Five levels

Restitution. The harm is reversible. The harm-doer makes the harmed whole at the resolution of the harm. The thing returned. The record corrected. The wage paid. Cheapest, because it acts exactly where the contraction was.

Restriction. Not fully reversible, and further harm is a live risk. A licence withheld. A pathway closed. The operator stays coupled everywhere else.

Separation. Restriction is not enough. The operator is separated from the site for a calibrated duration, with an endpoint and conditions for return.

Permanent separation. The operator’s continued coupling would propagate severe contraction at any configuration the structure can supply, and nothing lower can bring it to a sustainable rate. No endpoint. Under continuing review. Never grounded in discomfort, stigma, disability, illness, poverty, opposition, difference or convenience.

Removal. The window is closed. The heaviest correction, and by design the most expensive. Only where every lower level is insufficient. Every uncertainty defaults against it — identity, consequence, override, bias, the availability of a lower level. Because it cannot be repaired, the burden is not high. It is maximal.

Levels combine in practice. Treatment beside separation. Repair beside restriction. The hierarchy orders cost. It does not demand purity.

Above restitution, correction is not only constraint. At every level the structure also asks what would re-widen the harm-doer’s lawful paths. Treatment. Education. Repair. Supervised return. A correction that restricts with no path back, where one was available, is heavier than the geometry requires. That is parasitic too.

One guardrail on restoration. The harmed person’s authority over their own coupling holds at the site of repair. The structure may seek restitution from the harm-doer. It may not demand forgiveness, contact or emotional labour from the harmed as the price of running the correction. To do so is a second contraction at the first victim’s site.

Priority is structural, not temporal. In an emergency a higher level may come first because a lower one cannot act in time. Minimum sufficient intervention holds throughout.

This is the short edition of Ø Applications — a summary. Where a step is compressed here, the original carries it in full. The original book (PDF) · This edition (PDF)

The same page on the420code.org: the420code.org/models/applications/02-the-architecture-of-law/