Red Handed
Developing a justice system for Mars to ensure justice on Earth
One day, people will live on other worlds. While many of Earth’s top scientists and engineers have spent countless hours designing and building the technology necessary to make that happen, social scientists have spent comparatively few hours designing the social structures required to support the people who will inhabit these strange lands. Some recent books have noticed this and rightfully called for solving these “soft” problems before the first boots hit the ground. Red Handed is my crack at one of these problems. People on Mars will have conflict, and there will need to be a way to respond to and resolve that conflict.
How do you ensure justice on Mars? You start by reevaluating the foundations of justice on Earth. This requires studying philosophy, psychology, and sociology to understand what makes an effective and fair justice system. In the process of developing a justice system for Mars, you start to see how the justice systems around you can be improved.
Settling on Mars is the perfect situation for rethinking any social construct due to the opportunities the red planet’s blank slate provides. But this opportunity is fleeting. Once the first settlers land, whatever system they establish will likely get locked in and, over time, will resist change like our current systems. By starting the conversation now, we can give future settlers a range of options that will allow them to construct a system that meets the needs of the people in the best way possible.
Today’s justice systems are the natural evolution of the watch systems first used over 250 years ago and the first adversarial trials in the late 1600s. Things largely work as they did back then – someone is tasked with catching the criminal, lawyers argue the case in court, and the guilty are incarcerated. Rooted in the past and slow to change, our justice systems have been unable to keep up with modern problems and have reached a point where they can easily do more harm than good. Rethinking these systems by starting with their philosophical underpinnings and then examining how they fit in with modern morals, needs, and crime can lead to new justice systems that better serve and protect the people.
For example, in most current justice systems, crime prevention is an afterthought – at best, a small office in a police department. Starting with crime prevention as a central activity of a justice system, however, shifts the focus to solving a society's educational, employment, and economic problems as a core part of what it means to be just. Such a holistic and proactive approach to reducing crime can dramatically reduce the need for heavily militarized police, costly trials, and mass incarceration.
But tearing down and rebuilding a justice system like this is not feasible in practice, at least not here on Earth. Crime prevention efforts can take decades to show improvements, and cultural shifts are notoriously difficult to bring about. Showcasing these alternative systems, however, can spur incremental change. Even small increases in crime prevention budgets and improved cooperation with other social systems can have a lasting effect on current justice systems.
