Vexatious Justice

"Justice is denied if it is served late,
But so it is if served in haste."

Justice—one of humanity’s oldest pursuits—remains an enigma, often wavering between delay and undue haste, between fairness and absurdity. The very system meant to uphold morality sometimes stumbles, failing to distinguish between punishment and true reform.

Ingersoll once said,
"Every crime is born of necessity. If you want less crime, you must change the conditions. Poverty makes crime. Want, rags, crusts, misfortune—all these awake the wild beast in man. He takes, and takes contrary to law, and becomes a criminal. And what do we do? We punish him."

But what does punishment achieve? Does it serve justice, or does it breed more injustice? We lock men away, strip them of dignity, brand them with a past they can never escape, and then expect them to return as reformed individuals. We turn men into beasts, then shun them for their scars.

The Irony of Punishment

"Seven years for killing a man with a stick,
Two years under the wheel,
Ten years for 'Ganja,'
Ten rupees for hard drinks—
Justice is thus served,
For that is the ‘Law of our Land.’"

The absurdity of our legal system is stark. We weigh crimes not by intent but by technicalities. A man taking a life in rage receives less than one caught with a banned substance. A corporate fraudster walks free while a petty thief rots behind bars. The punishment, it seems, often reflects the privilege of the accused rather than the gravity of the offense.

Justice, once a moral force, has become an equation—often blind, sometimes cruel, and frequently misguided.

A Society That Favors the Powerful

"Punishment is now unfashionable because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility."

We punish not to correct, but to brand. And while we mete out strict sentences for the powerless, we shower rewards on the privileged.

"Fifty rupees for a hard day’s labor in a field,
Two hundred at least at the factory,
Millions for a song, a lyric, or a play,
Countless in politics."

Where is justice in this? The laborer toils under the scorching sun for a pittance, while those who entertain, manipulate, or govern amass untold wealth. The weight of justice, it seems, is borne by the weak, while the strong rewrite the rules.

Justice or Just Illusion?

Perhaps the true dilemma of justice is not about punishment but about balance. A system that punishes without rehabilitating, that rewards arbitrarily, and that sees crime as an individual failing rather than a societal one—such a system can never truly be just.

The challenge, then, is not just to serve justice but to redefine it. To ensure that it is not merely a system of penalties, but one of fairness, reform, and equity. Only then can justice truly be more than a word—only then can it become a force that uplifts rather than condemns.

For justice must not only punish wrongdoing; it must also uplift the wronged.