Reparative justice: The final stage of decolonization

Abstract

Taking inspiration from Neo-colonialism: the last stage of imperialism, by Kwame Nkrumah of the thesis by Lenin that Imperialism (is) the highest stage of capitalism, I postulate that reparative justice is the final stage of decolonization (Nkrumah 1968). Based on the argument in Counter-Colonial Criminology that imperialism is the general form of all types of deviance in the sense that all acts of deviance seek to invade and colonize the private and public spaces of others, I conclude that reparative justice programs addressing the legacies of crimes committed by empires and corporations would signal the final stages of decolonization. Contrary to the conventional assumptions in criminology that poverty and powerlessness are the major causes of deviance, I suggest that power, not powerlessness, is a more significant cause of all deviance by the powerful and by the relatively powerless alike because the relatively powerless prey on those even more powerless in the community while the majority of the poor remain overwhelmingly law abiding and the rich get away with bloody murder, as Steve Box and Jeffrey Reiman theorized (Box, 1993; Reiman and Leighton, 2020). Accordingly, the preferred societal response to deviance should be reparative rather than punitive justice in keeping with the decolonization paradigm in criminology and justice towards a more humane world devoid of immigration control, repressive policing, the prison-industrial complex, racism-sexism-imperialism, militarism, homophobia, the war on drugs, capital punishment, homelessness, illiteracy, and without state power as class domination to make way for the principles of taking from all according to their abilities and giving to all according to their needs (Pfohl, 1994).