What is justice for?: Distributive justice
New to public policy
The map already tells you
In 2016 the DOJ investigated the Baltimore Police Department. Officers had made 300,000 pedestrian stops in a city of 620,000. One man was stopped thirty times in four years. Never charged with anything.
The twenty wealthiest Baltimore zip codes spend four times per student what the twenty poorest do. Lead paint in rental housing went unaddressed for decades because the children being poisoned were Black. The single largest employer accessible without a degree was the drug trade. You can draw a map of where the violent crime will be five years from now, and a high schooler with a poverty dataset could draw the same one.
Before the crime
The retributivists and restorative camp both start after the crime happens. We’re asking why it was predictable. The refusal to fund those zip codes, generation after generation, is itself an injustice that no verdict addresses. A society spending $40,000 to incarcerate a person it spent $8,000 to educate has already chosen. Norway spends $130,000 per prisoner in facilities that look like dorms, with 20 percent recidivism. The US spends a third of that and gets 75 percent back. That’s not a philosophical difference. It’s a budget line.
The natural law camp talks about inherent dignity. Great. A society that means it funds it.
Where we concede ground: Structural change takes generations. The crime happened Tuesday. The victim needs something now.
What would change our mind: Genuine distributive equity achieved with no change in violent crime rates.
Read the full synthesis: What is justice for?