Unpacking Retribution Bias

A socially held and institutionally enacted bias towards exacting retribution — a bias favoring punishment.

Retribution bias is triggered in the presence of wrongdoing, or the perception of wrongdoing. It depends, in the American context, on the criminal justice system to name who is trustworthy, hirable, a “safe community member”, and so on. Retribution bias replaces the restorative instinct to develop, maintain, or (re)build relationship. Restoring relationship can be between the offender and offended, or can mean restoring the perceived offender to his or her full relationship with community — in other words, restoring citizenship, with rights, freedoms and responsibilities.

What makes retribution bias complex and powerful is the nexus of oppressions that it is funded by. Retribution bias depends squarely on the unconscious biases that many of us hold against people who have contact with the criminal justice system, the often biased way that the criminal justice system carries out its tasks, implicating the poor, people of color, and gender minorities at disproportionate rates, and the lack of real proportionate relationship between crime and punishment.

For example, mandatory minimums instituted by the Boggs Act of 1951, eventually grew to bind judges by law to sentence…