Justice is contextual – it consists of the meaning that the people involved give to it. Justice is useful only insofar as it is meaningful to those involved. When it ceases to be meaningful it ceases to be useful. People will have differing perspectives on what is meaningful. When justice takes the form of, or encompasses conversation, it is more likely to be meaningful to more people.
But justice is not about accepting at face value the stated impulses of its participants. It is not about satisfying a victim’s unexamined hunger for vengeance anymore than it is about accepting an offender’s justifications, entitlement and minimizations of a his actions. Rather, justice is a process of working with each party to deepen their sense of what is meaningful in the situation.
This process of working together to explore and deepen the sense of the meaningful should have a name. Perhaps “excavation.” Removing the layers to find bedrock. Qualities like true accountability or repentance or forgiveness may be manifestations of the bedrock. But remember that justice is a process, not just an outcome. Justice is the journey toward, not necessarily the arrival to, bedrock.
There is certainly a material element to justice. But the notion that penalty can be meted out according to a spreadsheet seems to falsely rigidify that which is innately fluid.