Conclusion: What Does It Mean to Do Justice? Current and Future Directions in Queer Criminological Research and Practice

Summary

Often times, those of us doing queer criminological work come to the (politically relevant) conclusion that our institutions, communities, interactions, and even psyche must be reconstructed – or deconstructed all together – in order to effectively include the intersections of queer people. A major purpose for this volume was to put queer theoretical and empirical insights into practice, something that is often left as a supplementary question to be dealt with in future research. Merging theory and practice as it relates to the criminal legal system touches on a critical need less attended to in queer criminology: reimagining and doing justice for queer people.

What does it mean to do justice?

This may be a fairly common phrase used among critical scholars, activists, service-oriented professionals, and anyone interested in social justice and inclusion, but what does it really mean to do justice to something, whether a common goal, person, or group of people? At its most basic level, the term insinuates treatment in a way that is ‘as good as it should be’ (Merriam-Webster, 2021). The definition alone denotes an inherent commitment to fairness, accuracy, inclusion, and overall distribution of equality. Barrett and Lynch (2015) suggest that social justice is contingent on the notion that equality is a valued social norm and societies are just when ‘they facilitate equality, and unjust when they hamper equality’ (p. 386). Unfortunately, the treatment of LGBTQ+ people, people of color – and LGBTQ+ people of color – by the criminal legal system and society at large is far from the depiction of fair, just, or equal. Readers may notice the subversive use of criminal ‘legal’ system throughout the book, which reflects similar logic as that outlined by Mogul et al. (2011), which demonstrates a focused resistance to the idea that the system treats all people – especially those most likely to be swept up by it – fairly, justly, or equally.

While this volume embraces queer as a marker of identity and community, the volume also embraces its use as a verb or a set of actions that seek to defy, deconstruct (Jakobsen, 1998; Dwyer et al., 2016), and reconstruct our current conceptualizations of applied and service-oriented work in the criminal legal system and beyond.