Marxism, justice and the justice model

Abstract

The question of justice is becoming an important issue at the moment not only in penal philosophy, but in criminology and moral philosophy. The aim of this paper is to relate these various manifestations of the concern for justice to each other, to locate them historically, and to critically evaluate them via an understanding of the work of Marx. Within penal philosophy the recent collapse of confidence in the rehabilitative ideal has left a partial philosophical void characterized by eclecticism and pragmatism a lack of coherence and direction which is particularly susceptible to the present pressures of economic restraint. It is likely that this void will be filled by some form of what is becoming labelled the "Justice Model of Corrections", as yet a disparate but rapidly growing body of ideas the protagonists of which may loosely be divided into two groups: the constitutionalists who urge a return to constitutionally guaranteed.rights, due process, and general formal legal rationality; and the transcendentalists who wish the criminal justice system to reflect and uphold universal human rights. Within criminology, there is a faction of the school of radical criminology in the United States which wishes to reorientate the concerns of criminology to the study of crime defined in terms of "violations of human rights". Within moral philosophy, the recent publication of Rawls' A Theory of Justicea revision and extension of ideas developed over the 1960s has set off a debate on social justice which is not confined merely to journals of philosophy [ 1 ]. It will be argued that a materialist perspective on justice enables a clearer understanding of the confusions of both "social justice" and "justice model" theorists.