18, Expediente RPZ-001, Gaceta de la Corte Constitucional [G.C.C.] ¶ 123.

[79] Massacres of Mozote, García-Sayán Concurring Opinion, ¶ 28.

[81] Id. ¶ 29.

[82] Id. ¶ 30.

[83] Ronald Slye, The Legitimacy of Amnesties Under International Law and General Principles of Anglo-American Law: Is a Legitimate Amnesty Possible? 43 Va. J. Int’L. L. 173, 184–86 (2002); Mariano Gaitan, Prosecutorial Discretion in the Investigation and Prosecution of Massive Human Rights Violations: Lessons from Argentine Experience , 32 Am. U. Int’l L. Rev. 539 (2017).

[84] In taking this position, I recognize that there is always the risk that this discretion can be abused. But under ideal conditions, it is a normal aspect of criminal justice.

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READ: The Justice Department's Summary Of The Mueller Report

Dana Farrington

A copy of Attorney General William Barr's letter to Congress regarding the conclusion of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation is arranged for a photograph in Washington, D.C. Bloomberg via Getty Images hide caption

A copy of Attorney General William Barr's letter to Congress regarding the conclusion of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation is arranged for a photograph in Washington, D.C.

Leaders of the Justice Department have sent a summary of Robert Mueller's main findings to key members of Congress. The special counsel's office completed its investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election on Friday.

Attorney General William Barr is required to notify Congress that the investigation is complete but is not obligated to release the full report, as many in both parties have demanded .

Mueller Report Doesn't Find Russian Collusion, But Can't 'Exonerate' On Obstruction

Read what Barr describes as Mueller's "principal conclusions" below. See the original letter here .

Dear Chairman Graham, Chairman Nadler, Ranking Member Feinstein, and Ranking Member Collins:

As a supplement to the notification provided on Friday, March 22, 2019, I am writing today to advise you of the principal conclusions reached by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III and to inform you about the status of my initial review of the report he has prepared.

The Special Counsel's Report

On Friday, the Special Counsel submitted to me a "confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions" he has reached, as required by 28 CF.R. § 600.8(c). This report is entitled "Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election." Although my review is ongoing, I believe that it is in the public interest to describe the report and to summarize the principal conclusions reached by the Special Counsel and the results of his investigation.

The report explains that the Special Counsel and his staff thoroughly investigated allegations that members of the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump, and others associated with it, conspired with the Russian government in its efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, or sought to obstruct the related federal investigations. In the report, the Special Counsel noted that, in completing his investigation, he employed 19 lawyers who were assisted by a team of approximately 40 FBI agents, intelligence analysts, forensic accountants, and other professional staff. The Special Counsel issued more than 2,800 subpoenas, executed nearly 500 search warrants, obtained more than 230 orders for communication records, issued almost 50 orders authorizing use of pen registers, made 13 requests to foreign governments for evidence, and interviewed approximately 500 witnesses.

The Mueller Report Is Done, But Investigations Related To Trump Will Go On

The Special Counsel obtained a number of indictments and convictions of individuals and entities in connection with his investigation, all of which have been publicly disclosed. During the course of his investigation, the Special Counsel also referred several matters to other offices for further action. The report does not recommend any further indictments, nor did the Special Counsel obtain any sealed indictments that have yet to be made public. Below, I summarize the principal conclusions set out in the Special Counsel's report.

Russian Interference in the 2016 US. Presidential Election.

The Special Counsel's report is divided into two parts. The first describes the results of the Special Counsel's investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The report outlines the Russian effort to influence the election and documents crimes committed by persons associated with the Russian government in connection with those efforts. The report further explains that a primary consideration for the Special Counsel's investigation was whether any Americans — including individuals associated with the Trump campaign — joined the Russian conspiracies to influence the election, which would be a federal crime. The Special Counsel's investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As the report states: "[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities." 1

Get Caught Up On The Russia Investigation: The 'Collusion' Question

National Security

What you need to know about the russia investigations: alleged collusion.

The Special Counsel's investigation determined that there were two main Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election. The first involved attempts by a Russian organization, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), to conduct disinformation and social media operations in the United States designed to sow social discord, eventually with the aim of interfering with the election. As noted above, the Special Counsel did not find that any U.S. person or Trump campaign official or associate conspired or knowingly coordinated with the IRA in its efforts, although the Special Counsel brought criminal charges against a number of Russian nationals and entities in connection with these activities.

The second element involved the Russian government's efforts to conduct computer hacking operations designed to gather and disseminate information to influence the election. The Special Counsel found that Russian government actors successfully hacked into computers and obtained emails from persons affiliated with the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party organizations, and publicly disseminated those materials through various intermediaries, including WikiLeaks. Based on these activities, the Special Counsel brought criminal charges against a number of Russian military officers for conspiring to hack into computers in the United States for purposes of influencing the election. But as noted above, the Special Counsel did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts, despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.

Obstruction of Justice.

The report's second part addresses a number of actions by the President — most of which have been the subject of public reporting — that the Special Counsel investigated as potentially raising obstruction-of-justice concerns. After making a "thorough factual investigation" into these matters, the Special Counsel considered whether to evaluate the conduct under Department standards governing prosecution and declination decisions but ultimately determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment. The Special Counsel therefore did not draw a conclusion — one way or the other — as to whether the examined conduct constituted obstruction. Instead, for each of the relevant actions investigated, the report sets out evidence on both sides of the question and leaves unresolved what the Special Counsel views as "difficult issues" of law and fact concerning whether the President's actions and intent could be viewed as obstruction. The Special Counsel states that "while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him."

What You Need To Know About The Russia Investigations: Alleged Obstruction

The Special Counsel's decision to describe the facts of his obstruction investigation without reaching any legal conclusions leaves it to the Attorney General to determine whether the conduct described in the report constitutes a crime. Over the course of the investigation, the Special Counsel's office engaged in discussions with certain Department officials regarding many of the legal and factual matters at issue in the Special Counsel's obstruction investigation. After reviewing the Special Counsel's final report on these issues; consulting with Department officials, including the Office of Legal Counsel; and applying the principles of federal prosecution that guide our charging decisions, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and I have concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel's investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense. Our determination was made without regard to, and is not based on, the constitutional considerations that surround the indictment and criminal prosecution of a sitting president. 2

The Mueller Report Is Getting A Lot Of Attention. Here's How We Got Here

Mueller Time(line): How We Got Here

In making this determination, we noted that the Special Counsel recognized that "the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference," and that, while not determinative, the absence of such evidence bears upon the President's intent with respect to obstruction. Generally speaking, to obtain and sustain an obstruction conviction, the government would need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a person, acting with corrupt intent, engaged in obstructive conduct with a sufficient nexus to a pending or contemplated proceeding. In cataloguing the President's actions, many of which took place in public view, the report identifies no actions that, in our judgment, constitute obstructive conduct, had a nexus to a pending or contemplated proceeding, and were done with corrupt intent, each of which, under the Department's principles of federal prosecution guiding charging decisions, would need to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to establish an obstruction-of-justice offense.

Status of the Department's Review

The relevant regulations contemplate that the Special Counsel's report will be a "confidential report" to the Attorney General. See Office of Special Counsel, 64 Fed. Reg. 37,038,37,040-41 (July 9, 1999). As I have previously stated, however, I am mindful of the public interest in this matter. For that reason, my goal and intent is to release as much of the Special Counsel's report as I can consistent with applicable law, regulations, and Departmental policies.

Based on my discussions with the Special Counsel and my initial review, it is apparent that the report contains material that is or could be subject to Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e), which imposes restrictions on the use and disclosure of information relating to "matter[s] occurring before [a] grand jury." Fed. R. Crim. P. Rule 6(e)(2)(B). Rule 6(e) generally limits disclosure of certain grand jury information in a criminal investigation and prosecution. Id . Disclosure of 6(e) material beyond the strict limits set forth in the rule is a crime in certain circumstances. See, e.g., 18 U.S.C. § 401(3). This restriction protects the integrity of grand jury proceedings and ensures that the unique and invaluable investigative powers of a grand jury are used strictly for their intended criminal justice function.

All The Criminal Charges To Emerge From Robert Mueller's Investigation

Given these restrictions, the schedule for processing the report depends in part on how quickly the Department can identify the 6(e) material that by law cannot be made public. I have requested the assistance of the Special Counsel in identifying all 6(e) information contained in the report as quickly as possible. Separately, I also must identify any information that could impact other ongoing matters, including those that the Special Counsel has referred to other offices. As soon as that process is complete, I will be in a position to move forward expeditiously in determining what can be released in light of applicable law, regulations, and Departmental policies.

As I observed in my initial notification, the Special Counsel regulations provide that "the Attorney General may determine that public release of" notifications to your respective Committees "would be in the public interest." 28 C.F.R. § 600.9(c). I have so determined, and I will disclose this letter to the public after delivering it to you.

William P. Barr Attorney General

1 In assessing potential conspiracy charges, the Special Counsel also considered whether members of the Trump campaign "coordinated" with Russian election interference activities. The Special Counsel defined "coordination" as an "agreement — tacit or express — between the Trump Campaign and the Russian government on election interference."

2 See A Sitting President's Amenability to Indictment and Criminal Prosecution, 24 Op. O.L.C. 222 (2000).

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Restorative Justice

The restorative justice movement is having an increasing impact upon criminal justice system policymakers and practitioners throughout the world. As a relatively young reform effort, the restorative justice movement and the practice of victim-offender mediation, as its oldest empirically grounded intervention, hold great promise as we enter the twenty-first century. By drawing upon many traditional values of the past, and from many different cultures, we have the opportunity to build a far more accountable, understandable, and healing system of justice that can lead to a greater sense of community through active victim and citizen involvement in restorative initiatives.

Additional topics

Restorative Justice - Bibliography
Restorative Justice - What Have We Learned From Research?
Other Free Encyclopedias

Law Library - American Law and Legal Information Crime and Criminal Law Restorative Justice - What Is Restorative Justice?, What Does Restorative Justice Look Like In Practice?, How Widespread Is Interest In Restorative Justice?

Discovering the Harsh Execution of Justice: Ancient Chinese Skeletons Reveal Cruel Punishments

R ecent archaeological findings point to the stark reality of punitive measures in ancient China. A pair of 2,500-year-old skeletons unearthed with identical mutilations sheds light on how amputation was employed as a form of punishment during the Eastern Zhou Dynasty.

Researchers, including paleoanthropologist Qian Wang from Texas A&M University, examined the remains and determined one to be male. This particular skeleton was missing its left foot, along with a portion of the lower left leg, leaving it noticeably shorter compared to the right by about 8 centimeters (3 inches).

The second skeleton, also believed to be male, exhibited a similar, precisely cut shortening of the right leg. The identical extent of the amputated limbs, varying by less than a centimeter, suggests a standardized method of execution.

These skeletons were found near Sanmenxia in Henan Province, China. Their age, ranging from 2,300 to 2,500 years, places them squarely within the timespan of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty (771 to 256 BCE).

Historical records of laws and punishment from the era are consistent with the findings presented by Wang and his colleagues in a paper published in March. Although the exact crimes attributable to these men have been lost to time, Wang postulates that different levels of offenses may have warranted varying severity in punishments, with amputation of different limbs reflecting the gravity of the crime.

The meticulous nature of the amputations and evidence of the bones’ healing suggest that these men were not only punished but also cared for post-amputation, allowing them to live on for years after their ordeals.

Indicators of their social standing were also observed. Both individuals were interred in double-layered coffins aligned in a north-south direction; a burial practice typically reserved for the upper class. Isotopic analysis suggested that they consumed a protein-rich diet, further supporting the theory that they were likely aristocrats or lower officials.

Though such amputations are not unique to ancient China—appearing across various cultures and periods for medical, ritualistic, or punitive reasons—the discovery of these two skeletons provides a more vivid picture of the legal and social complexities of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty era.

The full findings of this research have been detailed in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences .

FAQ Section

What can these skeletal remains tell us about ancient chinese punishment practices.

These remains indicate that the Eastern Zhou Dynasty employed a form of punitive amputation that was carried out with a high degree of precision, suggesting a standardized process for such punishments.

Were the two men who were amputated treated after their limbs were removed?

Yes, there is evidence that after the amputations, the men were nursed back to health, as indicated by the healed state of the bones where they had been severed.

What does the orientation and structure of the men’s graves suggest about them?

The north-south orientation of their graves and the presence of two-layered coffins suggest that the men were of higher social standing, possibly aristocrats or officials, unlike commoners who were buried in simpler east-west oriented tombs.

Is there any indication of the crimes that led to their amputations?

The exact offenses the men committed are unknown. However, historical documents imply different degrees of punishment severity were linked to the gravity of the crime, with amputations of specific limbs signifying the seriousness of the offenses.

The discovery of these two ancient Chinese skeletons, bearing witness to the harsh punishments of their time, is a stark reminder of the evolution of justice systems. The study of their remains not only contributes to our understanding of punitive methods in the distant past but also reveals the complex interplay between legal consequences, medical knowledge, and societal structure of ancient civilizations. As we uncover more from the grounds that hold centuries of human history, each finding like this enriches the tapestry of our collective past.

CroppedAmputatedVersusIntactLowerLegBones

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Bad Karma, No Justice: Void Manticore Destructive Activities in Israel

Void Manticore is an Iranian threat actor affiliated with the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). They carry out destructive wiping attacks combined with influence operations.
The threat actor operates several online personas, with the most prominent among them being Homeland Justice for attacks in Albania and Karma for attacks carried out in Israel.
There are clear overlaps between the targets of Void Manticore and Scarred Manticore , with indications of systematic hand off of targets between those two groups when deciding to conduct destructive activities against existing victims of Scarred Manticore.
Void Manticore utilizes five different methods to conduct disruptive operations against its victims. This includes several custom wipers for both Windows and Linux, alongside manual deletion of files and shared drives.

Introduction

Since October 2023, Check Point Research (CPR) has actively monitored and hunted state-sponsored threats targeting Israeli organizations with destructive attacks using wipers and ransomware. Among these threats, Void Manticore (aka Storm-842 ) stands out as an Iranian threat actor known for conducting destructive attacks and leaking information through the online persona ’Karma’ (sometime written as KarMa).

Void Manticore’s activities extend beyond Israel, as the group has also executed attacks in Albania using the persona ’ Homeland Justice ’ to leak some of the collected data. In Israel, the group’s attacks are distinguished by the utilization of the custom BiBi wiper , named after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Our analysis of Void Manticore’s intrusions and information leaks reveals a significant overlap in victimology with Scarred Manticore (aka Storm-861), suggesting a collaboration between the two groups. We were able to identify a clear “handoff” procedure of victims from Scarred Manticore to Void Manticore in some instances between the two groups. This phenomenon is evident in several cases involving victims in both Israel and Albania, indicating that cooperation between the threat actors extends beyond single operations or incidents.

The techniques, tactics, and procedures (TTPs) employed by Void Manticore are relatively straightforward and simple, involving hands-on efforts using basic, mostly publicly available tools. They often perform lateral movements using Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and typically deploy their wipers manually while conducting other manual deletion operations. The collaboration with Scarred Manticore, which appears to be a more sophisticated actor, has likely facilitated Void Manticore’s access to high-value targets.

Karma Below 80

In light of the conflicts and rising tensions in the Middle East, a wide range of hack and leak personas have emerged targeting Israel. Initially, the group known as Karma didn’t stand out, as they were perceived as part of a much wider effort carried out by hacktivists and state-sponsored actors. However, the group began to garner more public attention when it was linked to the BiBi wiper, a custom wiper named after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Karma joined the arena with a Telegram Channel soon after the Israeli-Hamas war broke out and launched its website in November 2023. The website further established a fake persona of an anti-Zionist Jewish group ( “Anti-Zionist Jewish Hackers” ) that opposes the Israeli government and specifically Benjamin Netanyahu (Bibi). Karma claims to be a product of the “butterfly effect” spurred by the government’s military actions and therefore uses a butterfly icon as part of its symbol.

Since its first appearance, the group claims to have successfully targeted over 40 Israeli organizations, including several high-value targets. According to their publications, the attacks involved wiping, stealing, and publishing the victims’ data.

While analyzing the leaks from Karma, we observed a reoccurring pattern: overlaps between leaked information and the victims of Scarred Manticore, an Iranian actor CPR has been tracking for months. These overlaps prompted the team to further analyze the connection between Karma and Scarred Manticore. Our findings led us to the activities of another actor we refer to as Void Manticore , who likely operates the Karma persona and utilizes access previously obtained by Scarred Manticore.

“One-Two Punch” – a Handoff Procedure

In addition to overlaps in the threat actors’ victims, our technical investigation detected an apparent handoff procedure between the attackers.

In the case of one victim, we discovered that after residing on the targeted network for over a year, Scarred Manticore was interacting with the infected machine at the exact moment a new web shell was dropped to disk. Following the shell’s deployment, a different set of IPs began accessing the network, suggesting the involvement of another actor – Void Manticore. The newly deployed web shell and subsequent tools were significantly less sophisticated than those in Scarred Manticore’s arsenal. However, they led to the deployment of the BiBi wiper, which is linked to Karma’s activity.

One of the first identified activities carried out by Void Manticore involved the use of a Domain Admin account. This suggests that the handoff process included more than just web shell deployments, but also access to additional information about the network.

Figure 2 - A high-level timeline of the Void-Scarred Connection.

From Albania to The Middle East

This handoff procedure is not unprecedented and is highly correlated with Microsoft’s reporting on the destructive attacks against Albania in 2022. In that incident, Storm-0861 (aka Scarred Manticore) was responsible for the initial access and data exfiltration, while Storm-0842 (aka Void Manticore) carried out the destructive attack. In this context, Karma’s activity closely resembles another persona linked to the actor by other vendors: Homeland Justice .

A comparison of the process that happened in Albania and in Israel is summarized in the table below:

The overlaps in techniques employed in attacks against Israel and Albania, including the coordination between the two different actors, suggest this process has become routine. The ties between the events in Israel and Albania have strengthened with the latest attacks against Albania ( late 2023 and early 2024 ), during which Void Manticore dropped partition wipers similar to those used in Israel as part of the BiBi wiper attacks.

Techniques, Tactics, and Procedures

Void Manticore’s TTPs are straightforward and aligned with their goal of quick and dirty destructive operations.

In some instances, Void Manticore’s access was established through an internet-facing web server, on which the group utilized various web shells. Among those was “Karma Shell”, which appears to be a homebrew tool. While masquerading as an error page (based on the page’s title and content), this tool can perform several functions. It can list directories, create processes, upload files, and start/stop/list services. Additionally, it employs base64 and a one-byte XOR to decrypt the supplied parameters.

Figure 4 – Snippet from Karma Shell.

As we monitored the activity of the group’s interaction with “Karma Shell”, we retrieved some of the commands executed by the attacker on the compromised server.

One notable activity we observed in Void Manticore is the uploading of a tailor-made executable file, do.exe . This file checks authentication for Domain Admin credentials. If the authentication is successful, the executable copies another web shell, a publicly available reGeorge , to the web directory, indicating the credentials are valid.

Using a binary with hard-coded Domain Admin credentials strengthens the assumption that the access was handed off to the group by another entity.

Figure 5 - “Do.exe” with hard-coded credentials of Domain Admin.

After deploying the reGeorge tunneling web shell, the actor continues to move laterally using RDP and collects information about target networks using SysInternal’s AD Explorer. On some of those hosts, the threat actor establishes a C2 channel using an OpenSSH client. This is executed in the following manner, setting up a SOCKS proxy from compromised hosts:

Figure 6 – Void Manticore SSH client executions.

In all the cases we observed targeting Israel in the last months, the access was later utilized to execute destructive activities, either with custom automated payloads or manual data destruction procedures.

Void Manticore utilizes a set of custom wipers in their attacks.

Some of Void Manticore’s wipers target and destroy the files themselves, corrupting specific files or file types within the infected systems. This approach allows the malware to selectively erase critical information, causing targeted damage to applications, user data, and system functionality.

The other wipers attack the system’s partition table. Instead of deleting individual files, these wipers obliterate the partition table, the component that stores the layout of the disk, including partitions where files are organized. By destroying the partition table, the malware essentially removes the map that the operating system uses to locate and access data. As a result, all data on the disk becomes inaccessible, even though the data itself remains unaltered on the storage medium.

CI Wiper is the first wiper used by the group in the first attack against Albania in July 2022, the details of which were published by CISA .

How it works: cl.exe gets arguments from the command line and uses a legitimate driver by ElRawDisk, called rwdsk.sys . The use of ElRawDisk is relatively common among wipers and has been previously used by several wiper families, some of them associated with Iranian actors. Additionally, the license key used in the wiper is the same as the one used in the ZeroCleare wiper, which is known to be used by several actors with links to MOIS. ElRawDisk enables interaction with files, disks, and partitions, proxying the wiping procedures and allowing raw access to the disk.

The cl wiper supports three commands:

in – Installs rwdsk.sys as a service named RawDisk3 and loads it.
un – Uninstalls the RawDisk3 service.
wp – Accesses rwdsk.sys for wiping with the IOCTLs 0x227F80 or 0x22BF84 , depending on the Windows version. These IOCTLs overwrite the contents of the physical drive with a predefined buffer. The Cl Wiper buffer is filled with ‘0’ characters.

Figure 7 - Cl Wiper main method and supported arguments.

Partition Wipers

Some of Void’s Manticore wipers are pretty straightforward, performing only one function: they iterate over available physical disks and then send an IOCTL (input/output control) named IOCTL_DISK_DELETE_DRIVE_LAYOUT (0x7c100).

This IOCTL removes partition information from the disk. If the partition style of the disk is Master Boot Record (MBR), it removes the signatures of the relevant drive from the partition table. If the partition style of the disk is GUID Partition Table (GPT), it wipes clean both the primary partition table header in sector 1 and the backup partition table in the last sector of the disk. As a result, it triggers a blue screen of death (BSOD) and crashes the disk during reboot due to a corrupted partition table, which does not have any information on which offsets each partition resides on the disk.

In the attacks against Albania in December 2023, the wiper was internally called LowEraser based on its PDB path (also called the No-Justice Wiper by ClearSky). This file was signed by Attest Inspection Limited, and the icon of the file matches the logo on the company website.

Void Manticore also used this type of wiper in attacks against Albanian entities such as INSTAT , where the tool was called Pinky based on its PDB path, and in the attacks against Israeli entities, where it was internally called JustMBR .

Figure 8 - Partition Wipers’ main logic.

There are minor differences between the variants of this wiper, such as debug strings that appear only in some of them.

In their most recent attacks, Void Manticore used a custom wiper called the BiBi wiper, referencing the nickname of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The wiper was deployed in several campaigns against multiple entities in Israel and has variants for both Linux and Windows.

Linux Version

On October 30, 2023, Security Joes published research about a new wiper used against Israeli companies during the Israel-Hamas war. The file name of this wiper was bibi-linux.out , and the extensions of the wiped files were “.BiBi” .

BiBi Wiper can receive command-line parameters such as the target_path (which is “/” by default). The wiper uses several threads, based on the number of CPU cores, for the wiping process and employs a queue to synchronize between them. It then corrupts the files with buffers of random data and renames the infected files with random names and the “.BiBi” extension ( [RANDOM_NAME].BiBi[NUMBER] ).

Interestingly, BiBi Wiper doesn’t infect files with the extensions “.out” and “.so” , likely because it relies on files with those extensions (like bibi-linux.out ) and other libraries essential for the OS and to keep the process running.

Windows Version

A Windows variant of the wiper, also named bibi.exe , was found several days later, exhibiting a similar flow. The wiper works with several threads based on the number of processors and avoids destroying files important to its operations (the Windows variant doesn’t destroy .exe , .dll and .sys files). The Windows variant also gets arguments such as the target_path , with a default value set to C:\\Users .

There are several differences between the Linux variant and the Windows variant:

In the Windows variant, the extension for the wiped files is “.BiBi<number from 1 to 5>” .
cmd.exe /c vssadmin delete shadows /quIet /all
cmd.exe /c wmic shadowcopy delete
The Windows variant disables the system’s trigger to call the Error Recovery screen on startup with the command cmd.exe / c bcdedit / set {default} bootstatuspolicy ignoreallfailures and then turns it off with the command cmd.exe /c bcdedit /set {default} recoveryenabled no .
All the command strings are stored in reverse.

Figure 9 - cmd.exe commands are stored backwards.

In February 2024, we found other variants of the wiper, which are more targeted than the earlier versions.

They enter the main flow only if the string “Israel” is not equal to the string “Country”:

Figure 10 - The malware authors seemingly mock the victims.

One of the new samples lacks the features to delete the shadow copies and disable the Error recovery.
The new samples have a different extension for the files, “.bb<random_number>” . This is probably to avoid security solutions that signed the former extension.
The new samples have the same ability as the partition wipers to remove partition information from the disk.

Manual Data Destruction Activity

In addition to deploying custom wipers, the group singles out victims for manual data-destruction activities using “seemingly” legitimate utilities:

File Deletion via Windows Explorer: Void Manticore achieved data destruction on hosts by deleting files via the Windows File Explorer.
SysInternals SDelete: Void Manticore also used SDelete to conduct secure data wiping manually.
Windows Format Utility: The actors often utilized the Windows Format utility to corrupt the partition using the “Quick Format” option. It was also used to perform a “Full” format that corrupted the partition and its content.

This article provides an in-depth analysis of the attacks carried out by Void Manticore, an Iranian threat actor that targets Israeli organizations as part of a broader Iranian offensive strategy. Void Manticore’s operations are characterized by their dual approach, combining psychological warfare with actual data destruction. This is achieved through their use of wiping attacks and by publicly leaking information, thereby amplifying the destruction on the targeted organizations.

Void Manticore’s use of distinct online personas, notably “Homeland Justice” and “Karma,” plays a significant role in their strategy. The personas allow them to tailor their messaging in an attempt to effectively weaponize political tensions. The deployment of the custom BiBi wiper in their operations against Israeli targets showcases their intent to not only cause direct damage but also to send a politically charged message.

The collaboration between Void Manticore and Scarred Manticore reveals a high degree of coordination within their operations. The documented handoff procedures between these groups suggest a consistent level of planning and allow Void Manticore access to a wider set of targets, facilitated by their counterparts’ advanced capabilities. This cooperation positions Void Manticore as an exceptionally dangerous actor within the Iranian threat landscape.

Check Point Customers Remain Protected

Check Point Customers remain protected against attacks detailed in this report, while using IPS, Check Point Harmony Endpoint and Threat Emulation.

Backdoor.WIN32.Liontail.A/B

Threat Emulation:

APT.Wins.Liontail.C/D APT.Wins.VoidManticore.ta.A-H APT.Wins.ScarredManticore.ta.A/B

Harmony Endpoint:

Ransomware.Win.BiBiWiper.A-F Ransomware_Linux_Bibi_B, Ransomware_Linux_Bibi_D

Indicators of Compromise

64.176.169.22 64.176.172.235 64.176.172.165 64.176.173.77 64.176.172.101 D0C03D40772CD468325BBC522402F7B737F18B8F37A89BACC5C8A00C2B87BFC6 DEEAF85B2725289D5FC262B4F60DDA0C68AE42D8D46D0DC19B9253B451AEA25A 87F0A902D6B2E2AE3647F10EA214D19DB9BD117837264AE15D622B5314FF03A5 85FA58CC8C4560ADB955BA0AE9B9D6CAB2C381D10DBD42A0BCEB8B62A92B7636 74D8D60E900F931526A911B7157511377C0A298AF986D42D373F51AAC4F362F6 CC77E8AB73B577DE1924E2F7A93BCFD852B3C96C6546229BC8B80BF3FD7BF24E

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Trump’s lawyer charges Michael Cohen lied to jury

Angry defense lawyer shouts in confrontation with Donald Trump’s former fixer, who stayed calm in his third day of testimony.

NEW YORK — The central witness against Donald Trump withstood a withering cross-examination Thursday from the former president’s defense lawyer, who accused Michael Cohen of lying as recently as two days ago to realize his dreams of revenge against his ex-boss.

The confrontation between Cohen and Trump lawyer Todd Blanche was the most anticipated moment in the month-long trial, which is now speeding toward a conclusion. Because the trial is off Friday, the jurors will have three days to weigh Cohen’s answers. His cross-examination will continue Monday morning, setting the stage for closing arguments next week.

New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan told the lawyers that he would try to make sure those arguments don’t stretch out over more than one day, but he warned that they might because of scheduling demands of the jurors and other logistics issues.

The day’s testimony was closely watched by a cadre of Trump’s political allies sitting behind him in court, including Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.). There were so many congressional Republicans in court in New York that a House Oversight Committee hearing in Washington was delayed .

Trump, who paid close attention Thursday to Blanche’s questioning of Cohen, has still not decided whether he will take the stand, Blanche told the judge. Most defendants do not testify at their trials, believing the risks of being questioned by prosecutors under oath are simply too great.

Trump hush money trial

In his third day on the witness stand, Cohen remained calm and quiet — speaking in a slow, sometimes raspy voice as Blanche challenged his truthfulness again and again. At one point, Blanche shouted that Cohen was a liar.

Cohen’s ability to keep his cool under pressure is an important measuring stick for the prosecutors’ chances of success.

Perhaps more importantly, the jury must decide whether they believe the only witness who directly ties Trump to an alleged scheme to falsify business records to cover up hush money payments to a porn star.

Cohen, a disbarred and convicted former lawyer , has admitted that he lied for Trump for years; it would be a far more serious threat to the prosecution case if jurors came to suspect he lied to them.

Trump is charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg . The indictment accuses Trump of creating a false paper trail to hide the fact that adult-film star Stormy Daniels was paid $130,000 in October 2016 to stay silent about her claim to have had sex with Trump years earlier. Trump denies the two had sex.

Cohen is instrumental to the prosecution case because he paid Daniels with his own money; the following year, the lawyer was given monthly payments from Trump in what prosecutors say was a corrupt scheme to reimburse him and keep Daniels’s allegations under wraps. Cohen is the only witness who has described conversations with Trump in which he said it was clear that his boss understood they would create the false paper trail.

The angriest and potentially most consequential moment in Thursday’s testimony came when Blanche confronted Cohen over his claim that he spoke to Trump on the evening of Oct. 24, 2016, when he called the phone of Trump’s security chief, Keith Schiller.

Cohen testified Tuesday that during the phone call, he told Trump the plan to pay hush money to Daniels was moving forward.

Blanche, however, presented text messages between Schiller and Cohen that preceded that call and suggested an entirely different reason for the conversation. In those texts, Cohen complained about getting harassing phone calls and asked for Schiller’s help. “Call me,” Schiller replied.

After hours of mild-mannered and patient questioning of Cohen, Blanche erupted as he confronted Cohen over the Schiller texts. Accusing Cohen of fabricating key evidence against his client, the lawyer angrily grabbed the microphone and raised his voice.

“That was a lie! You did not talk to President Trump that night!” Blanche bellowed.

Blanche suggested the call was simply too short for it to have included Schiller handing his phone to his boss so he and Cohen could discuss a financial transaction that would ultimately be the genesis of criminal charges against Trump.

“I’m not sure that’s accurate,” Cohen said.

He tried to revise his earlier account, saying he “also spoke to Mr. Trump and told him that everything regarding the Stormy Daniels matter was being worked on and it’s going to be resolved.”

The back-and-forth was the most tense moment yet of Cohen’s cross-examination, and of the entire trial.

But a quieter exchange may prove more damaging to Cohen’s credibility. It happened when Blanche asked Cohen if he had been willing to lie under oath while pleading guilty to tax crimes “because the stakes affected you personally.”

Cohen agreed that he had been.

A few minutes later, Blanche asked Cohen whether “the outcome of this trial affects you personally.”

Again, Cohen said: “Yes.”

Throughout the day, Blanche tried to methodically rip apart the prosecution portrait of Cohen as a remorseful, reformed henchman , using elements of Cohen’s prior testimony to suggest to the jury that he is a singularly selfish person .

Wearing a pale yellow tie, dark suit and dark-rimmed glasses, Cohen met Blanche’s indignation with a calm insistence that whatever his faults, his story about Trump’s guilt was true.

Yet he also struggled to explain why he told a congressional committee in 2019 that he never sought and would never seek a pardon from Trump, when his lawyer was doing just that . (Cohen called it a “misstatement.”) Or how he could claim to have accepted responsibility for financial crimes, but also call the prosecutor and judge in that case corrupt.

On the stand, Cohen said the fault for what happened lay with his bank, his accountant and others.

“You’ve blamed a lot of people over the years for the conduct you were convicted of, yes?” Blanche asked.

“I blame people, yes,” he replied.

Cohen also admitted that he often recorded his conversations with people without their knowledge, including at one point Trump, who at the time was his legal client.

Blanche played for the jury two short recordings of a bombastic Cohen talking about how joyful he was over Trump’s indictment and the prospect of the former president possibly going to jail. Cohen has continued to rail publicly against Trump, on podcasts, social media and in news interviews, despite repeated entreaties from the prosecutors for him to stop.

“I truly f---ing hope that this man ends up in prison,” Cohen said on a podcast excerpt played for the jury Thursday. “Revenge is a dish best served cold, and you best believe I want this man to go down and rot inside for what he did to my family.”

In another podcast clip, this one from May of last year, weeks after Trump’s indictment in this case, Cohen declared: “I want to thank the Manhattan district attorney’s office and their fearless leader Alvin Bragg, with whom I spent countless hours.”

On the witness stand, Cohen conceded that he had not in fact met or spent time with Bragg.

The district attorney has attended the trial intermittently but was not in court Thursday. The trial is off Friday so that Trump can attend his son’s high school graduation.

Just before court ended for the day, Blanche asked about a 2016 conversation in which Cohen reassured a reporter that the story about a Trump-Daniels encounter was false. In the phone call, Cohen told the reporter to believe Cohen because he is “a really bad liar.”

On the stand, Cohen acknowledged that he was lying at the time.

Trump New York hush money case

Former president Donald Trump’s criminal hush money trial is underway in New York. Follow live updates from the trial.

Key witnesses: Several key witnesses, including David Pecker and Stormy Daniels, have taken the stand. Here’s what Daniels said during her testimony . Read full transcripts from the trial .

Gag order: New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan has twice ruled that Trump violated his gag order , which prohibits him from commenting on jurors and witnesses in the case, among others. Here are all of the times Trump has violated the gag order .

The case: The investigation involves a $130,000 payment made to Daniels, an adult-film actress , during the 2016 presidential campaign. It’s one of many ongoing investigations involving Trump . Here are some of the key people in the case .

The charges: Trump is charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Falsifying business records is a felony in New York when there is an “intent to defraud” that includes an intent to “commit another crime or to aid or conceal” another crime. He has pleaded not guilty . Here’s what to know about the charges — and any potential sentence .

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COMMENTS

Opinion
The virtue of justice requires not only that we judge others fairly, but also that we judge ourselves fairly. This is no mean feat. The trouble is that if a person is a poor judge of him or ...
Essays About Justice: Top 5 Examples And 7 Prompts
Countries have different ways of instilling justice within their societies. For this prompt, research and discuss the countries you think have the best and worst legal systems. Then, point out how these differences affect the country's crime rates and quality of life for its citizens. 7. Obstructions to Justice.
Justice
Justice. The idea of justice occupies centre stage both in ethics, and in legal and political philosophy. We apply it to individual actions, to laws, and to public policies, and we think in each case that if they are unjust this is a strong, maybe even conclusive, reason to reject them. Classically, justice was counted as one of the four ...
Justice as a Virtue
By Hume's time the content of justice as a virtue has shifted as well. In Hume's treatment, the focus of justice is property — relations of "mine and thine.". It is a "cautious, jealous" virtue in the sense that it is focused on the sorts of exclusionary powers that are characteristic of property rules and relations.
Summary of Justice in Plato's Republic
Conclusion. Though Plato draws out similarities between justice of the individual and justice of the polity, this is, of course, quite a large assumption. Many may be attracted to his view that a certain sovereignty comes in gaining control of the self and living moderately, rather than controlled by one's passions or emotions. ...
A better path forward for criminal justice: Conclusion
The essays in this volume and the recommended supplemental readings provide much food for thought about the major areas of criminal justice reform that should be at the top of the nation's agenda.
Justice for All
The Constitution protects justice for all citizens in the United States. As American ideas about equality changed, we enacted laws to free American slaves and to extend voting rights to women and those without property. We moved to stop government agencies from treating African Americans unequally, whether by denying them the right to vote ...
PDF JUSTICE
a well-supported conclusion. The following guidelines are intended to help you understand how to accomplish that goal. Justice papers are not research papers. You should not do research beyond the read-ings for the course and the article(s) assigned with the paper topic. WRITING the TWO ANALYTIC PAPERS
On the Connection Between Law and Justice
that justice is only a judgment about law or has offered no reason to support a conclusion that justice is somehow part of law. This Essay attempts to reason toward such a conclusion, arguing that justice is an inherent component of the law and not separate or distinct from it. Given the history of the topic, I start with a disclaimer.
13 Findings, Conclusions, and Implications
CONCLUSION: In the domain of justice, empirical evidence by itself cannot point the way to policy, yet an explicit and transparent expression of normative principles has been notably missing as U.S. incarceration rates dramatically rose over the past four decades. Normative principles have deep roots in jurisprudence and theories of governance ...
Essay on Justice
Conclusion. In conclusion, justice is a complex and multifaceted concept that permeates various aspects of human life. Whether from a philosophical perspective, within legal systems, or as a social virtue, justice is fundamentally about fairness, equity, and the protection of rights. It is a cornerstone of a harmonious society and a guiding ...
Conclusion: Attitudes to Justice
By way of conclusion to this study, the present chapter seeks to explore that issue by focusing on attitudes to justice. It begins with an analysis of the ways in which people spoke of, and complained about, the law in fourteenth-century England, and ends with a broader discussion of the nature, meaning and implications of these traditions of ...
Social Justice Reflections and Conclusion
Abstract. We shall return first to the formal notions of justice, morality and education as a means of showing that the principle of equality of educational opportunity is related to all three, and that with this composite moral foundation it points unequivocally to social justice. Then we shall reflect finally on the main emphases we have made ...
Plato's Theory of Justice Explained
Justice is the befitting virtue of the state, which creates harmony among all three social classes and is a necessary condition for human happiness. Conclusion. Plato's theory of justice is a comprehensive theory of individual and social virtue. It is a theory of moral excellence that is essential for the individual and for the state.
A better path forward for criminal justice
As we prepare to exit pandemic conditions, it is a crucial time to address criminal justice reform in America. In the Conclusion to "A better path forward for criminal justice," our experts ...
Conclusion (Chapter 8)
The conclusion of the book sums up the key arguments and findings and their contribution to the field of transitional justice and beyond. It builds on this to reflect on three key issues emerging from the book: rethinking socioeconomic justice and its role in post-conflict justice processes; the role and accountability of economic actors, including economic actors that are traditionally left ...
8 Conclusions and Implications for Policy and Research
CONCLUSION 3-1 Factual findings from court proceedings, federal investigations into police departments, and ethnographic and theoretical arguments support the hypothesis that proactive strategies that use aggressive stops, searches, and arrests to deter criminal activity may decrease liberty and increase violations of the Fourth Amendment and Equal Protection Clause; proactive policing ...
A Balancing Act: The Right to Peace and Justice
While this conclusion may leave the Transitional Justice (TJ) field concerned, I will offer some perspective as to why the development when viewed historically is actually encouraging. In particular, the pressure felt by local actors is a remarkable advancement from the state of affairs only thirty years ago when such actors did whatever it ...
Conclusion: Environmental Justice and the Emergent Future of Human
In her recent history of human rights, Lynn Hunt (2007, 27) disputes this conclusion, arguing that national identity alone cannot provide what she calls the necessary "disposition toward other people" and "set of convictions about what people are like" that together form the basis of both human rights and justice.
Conclusion
Restorative justice provides a safe space for this communication, encouraging a willingness to grapple with difficult emotions, to explore uncomfortable needs and seek consensus on a way forward. Crime is dehumanising. It is an invasion of our lives, wrenches away our control and damages our sense of self. Every crime involves a breach of one ...
READ: The Justice Department's Summary Of The Mueller Report
A copy of Attorney General William Barr's letter to Congress regarding the conclusion of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation is arranged for a photograph in Washington, D.C. Leaders of ...
Restorative Justice
Conclusion. The restorative justice movement is having an increasing impact upon criminal justice system policymakers and practitioners throughout the world. As a relatively young reform effort, the restorative justice movement and the practice of victim-offender mediation, as its oldest empirically grounded intervention, hold great promise as ...
Conclusion: Justice and Responsibility (HRW Report
Conclusion The Rwandan genocide stands alone for the way its organizers aimed to mobilize mass participation in murder. ... La justice internationale face au drame rwandais (Paris: Karthala, 1996 ...
Discovering the Harsh Execution of Justice: Ancient Chinese ...
Conclusion The discovery of these two ancient Chinese skeletons, bearing witness to the harsh punishments of their time, is a stark reminder of the evolution of justice systems.
Prosecution Rests Case in Trump Trial as Defense Targets Cohen Again
Michael D. Cohen, Donald J. Trump's former fixer, was the last witness called to the stand by prosecutors. He made the hush-money payment that underpins the case, and the defense called his one ...
Bad Karma, No Justice: Void Manticore Destructive Activities in Israel
Figure 3 - Homeland Justice utilizes politically charged messages. A comparison of the process that happened in Albania and in Israel is summarized in the table below: Albania (2022) ... Conclusion. This article provides an in-depth analysis of the attacks carried out by Void Manticore, an Iranian threat actor that targets Israeli ...
Justice long overdue for blood scandal victims
Justice long overdue for blood scandal victims. Successive governments have allowed the process to drag on for too long. It is time to bring it to a swift conclusion. The final report of the ...
Michael Cohen testifies during heated cross-examination in Trump hush
The confrontation between Michael Cohen and Trump lawyer Todd Blanche was the most anticipated moment in the trial, which is now speeding toward a conclusion. Accessibility statement Skip to main ...

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Plato’s Theory of Justice Explained

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Characteristics of Plato’s Theory of Justice

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A Balancing Act: The Right to Peace and Justice

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Historical Perspective: The Peace v. Justice Debate

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