Kansas City was run by a military administration that ruled by curfew, informants and public hanging. A movement organized against it, won, and strung the administrators up in the square. Six weeks later the leader of that movement has a list of collaborators, a basement for questioning them, and a mass grave she describes as necessary. She is not a hypocrite and the series does not treat her as one — she is entirely lucid about what she is doing and why. The uncomfortable part is that everything she says about the regime she destroyed was true.
// The theoryCrime is suffering, and so is the answer to it
Criminology as Peacemaking (1991), edited by Harold Pepinsky and Richard Quinney, opened a tradition that most of the field treats as marginal and that has aged better than the field has. Its premises are few. Crime is a form of suffering, not a category defined by statute. The criminal justice response is itself a system for producing suffering, and the evidence that it reduces the first kind is thin. And since suffering cannot be ended by adding more of it, the response has to be reconstructed around what Quinney called peacemaking: restoration, mediation, the reduction of harm rather than its redistribution. The tradition draws on religious and humanist sources—Quinney was explicit about Buddhist influence—and on the feminist critique of the adversarial model, and its practical descendants are not fringe at all: restorative justice, transitional justice, truth commissions and community mediation all run on its premises. Its central and most contested proposition is about method. Means are not neutral instruments for reaching ends; they are the material the resulting institution is made of. A movement that builds its authority on summary violence will have, when it wins, an authority whose only instrument is summary violence.
The apparatus is inherited, not the ideology
The mechanism this file turns on is the one transitional-justice scholarship keeps documenting: what survives a regime change is rarely the doctrine and almost always the apparatus. The buildings, the files, the personnel who know how to conduct an interrogation, the informant networks, the categories that sort a population into loyal and suspect — these are infrastructure, and infrastructure is agnostic about whose hands it is in. Kathleen inherits a functioning list of collaborators, and the list is the regime. She did not have to design anything; she had to decide to use what was already built, and the decision looks like justice at the moment it is made. Research on post-conflict societies finds this pattern with depressing regularity, which is why the transitional-justice literature is so preoccupied with lustration and with the design of accountability processes that do not simply reverse the direction of the existing machinery. The alternative — truth commissions, conditional amnesty, restorative processes — is slower, less satisfying, and is chosen precisely because the fast option reproduces what it replaced.
// The subjectA grievance that is entirely legitimate
The series is careful with her in a way that makes the file work. Kathleen is not power-hungry, not corrupt, and not deluded about the past: her brother was killed by the administration she overthrew, the administration did everything she says it did, and the people now on her list did in fact collaborate with it. Every input to her reasoning is accurate. What peacemaking criminology argues is that accuracy of grievance is not the variable that determines the outcome — the variable is the instrument, and she has chosen the only one she has ever seen used. Her own account of it is the most honest line in the season: she says plainly that when they win they will do to the others what was done to them. That is not a betrayal of the revolution. It is a description of its method, stated before it is carried out.
It is worth noting what the series does with her ending, because it is not a moral. She is killed by the same indiscriminate catastrophe that the whole conflict had been ignoring, and the city she fought over is lost by everyone. Peacemaking criminology would not read that as poetic justice but as its standard finding: an entire population spent its remaining capacity on settling an internal account, and the settlement bought nobody an additional day.
Kathleen
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// The crackThe most frequently dismissed tradition in criminology
Peacemaking criminology attracts three serious criticisms and deserves an honest hearing on each. The first is that it is prescriptive rather than explanatory: it tells you what ought to be done and generates very few testable propositions about why people offend, which is why it appears in theory courses as an ethics and rarely in empirical journals. Its defenders accept this and argue the field needs a normative wing; its critics reply that a criminology without predictions is philosophy with a criminology budget. The second is the evidence problem in its practical descendants. Restorative justice, its best-developed application, produces excellent victim satisfaction and a genuinely mixed record on reoffending — reductions concentrated in violent offenses, weak or absent effects for property crime. Truth commissions have a similar profile: valuable for the historical record and for victims' recognition, unproven as a deterrent, and in several cases criticized for trading accountability for stability. The third and hardest is the question of self-defense: a framework that rejects violent means has to say something about populations under active attack, and its answers there are the weakest part of the literature. Saying that violence builds the wrong institution is true and is not a plan for the night the militia arrives. What survives is the mechanism rather than the pacifism, and it is well supported: the apparatus outlives the ideology, the instruments a movement uses become the instruments it governs with, and any account of a transition that examines only the change of personnel is measuring the wrong thing.
A revolution with one tool
Kathleen tortures and executes people, some of whom are guilty of exactly what she says and some of whom are not, and her grievance being legitimate settles none of it. The reason her file belongs beside David's and Marlene's is that all three are people whose reasoning is intact. She is not the villain of a revolution that went wrong through fanaticism; she is the predictable output of a revolution that had one tool. The question the tradition insists on asking is the only one with practical content: on the day after, what instrument is available, and who built it.
Three key ideas
- Pepinsky and Quinney (1991): crime is suffering, the penal response produces more suffering, and the evidence that the second reduces the first is thin. Its practical descendants are restorative and transitional justice, not a fringe position.
- Its most contested claim is that means are not neutral: they are the material the resulting institution is made of. What survives a regime change is the apparatus — lists, buildings, interrogators, categories — and Kathleen inherits a functioning one rather than designing anything.
- The criticisms are fair: the tradition is prescriptive rather than explanatory, restorative justice has mixed recidivism evidence, and its answers on self-defense are its weakest part. The mechanism survives the pacifism: the instrument a movement uses becomes the instrument it governs with.
Sources · to keep reading
- Pepinsky, H. E. y Quinney, R. (eds.) (1991). Criminology as Peacemaking. Indiana University Press.
- Quinney, R. (2000). Bearing Witness to Crime and Social Justice. SUNY Press.
- Braithwaite, J. (2002). Restorative Justice and Responsive Regulation. Oxford University Press.
- Teitel, R. G. (2000). Transitional Justice. Oxford University Press.
- Hayner, P. B. (2001). Unspeakable Truths. Routledge.
- Sherman, L. W. y Strang, H. (2007). Restorative Justice: The Evidence. Smith Institute.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Kathleen?
Kathleen is a villain from The Last of Us, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. The people who followed her were right about what came before.
Why does Kathleen become a villain?
Kathleen and peacemaking criminology: the leader of a revolution that reproduces exactly the apparatus it destroyed. The file on the tradition that argues violence cannot be used to end violence.
Which criminological theory explains Kathleen?
Kathleen's case is analysed through Peacemaking criminology. Peacemaking criminology — founded by Pepinsky and Quinney in 1991 — begins from a claim that sounds naive and is not: crime is suffering, the penal response is more suffering, and no quantity of the second reduces the first. From it they derived a proposition uncomfortable for any liberation movement: violent means are not a route to a peaceful end, because the means build the institution. Kathleen is that warning dramatized. Her cause was just, her description of the previous regime was accurate, and what she erects on the ruins is a security unit with lists, interrogations and summary executions — the same instrument with different names on the door.
