A Generative-Justice Ideal for the Moral Reorientation of American Penal Culture

• In Event: Institutions and Criminal Justice Reform in the US: Promise and Peril in a "New" Era

Abstract

This paper proposes a moral-normative “generative-justice ideal” to reorient the goals of criminal justice and the rules governing its pursuit. The paper lays out the core moral assumptions and values that undergird the concept I’m calling generative justice. It offers a conceptual model of what generative justice would entail in criminal justice contexts—including the principles, mechanisms, and practices that would constitute, animate, and deliver generative justice in the here and now. It assesses the model’s normative and instrumental compatibility with similarly nascent, parallel justice-reform movements. Most importantly, the paper explains why and how the constituent elements of a generative justice ideal could be usefully deployed in the here and now to shift the moral orientation of American penal culture. It stresses the formative role all social institutions would need to play for the generative justice ideal to establish the cognitive legitimacy needed to unify and prepare enough Americans to confront together several looming, existential threats to their nationhood. In short, generative justice offers a viable replacement discourse to depose a carceral state of mind inured to degenerative human suffering and to the debilitating toll state-sanctioned punishments take on human life.

Author

• David A. Green, John Jay College of Criminal Justice