We love watching cop shows where the rugged dick wins. The bad guy gets caught, everyone breathes a sigh of relief, and law and order are secured for another day, again. The detective’s a heavy drinking, chain-smoking, emotionally wrecked mess, but somehow they get the bad guy. Usually some rich, powerful bastard who almost gets away with it, but justice wins in the final act. We get to feel good. Satisfied.
But that’s not how it works in real life. For the working class the justice system doesn’t exist to deliver truth or fairness. It’s a system: a system under capital, a system that serves capital. It protects property, not people. It punishes survival. It targets the working class, the dispossessed, the traumatised, those who’ve already been hurt by other material conditions this system throws at them.
The real bad guys: wife-beaters, rapists, the corrupt bosses, the violent cops, they often walk free. Or they don’t even get looked at.
The victims? They’re ignored, re-traumatised through the courts, blamed, left to pick up the pieces with no support.
Let’s have the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth: most ‘crime’ is shaped by class and trauma. People with Borderline Personality Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Complex PTSD, … people who’ve been through it are more likely to end up in front of a judge than behind a desk. And when the harm is personal – sexual assault, domestic abuse, assault, the eyes of the system glaze over. Victims are told to report online, just trust the police, wait for justice, hope the Crown Prosecution Service thinks its viable… but ‘justice’ almost never comes. And when the abuser is the police? Only then, when it’s inescapably public, when it’s, PC Wayne Couzens, murderer and rapist, enabled by his position as a police constable, does the system act. It feels more like it’s PR.
Scotland Yard recently declared violence against women and girls to be a national epidemic. Where was that energy before it became another Met. Police media scandal? Survivors have been shouting into the void for decades. Justice isn’t something you find in a courtroom, not under this system.
Movements like MeToo (the campaign against sexual abuse) show the cracks — how deep the rot goes. But even they hit a wall. Restorative justice circles gain popularity then vanish again or end up doing more harm than good because they are operated by the enthusiastic but unqualified. We need systemic change, but the structures we live under fight revolution in every way.
The system fails over and over: the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the Met’s decades-long cover-up; the brutal killing of Sarah Everard by a serving officer known as ‘The Rapist’ among the force. Survivors of rape still face a system where only one percent of reported cases lead to charges. The Grenfell fire exposed how working-class lives are treated as disposable, wrapped in flammable cladding and sacrificed for profit. The Hillsborough disaster showed how the state lies to protect itself while victims’ families are left to fight for truth alone. These aren’t one-offs — they’re symptoms of a system doing exactly what it was built to do: protect power, property, and profit.
So what does socialism offer? Not more punishment. Not longer sentences. Not more cops with better PR. Socialism means we stop asking a broken system to fix what it’s built to ignore. It means no one has to live in the material conditions that cause crime in the first instance: poverty, trauma, insecurity, isolation. It’s built so that people who’ve been harmed are actually cared for. And people who’ve done harm are made to take responsibility, not locked in a cage, but made to understand, repair, change.
Justice under capitalism tends to protect power and often reinforces it. We’ve seen enough to know the courts won’t save us. But we also know that we’re not powerless and can bring change. This starts when we stop pretending this system works and start building something better ourselves.
A.T.
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