When people are friends they have no need of justice, but even just people need friendship

In the previous piece we said that the prison population in Turkey, which has now exceeded 433,000, should lead us to ask not only "How much crime is committed in this country?" but, perhaps more importantly, "When we encounter crime, how do we respond to it, and which acts do we punish, to what extent and by what methods?" For the international comparisons we made show that there is no data indicating that crime rates in Turkey are high enough to explain the enormous gap in our prison population compared with Germany or France; indeed, they show that for some types of crime the recorded rates in those countries may even be higher than in Turkey.

And this is exactly where we left the matter: Justice.

The state's authority to punish is legitimate only to the extent that it realizes justice, and justice is realized not by setting the heaviest possible penalty against every crime, but by establishing the right measure between crime and punishment, between perpetrator and victim, between the security of society and the freedom of the human being.

Of course, crimes committed against the public or against individuals must not go unpunished. If a person has killed another person, has seriously wounded him, has seized his property by force, or through his behavior poses a serious and continuing danger to society, it is unavoidable for the state to intervene and, when necessary, to restrict that person's freedom. No reasonable penal policy can do away with prison entirely; and the issue we need to debate is in any case not whether punishment is necessary in the face of serious crimes.

The real issue is how broad an area of crime we have made deprivation of liberty the ordinary form of punishment for, and how well we have been able to preserve proportion while doing so.

It is entirely fitting to recall that, alongside the concept of justice, the Qur'an insistently dwells on the concepts of qist and mizan. God does not only command justice; He also commands that people uphold qist, and that they keep right and measure scrupulously upright. In Surah al-Rahman, the order of the whole cosmos is described through the mizan: God, who raised the heavens, sets the mizan and immediately afterward says, "Do not transgress in the mizan."

For when you lose measure, even if you are acting in the name of justice, you may begin to produce injustice. Just as failing to give a person the due for the crime he committed can be an injustice against the victim, subjecting him to a heavier penalty than the act he committed requires can turn into an injustice against the perpetrator. This is precisely the difficulty of justice; in every incident in which public anger rises, it is easy to increase penalties; what is hard is to preserve the measure that can say "as much as is needed" even at the moment of that anger.

Nor can we think of imprisonment outside this measure. When we say "five years in prison," it sounds to our ears only like a legal sanction, yet the state is taking five years from that person's life; it cuts him off from his job, his family, his children and, of course, his social circle, and places him in an entirely different social world. When his sentence is over, we open the door and expect him to return to society.

But no one considers that the life he will return to is not the life he left. He may have lost his job, his marriage may have fallen apart, his children may have grown up, his debts may have piled up, his social reputation may have been damaged; moreover, the prison environment to which we sent him in order to reform him may in some cases have introduced him to criminal circles he had never known before.

Moreover, even if the legal addressee of a prison sentence is one person, its sociological addressee is often a family. When you put a father in prison for five years, you do not impose any punishment on his eight-year-old child, but that child grows up without a father for five years. When you take in the person who supports the family, you do not hand down a conviction against his wife, but that wife may suddenly have to shoulder alone the entire economic burden of the children and the household.

Therefore we cannot read the fact that 433,000 people are in prison merely as the punishment of 433,000 people. The personal nature of punishments (the principle that punishment attaches only to the offender) is a legal principle, but ensuring the personal nature of the consequences of punishment is almost impossible.

Here we encounter an even more thought-provoking paradox with regard to Turkey. According to the latest SPACE II data of the Council of Europe, Turkey has one of the highest rates in Europe not only in imprisonment but also in the number of people under probation. This means that the problem is not so simple that it can be solved by saying "Let us use probation instead of prison"; we need to think about a broader culture of punishment.

When we face a social problem, why is our first reflex increasingly "Let us increase the punishment"? When a tragedy occurs, when unacceptable behavior emerges or a new form of abuse is encountered, a demand immediately rises to create a new offense or increase penalties. In some cases there may of course be a need for this, but when we try to solve every social problem with the penal code, we face the danger of taking criminal law out of its place as an exceptional last resort and making it one of the ordinary instruments of governing society.

Right here it is worth rethinking what Aristotle said in the Nicomachean Ethics two thousand three hundred years ago, which I treated in detail in my book On Friendship (Dostluğa Dair), published last year: When people are friends, they have no need of justice; but even just people need friendship.

This is not a romantic saying that makes law unnecessary. On the contrary, it points to a very powerful sociological truth: A society cannot stand on law alone.

Where people do not trust one another, neighborliness has dissolved, family bonds have weakened and shared values have eroded, many matters that could earlier have been resolved within morality, friendship, neighborliness, counsel and mutual understanding become matters of law. As contract takes the place of friendship, supervision the place of trust, complaint the place of counsel, and litigation the place of reconciliation (sulh), law grows; and as law grows, the sanction and punishment mechanism behind it spreads into broader areas of our lives.

The subject is in fact somewhat related to Ibn Khaldun's concept of asabiyya, or the decline of asabiyya. Asabiyya is not simply tribal solidarity; it is the people who make up a society feeling a shared fate with one another, knowing they are responsible for one another and being able, when necessary, to make sacrifices for one another. In modern society its name may be social trust, civic solidarity or shared values, but no society that has entirely lost these bonds can fill their place with law, police and prison alone.

From here, when we look at our prisons holding 433,000 people, merely asking "What crimes did these people commit?" takes us nowhere. Alongside it we need to place a more disturbing but far more sociological question:

What kind of society have we become that we are compelled to imprison so many of our people?

This question does not excuse the criminal and does not neglect the victim's right. On the contrary, it leads us to the next and perhaps harder question:

What do we gain for the victim by throwing a person into prison for years?

In my view, this should be the question that marks all the short-, medium- and long-term programs of the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) for the coming Century of Türkiye. What is the paradox by which the more we enlarge institutional law, the less justice we have?

And of course, even before that, how are we going to remove the social coldness that will put 433,000 of our people in prison, and how are we going to close, with a politics of friendship, the distances that have come between the people that lead to imprisoning so many?