Give preventative justice a chance, even if it’s uncomfortable

People want justice. They demanded that Derek Chauvin be punished for killing George Floyd. And they wanted the Sackler family, as owners of Oxycontin producer Purdue Pharma, to face consequences for their role in the opioid epidemic.

In the wake of each injustice, we want those responsible to face consequences for their actions, and rightly so: bad actors need to be held accountable.

Our legal system is designed around punishment by offering a set of rules and procedures to assign responsibility and liability for harmful behavior. But punitive laws neither deter crime nor truly deliver justice.

True justice does not solely look at the past; it also focuses on the future. It is not just about reacting to past misdeeds, but also preventing future damage and victimization.

So we must also learn what conditions cause certain types of crime to occur and how we can prevent those crimes from happening again.

This requires fundamentally different expertise and skills than are now present in our legal system.

The good news is that science is on our side. And its findings are quite revolutionary. For most wrongdoings, stronger punishment alone will not help. Rather than punishment, behavior is driven more by people’s intrinsic motivations, how they respond to others and their own morals.

Another core finding is that the situation people are in matters. Criminal behavior is much more likely when people lack socioeconomic opportunities or when they have limited self-control.

There are solid examples of when preventative justice has worked. Cincinnati changed its policies and used a holistic, preventative approach that combined punishment with employment support and community pressure that saw gang member-involved homicides drop by as much as 41% in three and a half years.

Another successful approach is the so-called situational crime prevention strategy. Rather than focusing on figuring out the right punishment, the core objective is to make the damaging behavior more difficult. Speed bumps are a prime example.

Preventative justice is uncomfortable. It makes us look beyond our feelings of retribution. And it will mean that we need to thoroughly rethink and reform our legal system.

But to truly prevent the next police brutality, the next sexual assault and the next devastating corporate scandal, these are but small sacrifices.