For justice to obtain at the scale of a political community whose protective obligation against internal coercion runs alongside its recognition-failure-repair obligation toward both victims and offenders as participants (articulating the institutional conditions under which justice repairs failures of recognition without becoming retributive-suffering-infliction-for-its-own-sake, abolitionist gap-leaving, or community-mediation-only architectures that break down at the residual-extreme-case end) the framework maps out a structural-necessity inventory specific to justice as constitutive infrastructure. Each carries its own weight; what justice architecture has to deliver to count as justice architecture rather than as carceral extraction, as recognition-failure-without-response, or as community-only mediation that abandons parties without community-resource access is the conjunction in full.

*Property is stewardship-within-community, not Lockean pre-political right.* The framework grounds property in collective-investment output that an individual has stewardship over within the arrangement, not in a pre-political natural right that the political community merely respects. The derivation has two practical consequences the condition holds together: (i) the wrongness of vandalism and other property crime is independent of the owner's class, because the violated relation is the political community's stewardship logic, not the owner's personal pre-political claim; (ii) stewardship beyond proportionate contribution is structurally suspect, because it begins to look like privatization of infrastructure-output rather than legitimate holding. The class-warfare deflection holds symmetrically: there is no line of derivation within the framework that licenses 'stick it to the rich' as policy or practice, just as there is no line of derivation that licenses punitive criminalization of the poor. Both fall out of one premise.

*The recognition-failure-repair frame is binding, with modally-compatibilist responsibility intact.* Justice repairs failures of recognition when they occur and restores the conditions the political community needs in order to function. The recognition-failure analysis — the wrongdoer failed to recognize the victim (and, in property crime, the political community) as real participants in a common political life — grounds the political community's response. Responsibility is real: the modally-compatibilist account derived from the type/token distinction of [§7.7](<7.7 Cosmic History.md>) together with the Chapter 8 opening's integrated self-modeling locates desert in the agent's contribution to causal history, not in any libertarian could-have-done-otherwise sense. The condition precludes both pure-consequentialist justice architectures that dissolve desert entirely and pure-retributive architectures that ground desert in suffering-infliction rather than in recognition-failure-repair. Restoration discharges desert through repair, restitution, and reintegration in cases where mutual recognition can be re-established; where it cannot, state-administered institutional response substitutes.

*Restitution-incorporating sentencing with community-stake component is structural.* If the harm reaches collective-investment output (the destroyed wall was manufacturing, materials, supply chains, embedded labor that the political community produced together), then restitution is partly owed to the community, not only to the individual victim. Sentencing structures must incorporate restitution components (community service, contribution-to-public-good, victim-offender dialogue with community participation, restorative-justice conferences) alongside whatever incarceration or supervision component the residual-extreme-case standard requires. Pure-incarceration sentences without restitution components are structurally incomplete on the framework's terms because they remove the perpetrator from the community without restoring what was taken from it. Specific restitution-architecture designs (community-service requirements; contribution-to-public-good frameworks; victim-offender dialogue protocols; circle-process implementations) are underdetermined within the constraint.

*Upstream-justice preconditions hold across [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) / [§9.9](<9.9 Education.md>) / [§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>) / [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) / [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>).* A substantial share of what arrives at the justice system is downstream of failures the chapter already addresses in earlier domains: untreated mental illness and substance disorder ([§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>)), poverty and material precarity ([§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) and [§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>) jointly), educational gaps and under-formation of capacity ([§9.9](<9.9 Education.md>)), and the breakdown of the public channels that let disputes resolve before they become physical ([§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>), [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>)). Adequate upstream investment in those domains drains the upstream sources of internal coercion. The condition runs that justice cannot be designed as a stand-alone domain; its outcomes depend constitutively on the performance of upstream domains, and the most powerful justice intervention is the one that never reaches the justice system at all. The framework derives this as a structural prediction; the empirical pattern — dollar-for-dollar upstream investment outperforming downstream investment on the principal outcome margins where the comparison has been run (recidivism, lifetime fiscal return, prevented-incident cost), with the Washington State Institute for Public Policy's benefit-cost meta-analyses (Aos and Drake 2013) and the Heckman early-childhood return literature (Heckman 2006; Heckman and Masterov 2007) as the principal anchors — is what the prediction looks like in the record.

*Mental-health and substance-related conditions route through healthcare, not through justice ([§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>) coupling).* Mental-health and substance-related conditions are healthcare-domain conditions whatever their downstream behavioral manifestations. Routing them through justice produces measurable underperformance on the metrics the comparison has been run against (overdose mortality, treatment-engagement rate, recidivism for drug-related offenses, problematic-use prevalence). The condition couples [§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>) to [§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>) directly: drug-related crime tracks treatment availability more than prohibition severity (Hughes and Stevens 2010; Csete et al. 2016), and the Portugal / Swiss / Vancouver operational record (Hughes and Stevens 2010 on Portugal decriminalization; Csete et al. 2016 on the harm-reduction record more broadly) is the structural prediction in operational form. Specific implementations (the line between cases requiring healthcare-domain response and cases requiring justice-domain response; the architecture of treatment-first diversion programs; harm-reduction infrastructure) are underdetermined within the constraint.

*For-profit and extraction occupation of justice-system functions is structurally precluded.* Courts, prisons, police, public defenders, prosecutors, probation, and the broader justice infrastructure are themselves collective-investment outputs. The framework precludes for-profit occupation of justice-system functions on the same logic that precludes for-profit occupation of the healthcare sufficiency floor. Private prisons, for-profit probation, cash-bail-as-revenue, civil-asset-forfeiture-as-funding-mechanism, and bail-bond industry political economy each substitute profit-extraction at the point of coercive system contact for the political community's structural obligation to operate the justice system as collective-investment output. The condition applies symmetrically to institutional actors and to individual actors (corruption inside justice institutions; gaming the system; perjury): the structural extraction pattern is wrong at every scale.

*State-administered institutional backstop for residual-extreme cases is required.* Restorative-only architectures break down at the residual-extreme-case end where mutual recognition is structurally impossible (psychopathy; repeat-offender patterns refusing engagement; dangerous-to-others cases without engagement capacity). The framework's recognition-failure analysis is itself what predicts these breakdowns: where the offender's recognition capacities cannot be re-engaged, restoration cannot do the work, and the political community's protective obligation against internal coercion requires state-administered institutional response. The condition parts the framework from restorative-maximalism on this narrow point: not every case can be handled by community mediation, and institutional reliability for parties without community-resource access (the empirical failure mode of restorative-only architectures across multiple jurisdictions) requires state-administered backstop. Specific backstop architectures (the calibration of incarceration, supervised release, civil-commitment with healthcare-domain governance for dangerous-to-others cases without criminal capacity, dangerous-offender-specific tracks) are underdetermined within the constraint; the backstop's existence is binding.

Together, these seven conditions are what justice as constitutive infrastructure structurally requires: each indispensable, substantive justice architecture realized only with the full set in place. [§9.13.3](<9.13.3 What is Predicted.md>) frames its predictions against that conjunction.


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← [9.13.1 What is Disputed](<9.13.1 What is Disputed.md>) | [9.13.3 What is Predicted](<9.13.3 What is Predicted.md>) →
