A symposium with Theodore Dalrymple et al. Excerpt:
Dalrymple: That leftists regard the criminal justice system as criminal and therefore regard criminals as “primitive rebels” against an unjust system is, I suppose, right, though few of them would openly admit it. They tend to see the proper function of the criminal justice system as being the promotion of what they call social justice, by which they mean equality – and not equality under the law, but equality of outcome between identifiable groups. (Equity and equality they almost always assume to be the same.) And they think that if there were justice, equality would result, naturally and inevitably; there is no equality, therefore there is no justice. I think you can read for quite a long time before you find an unequivocal statement that there could be no greater injustice than equality of outcome.
Their approach to the criminal justice system is not that its faults should be corrected, and individual instances of injustice righted (there does seem much to criticize); but rather that the whole of society must be transformed into something completely different from what it is now.
'Social justice' is one of those obfuscatory pieces of leftist jargon which ought never to be used by conservatives. It sounds good, doesn't it? But as Dalrymple points out what it means is equality of outcome, equality of result. It has nothing to do with justice in any legitimate sense of the term. In fact, the implementation of 'social justice,' i.e., equality of outcome, requires massive injustice in the form of affirmative action, wealth redistribution, race-norming, and the like.