Stunz's Argument Analysis

Another site of legal violence is within mass incarceration. William Stunz addresses the violence of the system as focusing on the process over the outcome. He focuses on how the law was put into place to create the desired outcomes, rather than looking at the results to create the law. This focus on the process means there is no inquiry to whether material outcomes of the process are actually just and as such it appears that the system does not want to fix the problem, but rather just emphasize an existing problem. This is a systemic violence because the way the way the law is interpreted causes the focus on procedure rather than the outcomes (Gopnik 2012). Stunz’s argument is very similar to Naomi Murakawa who also address that the law is about process and achieving the result. An example she uses is within the war on drugs and its relation to incarceration. The purpose of the war on drugs was to prevent drug abuse in the community by incarcerating …show more content…
Simply labelling it as legal interpretation of the law does not excuse the violence that is used within the interpretation. The law’s interpretation should exist as an unbiased system, but because the it is so embedded in violence and bias the law appears to fail in living up to its own ideals. The violence the law implements is very rarely legitimate, certain circumstances such as a state of great harm may excuse the violence, but the violence of capital punishment and mass incarceration have proven to be less than justified. This is further emphasized with the idea of coercion because coercion and law are nearly indistinguishable because violence plays a key factor in both concepts. As a result, the law is cluttered with biased and arbitrary opinions becoming very difficult to uphold the ideals it has set in place. This ultimately shows that legal interpretation and violence are indistinguishable from one