Where is the justice in criminal justice?

The objective of this chapter is to answer the question, “Where is the justice in criminal justice?” – specifically in the context of the criminal justice system’s response to sex trafficking. This goal is advanced through an in-depth discussion of the ways in which the criminal legal system achieves, or more often fails to achieve, procedural, retributive, corrective, therapeutic, transformative, and conceptual justice. This chapter evaluates the criminal law’s response to trafficking against each of these six conceptions of justice and concludes that the criminal legal system typically fails to secure justice in any sense. While the chapter focuses primarily on the U.S. criminal justice system’s attempts to secure justice in the context of sex trafficking, brief consideration is given to alternative approaches adopted in other countries (e.g. legalization/regulation and the Nordic Model), and to the international definition of trafficking (see Siller, Chapter 7, this volume).

Learning Objectives

At the end of the chapter, readers will be able to:

Identify six conceptions of criminal justice;

Explain how each of the six conceptions of justice applies in the context of sex trafficking;

Understand how each of the six conceptions of justice fails in the context of sex trafficking;

Articulate solutions for improving the effectiveness of each of the six conceptions of justice in the context of sex trafficking; and

Think critically about the societal and criminal justice system responses to commercial sexual exploitation.