Open letter to all judicial officials

Welcome to the complementary profession of need-response.

Who watches the watchers?

Executive Summary [TLDR]

Need-response emerges as a new professional service to complement, or potentially compete with, the adversarial judicial system to serve the public’s justice needs. Only need-response emphasizes understanding the unresolved needs fueling conflicts, and how to more effectively respond to such needs. We invite everyone working within the judicial system to engage this fresh approach to serving one another’s underserved needs.

Thank you for your service

Wherever you serve the public in helping us all to stay safe and orderly, we thank you for your service. We appreciate how challenging it can be to reach just outcomes amidst our human complexities. The Anankelogy Foundation can provide you some helpful insight to unpack those complexities, with its new proposed professional service of need-response.

This visionary service seeks to support your efforts to address and resolve justice needs. We address the justice needs of the people based on this new social science of anankelogy, the disciplined study of need.

Every need persists as an objective fact

Foundational to this new academic field is the empirically based assertion that core needs exist as objective fact. Need-response as applied anankelogy exists to serve such “inflexible needs”. Such needs can never bend to serve arbitrary laws or the authorities that exist to address such needs.

Consider the implications of this vicious cycle.

legalism cycle

1. The more one suppresses their inflexible needs to appease authority, the less they can fully function.

2. The less they can fully function, the less capable they can comply with every legal requirement.

3. The less they comply with every legal code, the more easily targeted by law enforcement.

4. The more targeted by law enforcement, the more prone to suppress their inflexible needs to appease that authority.

Back to square one.

Trapping us in pain of our unresolved justice needs

An ethical dilemma emerges. The more the impersonal approach of law enforcement elicits poor outcomes benefitting its practice, the more motivated reasoning can blind judicial officials from its own role in such poor outcomes. The more you benefit as an institution from the negative situations you arguably help to create, the less incentivized to produce just outcomes for the people.

We appreciate how police must take an adversarial stance when apprehending someone presenting a threat. After such a person gets placed in custody, we see less room to impose adversarial assumptions. But we recognize such adversarialism is built into the very structure of the judicial process.

Need-response can complement law enforcement’s adversarialism, in ways not normally contemplated by ADR or arbitration options. It can illuminate the biases that adversarialism often impose. Moreover, it can potentially produce more just results by incentivizing those in a conflict to first exhaust all possible mutuality options.

We do not presume adjudicated individuals, either complainants or defendants, as oppositional. We first affirm their inflexible needs that cannot be changed. Then we address the improper ways they behaved to redress such needs.

We cast a broader net to explore both internal factors and external factors shaping their options. We stay clear of either extreme: victimhood (overemphasizing external factors) or hyper-responsibility (overemphasizing internal factors). We hold ourselves accountable to produce just outcomes, in ways rarely if ever seen in the judicial process.

No longer exclusive

The high volume of unsolved crimes, along with underreported violence, countered by estimated high rates of wrongly convicted innocents, suggests you could use a fresh approach to serving our justice needs. One less tied to the imposing constraints of adversarialism, and less beholden to constructs of law not held accountable to empirically measurable outcomes. In other words, prioritizing substantive justice over procedural justice.

To serve this noble goal of resolving more justice needs, need-response asserts a radical claim:

Anyone in the adversarial judicial system has the 

privilege and not the exclusive right

to serve the justice needs of the people. 

In the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Jefferson hints to this necessity for an alternative when a government slips into tyrannical tendencies, or worse.

"All experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

In other words, creeping normalcy coerces us to adjust to institutions creeping from their mission to serve the people in a just democratic society. Without any other option, the people acclimate to the mounting pain of their unresolved justice needs.

As the sole institution available to the public to address their justice needs, the adversarial justice system receives little incentive to improve outcomes. True to the American adventure of competition, need-response now presents itself as the incentivizing market force to improve just outcomes.

Opening a new path to resolve persisting needs

In contrast to Jefferson’s rhetoric, need-response does not seek to abolish the current forms of the judiciary, but instead to complement it, and where necessary to compete with it, to identify, address and resolve justice needs.

We invite you to learn with us how to utilize need-response to better fulfill your mission to serve justice needs. You can partner with us, as we extend a warm welcome to support a client’s noble wellness goal. One client at a time.

	Status quo institution	Need-response alternative
Justice means	procedural; process focused	substantive; results focused
Approach	adversarial; win-lose approach	mutuality; win-win approach
Service	serve flexible laws & powers	serve inflexible needs
Offer	relieve pain of survivors	remove pain by resolving needs
Responsibility focus	risk objectify individuals	psychosocial balance
Legitimacy	ascribed; coax public trust	earned; earn public trust
Aim	maintain social order	improve overall wellness
Perspective	myopic; reductive to what’s manageable	holistic; attentive to all
Manifest outcomes	toxic legalism; poor need orientations	social love; improved need orientations

Or you can drag your feet, delay your response, resist our intent, and even oppose our efforts. All under color of law. But we must address inflexible justice needs, with you or without you. And let the people democratically decide which they prefer. But the reality of inflexible needs is never legitimately up for any vote or court opinion.

Let us help you resolve justice needs

Resisting inflexible needs is never an option. Those who do under color of law become professionally and personally complicit in the rising number of poor wellness outcomes, like major depression, severe anxiety, recurring addictions, and deaths of despair. Need-response offers such officials an off-ramp from such damaging objectification.

Instead of always processing a mounting pile of troubling cases, need-response can potentially reduce that load as it cultivates greater responsiveness to the inflexible needs spilling into violent incidents. Need-response aims to get to the source of our problems, which points to our persisting unresolved needs. You can either be a part of this fresh alternative, or see how it helps others improve their lives and their careers.

Any injustice in the name of justice

We start with viable claims of innocence that can be independently verified. We investigate the biases of judicial officials, starting with prosecutors, who delay justice more for their own purposes than the public interest for a just society. We methodically explore limitations within the adversarial legal process, but not in an adversarial way.

We invite the wrongly convicted with a viable innocence claim to correlate their case with those already exonerated. We calculate the degree of their likely innocence instead of imposing a black-and-white guilt or innocence category. In other words, we aim to improve identifying the wrongly convicted innocent with a more scientifically valid process.

In case their estimated innocence fails to provide a timely, just outcome, we offer them the opportunity to demonstrate their responsiveness to all involved in a conflict. We incentivize all to fulfill the purpose of law, which is prosocial behavior toward each other. That includes incentivizing questionable authorities to be equally prosocial.

Inviting you to help shape this pioneering approach

We are testing a radically fresh approach. We link you with a sample of those you impact, so you can improve your effectiveness in enabling them to resolve their justice needs. This provides you the opportunity to improve your legitimacy to serve a wary public.

By offering you sponsorship opportunities, we help you nurture the public’s trust by helping you respond more effectively to their underserved justice needs. Much better than currently possible by applying the law alone.

Learn more…

For a more informed decision, learn more at AnankelogyFoundation.org. Follow us on the Need-Response podcast to keep informed how this new professional field of need-response is taking root and growing.

Let’s grow a better society together by holding each other accountably responsive to each other’s inflexible needs. Let’s incentivize each other to move past adversarial acrimony and impersonal alienation to make room for our untapped potential for more platonic love.

If we don’t, who will?

Respectfully,

The Anankelogy Foundation

Option to respond