Is justice a process or an outcome?

Widely maintained mythologies hold that “justice” refers to conclusive punishment for criminal wrongdoing (as in “an eye for an eye”). These narratives, centered on deviant acts rather than the systems in which actions unfold, delimit the possibility of justice within longstanding and embedded structures that have excluded certain individuals from the onset. If justice is understood as a process rather than an outcome, part of its work is to scrutinize the systems within which exclusive and excluding laws have been written and sustained.