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Criminal Justice and Responsible Mercy
- University of Virginia Press
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181 Criminal Justice and Responsible Mercy w i l l i a m s c h w e i k e r Introduction The American public is increasingly aware of problems in the United States criminal justice system as well as the massive social ills—poverty, racism, abuse—that motivate and yet are concealed by the system. More and more individuals, especially young men from ethnic and racial minorities , populate the prison system. In 1999, 1.5 million children in the United States had at least one parent in prison. What is more, even those who complete their sentences are marked for life: background checks, employment problems, family difficulties, and the like. Cities and states continue to build prisons in the hope of stemming crime, but also of vitalizing their economies. Businesses, like telephone companies, enter the prison system as a new market. Private prisons, poor conditions in many complexes, and economic failure also stalk the criminal justice system. Politicians and a range of social agencies labor to address the spread of crime and violence among us. Yet the politicization of the problem rarely lessens the increasing criminalization of our society and, in fact, often aids it. In sum, the American criminal justice system is characterized by stiff sentencing, the spread of criminalization through initiatives like the “war on drugs,” and the manifest inequalities in the prison population, where it seems that we have one system for whites and one for the rest. All of this is well known. Thankfully, there are voices of criticism and change, especially coming from poor, ethnic, and racial communities. Moreover, the troubling facts of the criminal justice system have provoked renewed reflection on justice and mercy. This is part of a wider global movement in political thinking. For much of Western thought, the theme of reconciliation, especially in the form of mercy or forgiveness , was outside of politics; it was seen as a suprapolitical human act best V4366.indb 181 V4366.indb 181 8/22/07 3:21:35 PM 8/22/07 3:21:35 PM 182 william schweiker spoken about in religious and moral terms. Yet things began to change with the twentieth century and its horrible violence and suffering. Theologians , religious thinkers, philosophers, and political theorists started to reconsider the place of mercy in debates about justice. War crimes tribunals , the United Nations, commissions on truth and reconciliation in South Africa and elsewhere, and the World Council of Churches heighten the awareness that suffering and conflict must be addressed in new ways. Some years ago the philosopher Hannah Arendt offered a basic insight about forgiveness and justice as political and not religious acts. Arendt argued that forgiveness, which she defined as the ability to begin anew after ruinous human action, is basic to politics. She even insisted that the “discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth.” Of course, Arendt quickly acknowledged that acts of forgiveness, the sparing of the vanquished, and even the right to commute a death sentence are found in other traditions, say, among the ancient Romans. The biblical message, she insisted, is unique in that the power to forgive is a “human power” in which God forgives those who show mercy (cf. the Lord’s Prayer). Arendt understood this discovery in purely philosophical and political terms and thus without reference to the divine. Yet she was not the only one to insist on the importance of reconciliation in politics. The great movements of liberation in the twentieth century inspired by Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela insisted on reconciliation as a political act. Perhaps we must think about social life differently in light of the realities confronting people around the world. In what follows, I want to explore these matters of justice and mercy with respect to matters of criminal justice from the perspective of work in Christian theological ethics. I intend to do so mindful of the wider, global debate about the relation between justice and reconciliation in political existence. Let me begin by clarifying the central claim and direction of my argument. What Will Be Argued and How My intention in what follows is to develop a conception of mercy, what I call “responsible mercy,” in relation to the demands of justice. I will do so by drawing on the resources of one specific religious tradition, realizing that other arguments could and should be made...