-
Catholic Responses to Our Criminal Justice Crisis
- Augsburg Fortress Publishers
- Chapter
- Additional Information
2 Catholic Responses to Our Criminal Justice Crisis While our criminal justice systems are in crisis, their current state is fundamentally intertwined with a crisis of social justice in the United States. On one hand, our criminal justice systems reflect numerous injustices that mar our society. The creation of mass incarceration is the result of economic, cultural, political, and social factors coalescing into a drive for more punitive criminal justice systems. On the other hand, these systems help sustain social injustices that marginalize, disempower, and endanger our neighbors. Because of particular policy decisions, money has been funneled away from education, mental healthcare, substance abuse treatment, job training, and other efforts that could contribute to the well-being of members of our society. Criminal justice systems have limited employment and educational opportunities for those caught up in them, as well as exacerbated poverty and curtailed civil rights. These effects extend beyond people convicted of crime to affect family members, friends, neighborhoods and communities, and ultimately, society as a whole. The burden of these crises, however, is not borne evenly by everyone in our society; our failures of criminal and social justice disproportionately affect members of racial and ethnic minority groups and people who have been socioeconomically disadvantaged. As a result of these interlocking problems, these members of our society are not treated as fully human persons who are due the resources necessary to participate in the dignity, unity, and equality of all people. Any adequate response to our circumstances must move beyond questions about criminal justice alone to consider its relationship with social justice. Not only must we ask how we ought to respond to individuals who commit crime and to their victims. We must also examine the broader social, economic, political, and cultural contexts of victims and offenders as well as of our society as a whole. Our responses to victims and offenders depend in part upon our understanding of the kind of people we want to be and what we want our 45 communities to be like. Our responses depend upon our character, beliefs, and actions about the type of society we wish to create. Given these concerns, our responses will depend in part upon our religious worldviews. In recent years, Christian theologians have entered into the conversation about our criminal justice crisis, offering reflections on how Christianity could offer alternative ideologies and practices of criminal justice, which then might support substantial institutional and social reform. Lee Griffith and Christopher Marshall, for example, each have written surveys of biblical texts that address these issues.1 Timothy Gorringe in God’s Just Vengeance offers a history of the relationship of penal ideology to Christian theology, especially Anselm’s satisfaction theory of atonement, and the effects of this ideology upon criminal justice practices.2 In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Punishment, T. Richard Snyder connects certain Protestant theologies of sin and grace to American interpretations of crime and redemption.3 Mark Lewis Taylor indicts what he calls “the prison-industrial complex” (borrowed from Christian Parenti4 ) and calls Christians to stand with “the executed God” against the racist and classist imperial dominance of our criminal justice systems.5 James Samuel Logan offers a constructive Christian social ethics of “good punishment” based in what he calls a “politics of ontological intimacy” with people in prison as an alternative framework for our current criminal justice systems.6 Each of these texts is important for initiating conversations among Christians about our criminal justice crises. Beyond these contributions, on a popular level, Charles Colson and his organization, Prison Fellowship, have worked toward the creation of 1. Lee Griffith, The Fall of the Prison: Biblical Perspectives on Prison Abolition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993). Also, Christopher D. Marshall, Beyond Retribution: A New Testament Vision for Justice, Crime, and Punishment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001). 2. Timothy Gorringe, God’s Just Vengeance: Crime, Violence, and the Rhetoric of Salvation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 3. T. Richard Snyder, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Punishment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001). 4. Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (London, New York: Verso, 1999). Parenti rejected the term “prison-industrial complex” shortly after the publication of his book. For a discussion of his reasons, see Theodore Hamm, “Our Prison Complex,” The Nation, October 11, 1999, 23. Mike Davis coined “prison-industrial complex” in his article “Hell Factory in the Field: A Prison Industrial Complex,” The Nation, February 20, 1995, 229. The foremost theorist and...