Since 2013, the subreddit has been steadily growing and bringing our attention to people who got what they deserved. From seriously gruesome crimes to petty thefts, the community is dedicated to sharing the best examples of how law and order gets gradually restored.

According to the moderators, “Posts must include a clear display of justice. ‘Justice’ includes charges—not just convictions; justice outside the courtroom, and justice that may not be inherently physical altercations.” This does not apply to protesting, call-outs, and viral or staged clips. The mods do not want to see memes, image macros or screenshots of articles, they wish to hear the whole story. 

The phrase “The king is dead, long live the king!” is written at the top of the page. Originally, it was used as a way to announce that a monarch has just passed away and to introduce the new king who immediately takes over. In modern times, the saying often serves as a headline for articles or ads on themes of continuation or replacement. 

One could think that the phrase is about immortality—an idea might die, but the institution will live on. It will be replaced with something else only to keep the function of the previous thing or person alive but will not bring any real improvements to the table. Over the years, the justice system has seen many changes and still, it remains flawed and requires our immediate attention.

According to the Sentencing Project, the U.S. is the world’s leader in incarceration and the criminal justice system today is like a bicycle stuck in one gear—the prison gear. Over the last 40 years, the population in prisons and jails has increased by 500%, with more than 2M people serving a sentence today. 

One explanation for this is the change in the sentencing law and policy, and not in the crime rate itself. This has resulted “in prison overcrowding and fiscal burdens on states to accommodate a rapidly expanding penal system, despite increasing evidence that large-scale incarceration is not an effective means of achieving public safety.”

While sentencing people to prison has had some impact on crime, it’s not as successful as one might think. First, imprisonment is not as effective when it comes to youth and drug crimes: “When people get locked up for these offenses, they are easily replaced on the streets by others seeking an income or struggling with addiction.”

Next, people tend to “age out” of wrongdoing. There’s research that shows that crime starts to peak during the teenage years and begins to decline when people are in their mid-20s. Because of this reason, lengthy prison sentences are a counterproductive and costly approach, with the exception of targeting extremely dangerous criminals. 

Most Americans agree that the country’s criminal justice system is an ineffective, purely punitive approach to crime, as stated in the research by the Open Society Institute. They conducted a nationwide telephone survey of 1,056 adults where they found out that Americans want to prevent crime rather than deal with the aftermath. 

The majority of the recipients favor dealing with the roots of crime. For example, today people see drug abuse as a medical problem and not a serious felony, as it was seen earlier. They think that it should be handled by counseling and treatment, not by courts and the prison system. 

“Americans believe that today’s prisons are no more than “warehouses,” providing little or no rehabilitation or reentry programs, that instead simply store criminals for a period of time and then dump them back on the street, no different than when they were first incarcerated,” Open Society explained. 

Needless to say, most people want fairness and this subreddit is a great place to see that justice does not fail to prevail. Still, if we wish for some positive shift in our society, harsh prison sentences should not be the primary tool for fighting crime. Using prevention, treatment and long-term public safety solutions should lead to change in the crime rates in the future.