This short article was published in the January 2026 newsletter of the European Group
At demonstrations protesting police killings and deaths in state custody the slogan “No Justice, No Peace” is a recurring chant. Those protesting the violence and brutality of the state and its agents repeatedly cry out for justice, an appeal, by implication, to the very same state’s justice system. The call for justice is in one sense obvious. Isn’t justice associated with concepts such as fairness, equal treatment, proportionality and impartiality? Even when these are not the reality of our society, or its law, they remain our aspiration. However, are such aspirations – for justice – consistent with the history of justice as a concept?
As well as its aspirational meaning the noun justice today tends to refer to two things. Firstly, the existing state’s justice system. Justice is something that is obtained through the court system. It is the word that literally sits at the very centre of the Criminal Justice System. Secondly, it refers to the concept of social justice, the creation of a more just, fair, equal society. This article starts by exploring how the English criminal justice system actually works, highlighting how it is in practice characterised by unfairness, how it treats people unequally, and seeks resolution through the infliction of blame and pain. If we judge it by the attributes people associate with the word justice, it is an abject failure. To attempt to explain this the next section explores the origin of justice as a concept. Firstly, its emergence in Ancient Greece, asking: how was justice understood in Athens; who was it available to; who was excluded from it and what was its relationship with other disciplinary regimes? Secondly, what was the king’s justice system that emerged in the Middle Ages in England? The medieval institutions of the king’s justice remain largely intact in today’s justice system. Initially created to establish and sustain the sovereignty of the feudal monarchy, they were not designed to promote fairness, equal treatment, impartiality or proportionality but to facilitate domination. The institutions of the king’s justice have survived beyond feudalism because they have had great utility to capitalism, colonialism and the associated modern state that have subsequently emerged. The article then looks at a more recent development, the concept of social justice before reaching some tentative conclusions of the potential and limitations of the concept of justice.
Justice or Punishment?
To understand any system, we need to see what it produces. At the conclusion of the criminal justice system’s (CJS) process are two potential outcomes. Either, in response to a particular conflict or harm, an individual (or group of individuals) is/are found to be to blame (guilty) and have pain inflicted on them (punishment) or alternatively, no one is to blame (not-guilty) and nothing is done. Criminal justice is a system whose outcomes are limited to either: blame and pain; or, nothing.
For victims, those hurt or harmed, it offers only the possibility of others being blamed and hurt, failing otherwise to respond to their needs. It resolutely refuses to address (or even acknowledge) the underlying social problems that cause so much conflict and harm. It displays a high level of sensitivity to power, consistently enabling the powerful to escape sanction while repeatedly inflicting pain on the poorest and most marginal communities in our societies. It focuses our attention on a narrow range of predominantly minor harms, deflecting attention away from many other more serious harms. Anyone familiar with the operation of the CJS will see little, if any evidence, of those characteristics we associate with the concept of justice: fairness, equal treatment, proportionality and impartiality. Its output is blame and pain, it would be more accurate to rename it (as I will do in the remainder of the article) the Criminal Punishment System.
But is this actually inconsistent with the historic origins of the concept of justice?
Birth of a concept – The slave societies of Ancient Greece
In Euro-America, politicians and philosophers talking about justice often reference Ancient Athens as the origin story of the concept of justice. Many of the ideas we associate with justice today can be found applied to the Greek polis or political society, economic fairness, procedural fairness, social harmony, all attributes linked to the goddess Themis and her daughter Dike. Dike was even represented as carrying a balanced scale (but without a blindfold – that was added in the 16th century). In fact, these ideas were not original but can be traced back the Ancient Egyptian goddess Maat in 2300 BCE.
There were significant differences in exactly how justice was understood between Ancient Greece and in Euro-America today, but we can see a clear link between the modern legal and philosophical understandings of today and how justice was perceived in the Greek polis. But what is often conveniently excluded from such comparisons is that the concept of justice was exclusively reserved for members of the polis – citizens – an elite group which excluded women, citizens’ children, foreigners and, most significantly, the enslaved. The individual status of those excluded from the polis obviously varied, but they were all consider as members of a citizen’s household (oikos). Whilst the citizen could expect justice in his regulation by the political community and in resolving disputes with other citizens, within the household his subjects enjoyed no such right. Governance of the household required no justice, ‘there can be no injustice’, Aristotle argued, ‘towards things that are one’s own’. The extent to which justice was attained within the elite Polis is open to debate, but it was as a concept exclusively an aspiration for citizens, an aspiration that excluded the vast majority of the population. If this is the foundation for the concept of justice relied on by philosophers and politicians today it is a justice reserved for the elite few and which excludes the many. It is a justice, that in Antiquity, not only tolerated slavery but operated to maintain it.
The King’s Justice, the King’s Peace
Justice as a concept reemerges in English history in the Middle Ages with the imposition of the King’s justice. Initially Anglo-Saxon England had a dual system of conflict resolution. In a society comprising largely of isolated homesteads consisted of an extended family and servants and slaves, the social order was maintained by firstly, a mechanism to resolve disputes between households – feuding and more often compensation – and secondly by the imposed order that the head/father imposed within their household. Again, like in Antiquity, we see two disciplinary spheres, resolution between freemen and the arbitrary discipline of the rest by those freemen. As the Middle Ages progressed the emergence of strong men saw them impose the order of their household on others through a process where the lord offered their protection to the vassal in return for their loyalty and service. This led over time to the formation of kingdoms, with these being unified into the kingdom of England in AD 927, a process which acknowledged the supremacy of the king and his household. Disputes would be brought to the king’s court for settlement. The king would also summon to his court those from whom he wanted to extract money or to discipline. It was in the king’s personal court, which often travelled around the country, that justice was done. By the end of the 11th century the word justice had entered the English language meaning the power to administer the law and the power to inflict punishment. Justice was a mechanism for maintaining, by violence, the order of feudal England.
In around 1290 a new term can be found in England, felony. It had a specific meaning; it was an offence against the King’s peace and as such against the king himself. As such it was tantamount to treason, and warranted, in all cases, the death penalty and the forfeiture, to the king, of the felon’s property. What constituted a felony developed over time but by the turn of the fourteenth century it included murder, rape, arson, robbery and larceny (any theft whose value exceeded 12d, 12d in 1300 is roughly equivalent to £550 in 2024 prices). Matters which had previously been seen as needing resolution, either by the participants (or their respective lords), or by the local lord or the head of household, now became the king’s property. Felony was a useful tool. Its core purpose was how it legitimised, through the concept of the king’s justice, the maintenance of the king’s peace. What was deemed to be felony, was essentially, behaviours that threatened the established social order. To understand what it encompassed – what warranted execution – it is necessary to see how it sustained a social order structured for the benefit, firstly of the king, and secondly for the nobility and to a lesser extent the gentry and commercial classes.
Whilst the king’s justice could be used against everyone (even in Henry VIII’s case his wives) it was predominately deployed against those at the bottom of society who posed the greatest threat to the king’s order. For example, by the end of the Middle Ages, vagrancy, to be jobless and/or homeless, a condition likely to have been generated by the social order, was considered a threat to that order. Masterless people, particularly men, not fixed within the social structure of an estate were therefore increasingly targeted by late medieval and early modern justice. Liable to be being whipped from village to village as they were returned to their home parish, branded with a V, and for subsequent offences hanged. And hanged they were. Whilst the claims that Henry VIII hung 70,000 rogues may be an overestimate, it is clear that by the 16th century justice had been established as summary, violent, brutal and a ruthless mechanism for maintaining the king’s desired social order.
Built for punishment not justice
In an article Rebecca Roberts and I wrote in 2016 we included a section entitled ‘Criminal justice as failure and criminal justice as success’. We highlighted the limitations of criminal justice detailed above but argued there were senses in which, at least for the powerful, criminal justice could be deemed a success. Whilst reformers see its failure to address the needs of victims or hold the powerful to account as evidence of malfunction, the history of its origins shows that the CJS was designed to help establish and maintain the inherently unequal medieval social order. In England today a police officer swears to uphold the king’s peace, courts administer the king’s justice, and people are incarcerated in His Majesty’s Prisons. In all of Britain’s former colonies, almost identical arrangements, imposed by the British, remain largely intact. Of course, despite their name in England, these do not enforce the king’s individual sovereignty. These systems have adapted to changes in the social structure of England and the British empire and now, sometimes in the king’s name and sometimes in the people’s name, they facilitate the domination of other interests. However, the criminal justice systems capacity to serve the interests of capitalism and colonialism, as well as feudalism, shows it was a model of justice designed for inequality and domination. It was not built to be fair, equal or impartial.
Social Justice
In critiquing the criminal punishment system many people, including me, have advocated for alternative models based around the concept of social justice. Social justice has been defined as advocating ‘the fair treatment and equitable status of all individuals and social groups within a state or society’. As a concept it is a relatively recent use of the concept of justice, it was first used in the 1840s by the conservative Jesuit scholar Luigi Taparelli, and adopted by the Catholic church as offering a third way alternative to laissez-faire capitalism and socialism. It has since been more broadly applied and although the right still lays claim to the term it is widely used by the left and abolitionists have laid claim to the term by adopting the slogan “Social Justice not Criminal Justice”. This history and its apparent utility across a broad political spectrum to denotate many, often contradictory things, means it is not unproblematic. It also risks legitimising an ahistorical understanding of justice which implies that justice has always meant something fair and equal. There is an urgent need to find a conceptual framework for the things we understand as justice that not only goes beyond criminal justice but is also less open to the different interpretations that social justice is subject to.
In recent years, particular here in Britain we have seen a shift in understandings of abolitionism. Whereas the abolitionism of the twentieth century was principally focus on the abolition (or at least the shrinking) of specific institutions, most particularly the prison, in the current century abolitionist have both targeted a much wider range of institutions (for example, borders) and been more explicit that a central part of abolitionist praxis is the creation of alternative ways of living. This was most clearly articulated by Aviah Sarah Day & Shanice Octavia McBean in their brilliant book Abolition Revolution. This more radical understanding of both abolition and justice recognises that meaningful change requires revolutionary change in our society. The inherent inequality of contemporary society inevitably shapes its justice system. If we want a more equal and fairer justice system, we have to change how our society is structured. As the abolitionist and organizer Mariame Kaba has argued: “abolition is two things: It’s the complete and utter dismantling of prisons, policing, and surveillance as they currently exist within our culture. And it’s also the building up of new ways of … relating with each other.” If this is our project, and I think it should be, we need a term that goes beyond social justice.
Beyond social justice because social justice implies for many people, including the person who coined the term, Luigi Taparelli, something that is achievable within the broad framework of our existing unequal society. All too often it is incorporated into a reform agenda that aspires to sustain existing social structures. We require more than that. My initial thought is to utilise the concept of “Abolition Democracy” coined by WEB Du Bois and more recently developed by Angela Davis. For Du Bois the abolition of slavery was by itself totally inadequate, what was needed was a society that offered everyone the “economic, political, and social capital to live as equal members.” The abolition of oppressive institutions was only one half of the struggle, the other half being the building of new, just arrangements. For the legal scholar Allegra M. McLeod this means ‘a conception of justice that not only attends carefully to the actual outcomes of processes that claim to administer justice, but also seeks to distribute resources and opportunities more equitably’. Abolition democracy remains almost exclusively a United States concept and we need to do more work developing it as a framework to use in Europe and in particular recognising the particular histories of enslavement and colonialism that are central to the development of European states and capitalism.
No Justice, Just Us
The musician D’Angelo opens verse three of the song Devil’s Pie with the line ‘Ain’t no justice, its just us’, echoing an old refrain of graffiti artists. For me the first half of this slogan, ‘No Justice’ provides a warning of the dangerous temptation of believing in a justice that can be provided for us through the courts or governments more generally. Those structures were not created for our benefit, but were fabricated by those with power to operate for their benefit. They only offer false hope. True hope comes from the second half of that slogan, ‘Just Us’, in recognising that the potential for change that lies in us collectively. It is not justice, with its dubious history, that we need, but abolition democracy. What that would look like will only be determined by the journey towards it. We may not achieve something that is totally just, abolition is always unfinished, but we can build a better world.
Trincomalee walks 