Peace versus Justice

Henry & Lanier, Essential Criminology Reader,  11.2: “Peacemaking” by Hal Pepinsky

Postulate 1: Violence begets violence

Corollary:  Economic exploitation breeds embezzlement and sabotage.

Postulate 2:  Measures intended to stop violence only channel it into other outlets.

Theorem:  There exist forms of human relations that are satisfying to all.

Corollary:  Violent interactions can be transformed into constructive human relations.

Corollary:  These constructive human relations restore the victim and the offender.  They reconcile the victim and offender to the best possible extent.  They require that the offender recognize the losses of the victim as a condition of transformation.

Definition:  The opposite of peacemaking is unresponsiveness.

Criticisms (Straw men)

1. Peacemaking is not a theory.

2. Peacemaking is impractical

3. Peacemaking is privileged.

Replies.

1. Admitted that this is not a positivist theory.  It does assert a testable and falsifiable hypothesis:  Reconnecting broken social relations will produce less violence in the future, rather than adding violence and deprivation.
2. We know what separates people and what brings them together.  Given that, it remains that people can choose the impractical continuation of risk from their fear of peace.  This is a personalized reflection of a general self-defeating modality pervasive within society.
3. The position of privilege does not invalidate the means of peacemaking.  

Pepinsky’s Peacemaking.

Ø      The essence of peacemaking is to continually learn where the other people in the relationship are and what the "subject one" needs to do to adjust to the newly stated context in order understand where the "subject one’s" own interests as well the interests of the "subject other" all lie.

Ø      The "Navajo" rules of peacemaking are: Show up. Tell the truth.  Pay attention.  Detach yourself from any expectation of outcome.

Ø      Remain comfortable with open disagreement.

Ø      Rather than a substantive rule of objective, rational law based on predefined outcomes, peacemaking proceeds by fluidly changing needs and interests at hand.

 Ø    The process hinges on a set of assumptions.

1.      No distinction between violence and peacemaking as the definition of crime is politically and economically arbitrary. 

2.      Rich and powerful people are likely to commit crimes of violence. 

3.      The greatest violence is the silencing of the powerless.

4.      Children are the ultimate underclass.

Reflective critique

1. Basically, I like this theory.
2. Pepinsky begins with the assumption that exploitation causes embezzlement.  He does not consider that employee theft is the initial aggression that demands remediation, restoration and peacemaking.  Employee theft reduces the capital of a business, not only preventing growth but threatening the employment of others.  The thief steals not the owner’s purse, but the co-worker’s pay. 
3. See Appendix A for source material on employee theft.
4. In short, if being poor is not a crime, neither is being rich.  If the underclass have needful requisites that underlie the harms they commit, then, so, too, must the rich.
5. This theory reflects certain truths of economics, especially those discovered by the “Austrian” school. 
   1. All values are subjective. 
   2. All open exchange brings profit to both parties: you buy the gel pen not because it is equal to a dollar, but because it is worth more than a dollar.
   3. There is no such thing as an objectively “fair” price, only the price established by the buyer and seller at this place and this time.
   4. All prices are constantly subject to renegotiation with each new transaction.
   5. The past is no indication of the future.  Statistical summaries are of limited usefulness at best.
   6. Human action is contingent and therefore not amenable to central control by political means. 
   7. Government intervention is the injection of force (coercion; aggression) into the marketplace. This robs individuals of agency.
   8. Government intervention always must have negative consequences, often unseen and unexpected, real in their harms to unintended others.