Justice Unshackled | Episode 16 | “The Myth of Closure”: A Searching Essay on Victims’ Rights, Punishment, Grief, Revenge, and Restorative Possibilities

Abstract

The concept of “closure” occupies a sacrosanct position within the modern American criminal justice lexicon. It is routinely invoked by prosecutors, judges, and legislators as the ultimate psychological destination for victims of violent crime—a state of emotional resolution that can supposedly be achieved through the imposition of severe penal sanctions, most notably the death penalty. However, a rigorous interdisciplinary analysis spanning jurisprudence, sociology, and trauma psychology reveals that this systemic promise is fundamentally hollow. This comprehensive report systematically deconstructs the “myth of closure,” arguing that the concept is not a recognized psychological phenomenon, but rather a politically engineered construct designed to legitimize the retributive violence of the carceral state.

By tracing the historical emergence of closure rhetoric in the 1980s, the analysis demonstrates how the term was strategically deployed to rescue capital punishment from growing abolitionist critiques, replacing the harsh optics of state vengeance with the gentle, therapeutic language of victim healing. This linguistic pivot fundamentally altered capital jurisprudence, culminating in the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Payne v. Tennessee (1991), which permitted the introduction of Victim Impact Statements (VIS). Through an examination of empirical mock-juror studies, this report quantifies how VIS frequently bypass rational deliberation, inflaming racial and socioeconomic biases that disproportionately result in death sentences when victims are affluent and white.

Furthermore, the analysis interrogates the broader “victims’ rights” movement, specifically the aggressive nationwide campaign for Marsy’s Law. While ostensibly designed to empower the harmed, the legal mechanics of these constitutional amendments frequently create a false equivalency between the accused and the victim, undermining foundational due process protections while perversely providing statutory cover for police departments to shield the identities of officers involved in fatal shootings. To understand who the system truly protects, the report applies Nils Christie’s sociological framework of the “Ideal Victim,” illustrating how the justice system systematically marginalizes survivors of color, working-class victims, and those harmed by systemic state violence.

Against this backdrop of political manipulation, the report elevates the empirical reality of what survivors actually need. Drawing upon groundbreaking survey data from Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice and the clinical trauma research of Dr. Judith Lewis Herman, the evidence unequivocally shows that a vast majority of violent crime survivors prefer investments in rehabilitation, mental health treatment, and community prevention over longer prison sentences. Finally, the analysis explores the transformative potential of restorative justice models, highlighting the empirical success of face-to-face victim-offender dialogues. By demanding active accountability rather than passive suffering, restorative paradigms offer a genuine pathway to trauma reduction and community repair. Ultimately, the report concludes that true justice cannot be found in the politically convenient myth of closure, but must be actively built through truth, equitable repair, and the dismantling of the retributive machinery that perpetuates mass incarceration and community destabilization.

Introduction: The Vocabulary of Vengeance

The American criminal justice system relies on a complex architecture of laws, institutions, and economic incentives to maintain its expansive reach. Yet, no mechanism of state power can sustain itself on pure coercion or economic extraction alone; it requires a compelling moral narrative to manufacture public consent. For the past four decades, the most potent narrative weapon in the arsenal of the carceral state has been the co-optation of grief.

When a violent crime shatters a community, the state steps in not merely as an arbiter of statutory law, but ostensibly as an agent of emotional healing. The prosecutorial pursuit of maximum sentences, the denial of parole, and the execution of the condemned are routinely justified under a single, powerful banner: providing “closure” to the victims’ families¹. The word has become so ubiquitous in news broadcasts, courtrooms, and political campaigns that it is assumed to represent a natural, achievable psychological state. It suggests a tidy conclusion to trauma, a moment when the gavel falls, the cell door locks, or the lethal injection is administered, allowing the bereaved to finally move on³.

However, when subjected to the scrutiny of trauma psychology and legal scholarship, this facade crumbles. The promise of closure provided by the state is a calculated fiction¹. It is a concept that asks victims to endure years of agonizing legal proceedings, aggressive cross-examinations, and endless appeals, all while tethering their personal psychological recovery to the infliction of pain upon another human being¹. This report investigates the chasm between the systemic promise of closure and the empirical reality of traumatic grief. It dissects how the legal system selectively elevates the “ideal victim” to justify its punitive objectives, while simultaneously ignoring the actual, documented preferences of violent crime survivors. By exploring the weaponization of Victim Impact Statements, the constitutional distortions of Marsy’s Law, and the profound efficacy of restorative justice alternatives, this analysis seeks to untangle the genuine needs of survivors from the political convenience of the penal state.

The Psychological Reality of Trauma: The “Closure” Fallacy

To dismantle the myth of closure, it is necessary to first recognize that the term does not originate in the clinical study of grief. For decades, trauma psychologists and sociologists have understood that severe loss does not operate on a neat, linear timeline with a definitive endpoint.

Ambiguous Loss and Frozen Grief

The cultural expectation of neat emotional resolution was fundamentally challenged by Dr. Pauline Boss, a pioneering family therapist and researcher who developed the theory of “Ambiguous Loss” in the 1970s⁶. Boss’s research originally focused on the families of soldiers missing in action, but it rapidly expanded to encompass any loss that occurs without a clear understanding or definitive boundary. Boss categorized ambiguous loss into two distinct types: physical absence with psychological presence (e.g., missing persons, unrecovered bodies), and physical presence with psychological absence (e.g., severe dementia, traumatic brain injury, or chronic addiction)⁸.

The central tenet of Boss’s clinical framework is that in cases of profound or ambiguous loss, “closure is a myth”⁷. Grief is a continuous, evolving process. The societal insistence on finding closure actually pathologizes normal human grief, placing a destructive burden on survivors to achieve a state of finality that is neurologically and emotionally impossible³. True resilience, according to Boss, is not about closing a chapter, but about increasing one’s tolerance for ambiguity, learning to live with unresolved grief, and discovering new meaning in the aftermath of devastation⁷.

When the state promises closure through a criminal conviction or an execution, it sells a psychological impossibility. It implies that the absence of a loved one can be structurally remedied by the destruction of the offender³. The criminal justice system, with its prolonged appeals and sensationalized media coverage, frequently generates a state of “frozen grief,” where the bereaved are trapped in an emotional holding pattern, unable to process their loss because the state has conditioned their healing on a final judicial outcome⁶.

The failure of this systemic promise is starkly documented in clinical observations of capital punishment outcomes. In Jody Lyneé Madeira’s extensive study of the families affected by the Oklahoma City bombing (Killing McVeigh: The Death Penalty and the Myth of Closure), research demonstrated that the execution of Timothy McVeigh failed to deliver the profound psychological release that many survivors had been culturally conditioned to expect³. The execution occurred, the state claimed victory, but the grief endured. Anecdotal and sociological evidence consistently suggests that the primary relief victims feel following an execution is not “closure” regarding their loved one’s death, but rather relief that they are finally free from the agonizing, revictimizing grip of the legal system itself¹.

The Political Manufacture of a Legal Concept

If closure is a psychological myth, its ascendancy to the defining objective of the American criminal justice system requires a historical explanation. The answer lies in the shifting political winds and ideological crises of the late twentieth century.

According to eminent legal scholar Susan Bandes, who has extensively researched the sociology of emotion in law, “closure” is a newly minted legal concept that was strategically deployed in the 1980s to rescue capital punishment². In the post-Furman v. Georgia (1972) era, the traditional justifications for the death penalty were failing. Deterrence theories were being systematically debunked by criminological data, and the raw, unvarnished language of “retribution” and “vengeance” was increasingly viewed as barbaric and out of step with the norms of a modern democracy¹.

Facing this ideological crisis, proponents of the death penalty required a new, publicly palatable justification. “Closure” burst onto the scene, sounding exactly like a long-established, authoritative therapeutic concept². By carrying out executions, the state argued it was no longer acting out of bloodlust; it was acting out of compassion. It was honoring the victims and helping their families heal¹.

This linguistic sleight-of-hand was a masterclass in political rebranding. It successfully neutralized abolitionist critiques by shielding the state’s violence behind the unimpeachable grief of the bereaved². To oppose the death penalty, or even to oppose extreme mandatory minimum sentences, was no longer framed as a principled stance against state violence; it was reframed as a cruel denial of healing to a grieving family². This incursion of therapeutic language into the legal realm transformed expectations about the purposes of a criminal trial⁴. It recast the criminal justice system—a massive, bureaucratic apparatus designed for fact-finding and punishment—into an entirely ill-equipped psychological service provider⁴.

The Jurisprudence of Emotion: Payne v. Tennessee

The political utility of the closure narrative fundamentally reshaped constitutional law, most notably by tearing down the firewall that previously prevented highly emotional, prejudicial testimony from influencing life-or-death sentencing decisions.

In the late 1980s, the U.S. Supreme Court held the line against the encroaching victims’ rights movement regarding capital sentencing. In Booth v. Maryland (1987) and South Carolina v. Gathers (1989), the Court ruled in 5-4 decisions that Victim Impact Statements (VIS)—testimony detailing the emotional, physical, and financial devastation suffered by the victim’s family—were per se inadmissible during the penalty phase of a capital trial¹³. The Court reasoned that such statements were irrelevant to the defendant’s specific “blameworthiness” and created a constitutionally unacceptable risk that a jury would impose the death penalty in an arbitrary and capricious manner, driven by raw emotion rather than objective facts¹⁵. Justice Powell explicitly warned that admitting VIS would imply that defendants whose victims were perceived as “assets to their communities” were more deserving of execution than those whose victims were perceived as less worthy, violating the core tenets of equal protection¹⁴.

However, the political pressure to center the victim proved insurmountable. A mere four years later, following changes in the Court’s composition, the newly configured conservative majority abruptly reversed course. In Payne v. Tennessee (1991), Chief Justice William Rehnquist authored a 6-3 opinion overruling Booth and Gathers, declaring that the Eighth Amendment erects no per se bar prohibiting a capital sentencing jury from considering victim impact evidence¹⁴. Rehnquist argued that VIS are necessary to show the victim’s “uniqueness as an individual human being” and to balance the scales against the mitigating evidence presented by the defendant¹⁵.

The Empirical Reality of the Payne Precedent

Legal scholars have vehemently criticized the Payne decision for its willful blindness to the sociology of emotion. Bandes argues that VIS do not merely provide neutral “information” to the jury; they act as emotional contagion, evoking intense feelings of rage, hatred, and a desire for undifferentiated vengeance¹⁹. By overwhelming the jury with the raw agony of the bereaved, VIS deflect the jury from its constitutional duty to rationally assess the individual culpability of the defendant²⁰.

Moreover, the empirical data gathered in the decades since Payne has validated the exact fears articulated by the dissenting justices in Booth. Controlled mock-juror studies have repeatedly demonstrated that the introduction of Victim Impact Statements actively exacerbates racial and socioeconomic disparities in capital sentencing.

Victim Characteristic in VIS	Empirical Effect on Juror Decision Making	Constitutional Implication
High Socioeconomic Status (SES) Victim	Mock jurors are significantly more likely to vote for the death penalty when the victim is presented as middle-to-high SES (e.g., college-educated, respectable profession).16	Violates equal protection by implicitly valuing affluent lives over impoverished lives in the application of the ultimate sanction.
Low Socioeconomic Status (SES) Victim	Mock jurors are less likely to impose the death penalty, showing reduced punitiveness and rating the victim as “less valuable to the community.”16	Demonstrates that justice is unconstitutionally scaled to the perceived social worth and respectability of the deceased.
White Victim (Race-of-Victim Effect)	Strongest predictor of a death sentence. Studies show prosecutors are far more likely to seek death, and juries more likely to impose it, when the victim is White.17	Entrenches systemic racism into the penal system, reflecting implicit associations between Whiteness and the value of life.
Use of Specific VIS Instructions	Providing jurors with specific, tailored instructions on how to appropriately weigh VIS can reduce the affective impact and lead to a decrease in death sentences.23	Highlights that the unregulated emotional impact of VIS is the primary driver of its lethality, not the factual content of the harm.

As the data illustrates, the use of VIS effectively places a “heavy thumb on the scale” of death¹⁶. When a victim is white, educated, and articulate, their family’s grief translates into a lethal weapon against the defendant¹⁶. When the victim is a person of color, or comes from a lower-class background, the jury’s empathic response is demonstrably muted. Therefore, the Payne decision did not simply give victims a voice; it gave ideal victims a mechanism to legally mandate state violence, inextricably linking the administration of the death penalty to the demographic privileges of the deceased.

The Sociology of Victimhood: The “Ideal Victim”

To fully understand why the criminal justice system responds with maximum force to certain crimes while ignoring others, one must analyze who the system is designed to protect. The state’s promise of closure is not distributed equally; it is governed by the sociological framework of the “Ideal Victim.”

In 1986, Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie introduced the concept of the ideal victim to explain why certain individuals are readily granted the legitimate, unquestioned status of victimhood in the public consciousness, while others are met with skepticism, blame, or indifference²⁴. Christie argued that criminal justice frequently operates as a scripted drama, and society reserves its empathy for victims who fit a specific, narrow narrative²⁴.

Christie identified five core attributes of the ideal victim:

1. Vulnerability: The victim is inherently weak (e.g., female, elderly, sick, or a child)²⁵.
2. Virtue: The victim was carrying out a respectable, blameless project at the time of the crime²⁵.
3. Location: The victim was in a place they could not be blamed for being²⁵.
4. The Offender: The offender is “big and bad,” unequivocally evil²⁵.
5. Relationship: The offender is a complete, intimidating stranger to the victim²⁵.

When these elements align—for instance, a child abducted from their bedroom by a stranger—the media and the legal system react with overwhelming, coordinated force²⁵. However, the empirical reality of crime in the United States rarely mirrors this dramatic script. Most violent crime occurs between individuals who know one another, frequently within marginalized communities, and often in contexts complicated by poverty, previous justice system involvement, or substance use²⁷.

When a victim does not perfectly align with Christie’s ideal, the state’s sudden concern for “closure” and “victims’ rights” evaporates. This dynamic manifests acutely in the media through “Missing White Woman Syndrome,” where the disappearances of affluent white women trigger massive federal responses and continuous news cycles, while the disappearances of Indigenous, Black, and Latina women are routinely ignored by both the press and law enforcement²⁵.

This hierarchy of grief intersects directly with the racial and economic stratification of the prison-industrial complex. If a young Black man from an impoverished neighborhood is murdered, he is rarely afforded the status of an “ideal victim.” His background, associations, or mere presence in a high-crime area are weaponized to suggest complicity in his own demise²⁵. Consequently, his family is rarely offered the full, performative weight of the state’s closure apparatus. In many cases, families of marginalized victims report feeling re-victimized by a system that treats them with suspicion and denies them basic victim compensation funds due to arbitrary background checks²⁸. The state’s therapeutic concern is thus revealed not as a universal human right, but as a privileged commodity selectively applied to validate existing social hierarchies.

The Illusion of Equivalency: Marsy’s Law and the Subversion of Due Process

The cultural triumph of the closure narrative has fueled a massive, well-funded political campaign to rewrite state constitutions across the country. Spearheaded by California billionaire Henry Nicholas following the tragic murder of his sister Marsalee, “Marsy’s Law” seeks to elevate victims’ rights to the same constitutional status as the rights of the accused³⁰. Versions of Marsy’s Law have been heavily funded and passed via ballot initiatives in numerous states, including California, Ohio, Florida, and South Dakota³².

The campaign’s opening salvo relies on a seductive appeal to fairness: victims should have “equal rights” to defendants³⁰. The rights granted typically include the right to be notified of all court proceedings, the right to be heard at bail and sentencing hearings, the right to restitution, and the right to privacy³¹.

However, legal experts, public defenders, and civil liberties organizations warn that the foundational premise of Marsy’s Law rests on a dangerous constitutional fallacy. The U.S. Constitution guarantees rights to the accused because those rights exist to check the awesome, asymmetrical power of the state³⁰. The criminal justice system is not a civil dispute between a victim and an offender; it is a mechanism where the state seeks to deprive a citizen of their fundamental liberty, utilizing the overwhelming resources of police departments and prosecutors³¹. By demanding “equal rights” for victims, Marsy’s Law fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of due process, positioning the victim as a co-prosecutor and effectively placing the defendant at a severe, two-to-one disadvantage against both the state and the aggrieved³⁰.

The Erosion of Civil Liberties

The practical implementation of Marsy’s Law has generated a labyrinth of unintended, yet catastrophic, consequences for civil liberties. Because the language of these constitutional amendments is often vague and overly broad, it allows for interpretations that directly subvert a defendant’s Sixth Amendment rights.

Marsy’s Law Provision	Impact on the Accused and Due Process	Systemic Consequence
Right to Privacy	Allows victims to refuse interviews, depositions, and discovery requests from the defense.31	Denies the accused the right to confront their accuser and gather exculpatory evidence, increasing the risk of wrongful convictions.30
Right to be Heard at Bail/Release	Requires the victim to be located and notified before a defendant can be released pre-trial.32	Severely delays pre-trial release programs, resulting in prolonged, unconstitutional detention for legally innocent individuals simply because a victim cannot be immediately reached.32
Broad Definition of “Victim”	Expands the definition of victim to anyone “proximately harmed,” potentially including corporations.31	Creates an administrative quagmire that clogs court dockets and conflicts with the defendant’s right to a speedy trial.31

Perhaps the most perverse application of Marsy’s Law has occurred in the realm of police accountability. In states like South Dakota and Florida, police unions and departments have successfully utilized the law’s expansive definition of “victim” to shield the identities of police officers who shoot and kill civilians³³. By claiming that the officer was the “victim” of an aggravated assault prior to deploying lethal force, police departments invoke Marsy’s Law’s privacy protections to conceal the officer’s name from the press and the public³³.

This grotesque distortion reveals the true mechanics of victims’ rights legislation in the modern carceral state. A law ostensibly designed to protect vulnerable, grieving families has been seamlessly co-opted by the armed agents of the state to evade transparency and protect themselves from public oversight after committing acts of lethal violence³³. It demonstrates that when therapeutic rights are codified within a punitive system, they are inevitably utilized to expand the power of the state and erode the liberties of the public.

The Empirical Reality: What Survivors Actually Want

The most tragic irony of the “tough on crime” era is that the massive expansion of the prison-industrial complex was carried out in the name of crime victims, yet it routinely ignores the actual, documented preferences of those very individuals. The assumption that all victims desire maximum retributive punishment is a political projection, not an empirical fact.

To bridge the gap between political rhetoric and survivor reality, the Alliance for Safety and Justice, alongside Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice, commissioned the largest national survey of violent crime victims ever conducted in the United States. The resulting Crime Survivors Speak 2024 report shatters the conventional wisdom regarding what victims need to heal³⁴.

The data paints a devastating picture of trauma and systemic neglect. One in three Americans has been a victim of violent crime in the past ten years, and violent crime victims are four times more likely to be repeat victims²⁷. The collateral damage is immense: compared to the general public, violent crime survivors are 3.8 times more likely to experience PTSD, 3.6 times more likely to declare bankruptcy, and twice as likely to survive a life-threatening illness³⁵. Yet, the vast majority of these individuals receive no support from the criminal justice system in the aftermath of harm; only 18 percent reported receiving help from police, and 16 percent from prosecutors²⁹.

When asked about public policy preferences, survivors unequivocally reject the carceral status quo:

Public Policy Preference	Margin of Survivor Support	Insight
Rehabilitation over Punishment	2 to 1 Margin27	Victims recognize that prisons fail to correct behavior; nearly 3 to 1 believe prisons make people more likely to commit crimes.27
Investing in Crime Prevention vs. Prisons	7 to 1 Margin27	Survivors prioritize stopping future harm over exacting vengeance after the fact.
Mental Health & Drug Treatment over Prisons	7 to 1 (Mental Health); 4 to 1 (Drug Treatment)27	Reflects an understanding that untreated illness and addiction are root causes of violence.
Jobs & Education over Prisons	10 to 1 (Jobs); 15 to 1 (Education)27	Victims demand systemic investment in marginalized communities to break cycles of harm rather than warehousing individuals.

The data is undeniable. Only 16 percent of violent crime victims believe that longer prison sentences are an effective crime prevention strategy³⁴. By a margin of 3 to 1, survivors prefer accountability mechanisms outside of prison, such as rehabilitation, mental health treatment, community supervision, and community service²⁷. The system’s pursuit of “closure” through maximum sentencing is therefore exposed as a political agenda disconnected from the very people it claims to champion.

Truth and Repair: Listening to Survivors

This profound disconnect between the justice system and the people it claims to serve is meticulously explored by Dr. Judith Lewis Herman, a renowned trauma psychiatrist, in her seminal work Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice³⁶. Herman argues that the conventional retributive process fails survivors precisely because it was never designed for them. The criminal justice system is concerned with the state’s monopoly on force and the lawful resolution of disputes, not the psychological restoration of the harmed³⁶.

Through extensive qualitative interviews, Herman discovered that survivors find the adversarial trial process deeply retraumatizing—often describing aggressive cross-examination, public humiliation, and institutional victim-blaming as a “second rape” or secondary trauma³⁶. When asked what justice actually looks like, survivors rarely prioritize the incarceration of the offender. Instead, their needs are profoundly restorative. They desire:

1. Truth and Acknowledgment: The public exposure of the truth and the offender’s unmitigated acknowledgment of the harm caused. The system’s reliance on plea deals and the invocation of the Fifth Amendment structurally prevents this truth-telling³⁶.
2. Vindication from the Moral Community: Reconnection with society, validating that what happened to them was wrong, ending their isolation and shame³⁸.
3. Prevention of Future Harm: Assurances that the offender will not be able to hurt anyone else, prioritizing community safety over individual punishment³⁸.

The current system sacrifices the victim’s need for truth on the altar of securing a conviction, demonstrating that the therapeutic needs of the survivor are consistently subordinated to the administrative goals of the state.

Restorative Possibilities: Active Accountability vs. Passive Suffering

If the retributive system fails to deliver closure, exacerbates racial inequity, and ignores the express desires of survivors, what is the alternative? The answer lies outside the courtroom, in the rapidly expanding paradigm of Restorative Justice (RJ).

Restorative justice is a framework that views crime not merely as a violation of statutory law against the state, but as a fundamental rupture in human relationships and community trust³⁹. While the traditional system asks “What law was broken, who broke it, and how should they be punished?”, restorative justice asks “Who was harmed, what do they need, and whose obligation is it to repair that harm?”³⁹.

Common Justice: Addressing Violent Crime

Critics of restorative justice often dismiss it as a utopian concept suitable only for low-level property crimes or juvenile infractions. However, pioneering organizations are proving that RJ is highly effective even in cases of severe violence.

Danielle Sered, the founder and executive director of Common Justice—a groundbreaking organization based in New York City—operates the first alternative-to-incarceration program in the United States to focus exclusively on violent felonies in adult courts³⁹. In her book Until We Reckon, Sered articulates a devastating critique of the prison system: incarceration does not demand accountability; it merely demands compliance⁴².

“Being punished only requires that people sustain the suffering imposed upon them for their transgression,” Sered explains. “It is passive… It requires neither agency nor dignity, nor does it require work”⁴⁴.

True accountability is an active, grueling process. Through Common Justice’s 15-month program, individuals who have committed violent offenses (such as shootings, stabbings, and robberies) must undergo intense preparation before participating in a face-to-face dialogue with their victims (if the victim consents)³⁹. During these Victim-Offender Dialogues (VOD), the responsible party must look their victim in the eye, listen to the absolute devastation they caused, express genuine remorse, and agree to a rigorous “harm repair agreement”³⁹. This agreement often involves extensive community service, educational milestones, maintaining employment, and anti-violence commitments⁴⁵.

The Empirical Success of Restorative Practices

The empirical success of restorative justice is formidable, delivering outcomes that the traditional carceral system cannot match.

Outcome Metric	Restorative Justice Impact	Comparison to Traditional Justice
Trauma Reduction for Victims	Substantially reduces post-traumatic stress symptoms in victims of violent crime.46	The traditional adversarial process is frequently reported to cause secondary trauma (the “second rape”).36
Victim Satisfaction	Victims report overwhelmingly higher satisfaction with the justice outcome.40	Traditional justice delivers only a 57% victim satisfaction rate.40
Recidivism Reduction	RJCs cause highly cost-effective reductions in repeat offending.46	Traditional incarceration yields a 64% rearrest rate for federal prisoners convicted of violent offenses.43
Desire for Revenge	Significantly reduces the victim’s desire for violent revenge against the offender.47	The retributive system frequently stokes the desire for vengeance by framing the trial as a zero-sum battle.20

Table 3: The Efficacy of Restorative Justice Conferences (RJCs) vs. Traditional Criminal Justice (Data: Campbell Systematic Review by Sherman and Strang).⁴⁶

By forcing the individual who caused harm to confront the human cost of their actions and actively labor to make amends, restorative justice achieves what prison cannot: it builds empathy, fosters genuine behavioral change, and provides the victim with an authentic avenue for psychological recovery. It allows victims to reclaim their power, ask unanswerable questions, and alleviate the paralyzing fear that the offender is an unknowable monster, effectively humanizing the experience and providing the “truth-knowing” that is essential for psychological recovery¹¹.

The Economics of Grief: Food Insecurity and Community Deprivation

The relentless pursuit of retributive closure carries a staggering economic cost, a cost that is ultimately paid by the very communities the justice system claims to protect. The American carceral state consumes over $80 billion annually in direct government expenditures. When a state decides to pursue a death penalty case in the name of victim closure, the costs are astronomically higher than prosecuting a case for life imprisonment, due to prolonged appeals, specialized incarceration, and complex pre-trial motions.

This vast misallocation of public funds directly starves communities of the resources required to build actual, sustainable safety. As the survey data from violent crime survivors indicated, there is a desperate need for investments in housing, education, and mental health treatment²⁷. When billions are diverted into the prison-industrial complex to exact vengeance, marginalized communities are left economically decimated.

This economic destabilization manifests most acutely in fundamental human needs, such as food security. When a household’s primary breadwinner is incarcerated, or when a family must liquidate their assets to pay predatory bail bonds and court fees, the immediate consequence is severe material hardship. The pursuit of closure for one family inevitably engineers the poverty and food insecurity of another, creating a vicious cycle of trauma that guarantees future crime. True justice, as envisioned by survivors, requires divesting from the machinery of passive suffering and investing those resources into the foundational building blocks of community health—ensuring that no family is forced to choose between feeding their children and funding the courts.

Conclusion: A Justice That Heals

The architecture of the American carceral state is sustained by a series of powerful myths, but perhaps none is more emotionally manipulative than the myth of closure. For decades, the justice system has hijacked the profound, ambiguous grief of violent crime survivors, weaponizing their pain to justify a relentless expansion of state violence, extreme sentencing, and capital punishment.

The empirical evidence meticulously gathered across legal, sociological, and psychological disciplines dismantles this narrative entirely. The psychological reality of traumatic loss dictates that grief does not yield to a gavel strike; demanding closure places an impossible burden on survivors while obscuring the enduring nature of their pain. In the courtroom, the use of Victim Impact Statements does not dispense equitable justice; rather, it injects severe racial and socioeconomic biases into the ultimate penal sanctions, valuing the lives of the affluent while dismissing the marginalized. Furthermore, the aggressive codification of victims’ rights through mechanisms like Marsy’s Law routinely operates as a Trojan horse, undermining the fundamental due process rights of the accused and providing a legal shield for state actors to evade accountability.

Most damningly, the state’s punitive obsession stands in direct defiance of what violent crime survivors actually demand. The data is unequivocal: those who have suffered the most profound harms do not desire a system that simply mirrors their pain through the passive suffering of incarceration. They demand a system that prevents future harm, invests in community stability, addresses the root causes of addiction and mental illness, and facilitates genuine, active accountability.

Moving beyond the myth of closure requires a radical reimagining of accountability. It demands abandoning the politically convenient theater of retribution in favor of the difficult, transformative work of restorative justice. By centering the truth, facilitating repair, and reintegrating both the harmed and the harm-doer into a supportive moral community, society can begin to untangle justice from vengeance. The justice system must cease asking victims to find peace in the destruction of another, and instead build an infrastructure robust enough to hold the weight of their grief, actively labor toward their healing, and unconditionally affirm that true justice is not measured by the depth of the cage, but by the restoration of the community.

Works cited

1. The Death Penalty and the Myth of Closure, https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/the-death-penalty-and-the-myth-of-closure
2. The Death Penalty and the Politics of Defining Emotion – NLS Forum, https://forum.nls.ac.in/slr-forum-blog/the-death-penalty-and-the-politics-of-defining-emotion/
3. The Death Penalty and the Myth of Closure | Franciscan Media, https://www.franciscanmedia.org/st-anthony-messenger/the-death-penalty-and-the-myth-of-closure/
4. Victims, “Closure”, and the Sociology of Emotion – Chicago Unbound, https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=public_law_and_legal_theory
5. Victims, ‘Closure’, and the Sociology of Emotion – ResearchGate, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228257839_Victims_’Closure’_and_the_Sociology_of_Emotion
6. Ambiguous loss – Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguous_loss
7. Ambiguous Loss: The Grief is Real – URMC.Rochester.edu, https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/behavioral-health-partners/bhp-blog/december-2023/ambiguous-loss-the-grief-is-real
8. The Endless Grief in Waiting: A Qualitative Study of the Relationship between Ambiguous Loss and Anticipatory Mourning amongst the Relatives of Missing Persons in Italy – PMC, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7408511/
9. Ambiguous Grief: Grieving Someone Who Is Still Alive, https://whatsyourgrief.com/ambiguous-grief-grieving-someone-who-is-still-alive/
10. Working with Loss and Grief | Deep Release, https://deeprelease.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Working-with-Loss-and-Grief-2024-PARTICIPANTS.pdf
11. Closure and its myths: Victims’ families, the death penalty, and the closure argument | Request PDF – ResearchGate, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275458786_Closure_and_its_myths_Victims’_families_the_death_penalty_and_the_closure_argument
12. The Victims’ Rights Mismatch – Michigan Law Review, https://michiganlawreview.org/journal/the-victims-rights-mismatch/
13. The Resurrection of Victim Impact Evidence in Capital Sentencing: Payne v. Tennessee – Scholarship @ UTulsa Law, https://digitalcommons.law.utulsa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1935&context=tlr
14. PAYNE v. TENNESSEE, 501 U.S. 808 (1991) – FindLaw Caselaw, https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-supreme-court/501/808.html
15. Payne v. Tennessee | 501 U.S. 808 (1991) – Justia Supreme Court, https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/501/808/
16. Victim Impact Statements: How Victim Social Class Affects Juror Decision Making – Ovid, https://www.ovid.com/journals/vlvt/fulltext/10.1891/0886-6708.32.3.521~victim-impact-statements-how-victim-social-class-affects
17. An Empirical Study of Implicit Racial Bias on Jury-Eligible Citizens in Six Death Penalty States, https://files.deathpenaltyinfo.org/legacy/LevinsonSmithYoung.pdf
18. PAYNE v. TENNESSEE 111 S. Ct. 2597 (1991), https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1093&context=wlucdj
19. The University of Chicago Law Review – SciSpace, https://scispace.com/pdf/empathy-narrative-and-victim-impact-statements-5dt0idtt5e.pdf
20. Reply to Paul Cassell: What We Know about Victim Impact Statements – Digital Commons@DePaul, https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2534&context=lawfacpubs
21. Parole, Victim Impact Evidence, and Race – Gretchen, https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1696&context=fac-articles
22. (PDF) Devaluing death: An empirical study of implicit racial bias on jury-eligible citizens in six death penalty states – ResearchGate, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286195843_Devaluing_death_An_empirical_study_of_implicit_racial_bias_on_jury-eligible_citizens_in_six_death_penalty_states
23. The Moderating Effect of Judge’s Instructions on Victim Impact Testimony in Capital Cases, https://dev.cjcenter.org/_files/apcj/2_2_moderatingeffect.pdf
24. Ideal victim (concept) | Social Sciences and Humanities | Research Starters – EBSCO, https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/social-sciences-and-humanities/ideal-victim-concept
25. Who gets to be a victim? | University of Law, https://www.law.ac.uk/resources/blog/who-gets-to-be-a-victim/
26. Nils Christie’s ‘Ideal Victim’ applied: From Lions to Swarms – Critical Legal Thinking, https://criticallegalthinking.com/2015/08/05/nils-christies-ideal-victim-applied-from-lions-to-swarms/
27. Crime Survivors Speak Report – Alliance for Safety and Justice, https://allianceforsafetyandjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/documents/Crime%20Survivors%20Speak%20Report.pdf
28. CRIME SURVIVORS SPEAK – Prison Policy Initiative, https://static.prisonpolicy.org/scans/ASJ_Crime_Survivors_Speak_September_2022.pdf
29. Why Many U.S. Crime Victims Don’t Get Money Meant to Help – TIME, https://time.com/5886815/crime-survivors-funding/
30. ‘Victims’ Rights’ Proposals Like Marsy’s Law Undermine Due Process | ACLU, https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/victims-rights-proposals-marsys-law-undermine-due-process
31. Marsy’s Law: Harmful to Defendants – Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, https://journals.law.harvard.edu/crcl/marsys-law-harmful-to-defendants/
32. How Marsy’s Law May Affect the Criminal Justice System | Ohio State Bar Association, https://www.ohiobar.org/member-tools-benefits/practice-resources/practice-library-search/practice-library/2018-ohio-lawyer/how-marsys-law-may-affect-the-criminal-justice-system/
33. Marsy’s Law should not protect police from being held accountable – R Street Institute, https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/marsys-law-should-not-protect-police-from-being-held-accountable/
34. My name is Kage John member of – Maine Legislature, https://legislature.maine.gov/legis/bills/getTestimonyDoc.asp?id=190794
35. New Survey of U.S. Crime Victims: PTSD, Financial and Physical Hardship Plague Survivors of Violent Crime, As Public Safety and Justice Systems Fail Them, https://allianceforsafetyandjustice.org/news/new-survey-us-crime-victims-ptsd-financial-and-physical-hardship-plague-survivors-violent-0/
36. Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice – Goodreads, https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/61399139-truth-and-repair
37. Truth and Repair by Judith Lewis Herman, MD & Stacey Glemboski | Hachette Book Group, https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/judith-lewis-herman-md/truth-and-repair/9781549139499/?lens=basic-books
38. Webinar with Judith Lewis Herman, M.D. Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice – Women’s Mental Health Consortium, https://wmhcny.org/s/webinar-with-judith-lewis-herman-m-d-truth-and-repair-how-trauma-survivors-envision-justice-march-1-2024-at-10-am
39. The Potentials and Limitations of Community Engagement in Restorative Justice – Digital Commons @ Colby, https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2509&context=honorstheses
40. Restorative Justice – Maryland, https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/cmte_testimony/2023/jpr/1gISAQwrz-yWJDU6L94X3E8J7tU7oSRia.pdf
41. Making Space for Restorative Justice | YES! Magazine, https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/world-we-want/2020/02/19/making-space-for-restorative-justice
42. Accounting for Violence: How to Increase Safety and Break Our Failed Reliance on Mass Incarceration – Cloudfront.net, https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/commonjustice/pages/82/attachments/original/1506608259/accounting-for-violence.pdf?1506608259
43. Introducing the Principles and Practice of Restorative Justice: Reactions from a Generalist Audience – ScholarWorks@Bellarmine, https://scholarworks.bellarmine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1080&context=ugrad_theses
44. Restorative Justice Diversion: A Better Way to Provide Meaningful Accountability for Youth, https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/restorative-justice-diversion-a-better-way-to-provide-meaningful-accountability-for-youth/
45. REDESIGNING RESTORATIVE JUSTICE FOR CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM – Tennessee Law Review, https://tennesseelawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/88tennlrev947.pdf
46. The Impact of Restorative Justice Practices, https://justiceresearch.dspacedirect.org/bitstreams/55c9dc0a-91d0-4379-9858-da3f7238b0d9/download
47. restorative justice: the evidence, https://www.iirp.edu/images/pdf/RJ_full_report.pdf
48. Grasping the Third Rail: Restorative Justice and Violent Crime – Digital Commons @ American University Washington College of Law, https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3294&context=facsch_lawrev
49. Restorative Justice: The Experiences of Victims and Survivors – Victims of Crime Research Digest No. 11, https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/cj-jp/victim/rd11-rr11/p5.html