Amnesty International said the decision by African leaders to grant themselves immunity was "a step backward for justice".
But it's not so simple as liberal Europe striding progressively ahead of backward American justice.
While the Trump era may involve egregious steps backward in social justice, economic justice, human rights, and democracy itself, America is resilient and our young people will lead us to bend the arc of history back toward justice.
If there was ever a time to watch a television series's forthright and intrepid depiction of prejudice, hatred, and the long, windy, and sometimes backward road to justice, it's now.
The present norm, which has a backward sense of justice, comes at a tremendous moral price as well as a great economic one: At Rikers, it costs $70,000 a year to jail a person who can't post bail, whereas the alternatives would be far less of a burden on taxpayers.
Younger, reform-minded viewers interpret the story of Omar as a parable for their own struggles — Omar brings the prophet's words on monotheism, tolerance and social justice to backward tribes who stubbornly cling to old values.
Instead of dismissing this point of view as backward and barbaric, criminal justice reformers should try to harness it, by pointing out that too often our punishments don't fit the crime — that sentences for many drug crimes are disproportionate to the offenses, for instance, or that rape and sexual assault have become an implicit part of many prison terms.
McGary emphasizes that a backward-looking sense of justice can justify the repayment of a comparable value to victims who have suffered a wrongful loss or harm.
Criminal punishment cannot contribute to those appropriate ends: it reflects a primitive, backward-looking concern with retributive justice, whereas we should rather be seeking a forward-looking restorative or reparative justice.
As David Segal pointed out in an op-ed he wrote for Motherboard, the criminal justice system bends over backward to make examples of hackers.
