Changing Paradigms: Punishment and Restorative Discipline. By Paul Redekop. Scottdale, Pa.: Herald, 2008.
Good Punishment?: Christian Moral Practice and U.S. Imprisonment. By James Samuel Logan. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008.
“We have a saying in the African-American church,” a student of mine wrote. “`There but for the grace of God go I’.” Should I gently inform her that the words come from the 17th century English poet John Donne? Or let it pass and spare her the embarrassment?
Reviewing these books has made me realize she was more right than I. The black church really does believe that great line from Donne; many white Christians’ politics of punishment suggest they don’t. Donne could look out on those prisoners heading for the gallows and have his pride clipped wondering at the ways of providence, which alone separates his fate from theirs. No sinner has reason to boast before a convict. In the African-American community, where more than a quarter of newborn boys can expect to spend time in jail at some point in their lives, Christians know this bedrock theological truth in their gut. “We” are no better than “they,” in fact, for members of the body of Christ, “we” is “they.”
The United States of America incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation. More than Russia. Iran. North Korea. Cuba. Our 2 million inmates, if they were gathered in a single locale, would be a city the size of Houston. For the last generation or two in American politics there’s been no better way to curry electoral favor than to promise to be “tough on crime,” no faster way to lose that favor than to succumb to being seen as “soft on crime.” The result is what’s been justly called the “prison-industrial complex,” in which small post-agricultural and industrial communities see their economic salvation, politicians see their electoral future, and citizens see their safety in prison-building. We spend some $60 billion a year spent on it. And what do we have to show for it? No one is made more virtuous, many millions are made more vicious, and released back into our neighborhoods. And depending on how you slice it, the crime rate is not significantly reduced from when we first took this tack. We have, in the words of friend and convict-author Jens Soering, An Expensive Way to Make Bad People Worse.
One would think the world’s greatest democracy, the most Christian among the economically-advanced nations, would be outraged, ashamed and ready to take to the streets over the fact that we imprison more of our own than any other nation at present or in history. Perhaps we don’t because those of us with money don’t sweat the caging of people who are poorer and darker skinned than we are. In fact, we feel safer because of it, or we wouldn’t direct our politicians to keep locking them up.
So what should we do about it? What alternative do we have to warehousing two and a half million souls?
James Logan pushes toward something he calls a “politics of ontological intimacy.” It’s how “radical human bondedness amidst difference might be developed to take Christians to a fuller, more dynamic, and more socially responsible practice of good punishment.” He wants to leave us space to “chastise”—to correct wrongdoing in a way that leads to the transformation and flourishing of the wrongdoer—rather than take vengeance. And as Christians we should do so “informed both by the story and model of communal tragedy [of our prison system] and celebration symbolized by the narrative of a bloodstained cross.”
This was Logan’s doctoral dissertation at Princeton, where he worked with great religious intellects Cornel West and Jeffrey Stout. He teaches now at the Quaker Earlham College in Indiana (ironically enough, since Quakers inspired our current system of “penitentiaries”). His book is blessedly more engaged with present social reality than much academic theology—laying out in several chapters the grim reality of our prison system with a social critic’s sharp eye. I cannot resist passing on two factoids. For every one black male college graduate in this country, there are 100 in jail. And this country spends more on jail construction and maintenance than it does on public schools. Both those facts could call for a lifetime of theological analysis on race and public priorities, and Logan offers astute commentary on both. And Logan offers countless points of reflection like this: in many neighborhoods prison has lost any stigmatization. It is just assumed young black men will go. So they don’t fear it. They just make plans for how to survive it. Put that in your argument for deterrence and smoke it.
Logan has sections that make for deep reading on the racism of our prison system and the manner in which the “war on drugs” has become a war on women—they’re among the fastest growing segments of the incarcerated. When you consider that ¾ of women behind bars are mothers, and some 2% of all children in the US have a parent behind bars, you can see the wisdom of Logan’s lament: “The future stability of whole communities is jeopardized.”
Logan also has a sharp eye for the implicit theological mistakes made in the corrections system we so blithely support. For example, we tend to evaluate crime as though all people are isolated individuals. Punishing the criminal merely punishes that one, and “`other persons are unaffected by that punishment in every way except in calculations of the desirability of engaging in crime’.” But when we lock up the mothers of our most vulnerable children, is it any wonder an entire neighborhood suffers?
Logan then turns to theological resources, especially the work of Stanley Hauerwas, in search of an alternative. Duke’s theologian is interested in how to punish well. But as in all his work he is interested in specifically Christian speech about sin and grace, and only secondarily interested in what non-Christians in liberal social orders should do. Hauerwas is committed to taking forgiveness more seriously than sin. Sin (of which crime is a subset) is, in fact, its own punishment in Christian parlance. The gospel is good news not only for sinners but for their worst subclass: murderers. Did not Jesus forgive his own murderers on the cross? In doing so Jesus inaugurated a new reality, in which forgiveness is more powerful than violence, which Christians live into now by his Spirit. We do not evaluate a course of action on its effectiveness (in fact, Logan is at pains to argue, prison more likely exacerbates crime than alleviates it), but by its faithfulness. Finally, Christians know we cannot make our children entirely safe—and any politician promising to do so is a liar.
Logan is drawn to Hauerwas partly because neither man wants to sugarcoat the reality of the pain caused by crime. Logan testifies in a personal aside: “As much as I would like to see the rapists and murderers of some of my family’s best friends mercilessly punished, I recognize that passion with which we pursue retributive degradation tears apart the bonds of social affection.” The pair agrees with interlocutor Oliver O’Donovan, for whom society punishes as a way of rendering judgment against evil acts. No one is done a favor by pretending violence doesn’t exist or turning away from the details of its horror. Both Logan and Hauerwas agree with John Howard Yoder that God’s way with evil is to “swallow it up, drown it in the bottomless sea of His crucified love.”
Hauerwas’s own preferred way to punish Christians is excommunication, especially as practiced by Mennonites, as a “call to come home by helping us locate how we have alienated ourselves from God and those that gather to worship God.” Logan, a Mennonite himself, is unimpressed. The very term is cruel, suggesting exclusivity rather than the restoration of social fabric suggested in a term like “care-frontation.” Hauerwas is right to insist we need healing practices of memory—instead of evading the pain of a horrible crime we should face it full on in the confidence of God’s forgiveness. But how’s that work ‘in the real world’ exactly?
Logan isn’t sure, but he sure is mad at Hauerwas for not showing him how. Hauerwas’s church is made of people who “get a pass on making the society come out right.” Hauerwas worries such messy-handed engagement in the real world will “spoil the purity” of the church, which “sits on a hill and views its life of virtue as a gift to society.” Finally Hauerwas makes “of the body of Christ an idol,” engaging in “churchianity,” rather than true Christian faith.
But why did Logan bother to read Hauerwas in the first place? Because he was drawn to the resources Hauerwas’s thought provides to a church trying to figure out what it has to say to a wider world. Excommunication is something we Christians do. Not often, not well, but it is a distinctive Christian practice. Who knows how the world will learn from this practice? And if Logan wants to push the practice out beyond the church into new social forms he would be Hauerwas’s guest. This is why Hauerwas agrees with a shrug when accused of insufficient engagement with the world. His task has been enriching Christian speech, restoring Christian memory of treasures we’ve lost, seeing that we have something worth saying when we talk to the non-baptized. Logan screeches: “You should talk to the world!” Hauerwas responds, “You’re right. Can you help me do it, with what we’ve learned about our own vocabulary and practices?”
Logan does have some suggestions: restorative justice (more below), decriminalization of narcotics, and most importantly, a turn away from the politics of degrading prisoners, what Logan calls, in a borrowed phrase, “The science of kicking ass.” We must treat the worst among us with dignity, else we simply implicate ourselves in their violence. In this Logan is lightyears ahead of most politicians and many Christians. His question is, at heart, a communitarian one: what sort of people is prison making us? Is our society helping individuals choose the good, and so making us a better people? The implied answer from his onslaught of stories about the harm wrought by prison is an eloquent “no.”
Paul Redekop has a much more explicit resolution for those ready for an alternative to mass incarceration. Let’s do away with punishment. We will need to maintain discipline, yes. Some form of detention may be necessary from time to time. But restorative justice can replace our system’s basis of punitive degradation of our fellow human beings.
Redekop’s “world without punishment” would consider the needs of the victims first. This is restorative justice’s greatest genius in my mind. Our current system hardly considers victims’ needs for information at all (Redekop gives a personal vignette in which an act of arson against his home was resolved. He only learned by happening across a minor news item in the newspaper months later). Mayhem resulted when the early modern state decided a crime was an office against the sovereign. Crime then amounted to treason—so punishment ratcheted up accordingly and the rending of a community’s social fabric was forgotten. Restorative justice, by contrast, treats the offender as a human being and his offense in the context of a community. Its simple but profound goal is the repair of relationships.
This may sound like the sort of pie in the sky we might expect from a Canadian Mennonite. But Redekop knows of what he speaks—he has been a mediator in restorative justice himself, and so writes not only as an academic but as a practitioner who has seen it work. Restorative justice has also worked on a mass scale in Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in places like South Africa. There the enormous scale of injustice plus the willingness to grant amnesty in exchange for truthful testimony has yielded social repair many never thought possible. Countries like Canada and New Zealand have replaced much of their juvenile justice system especially with restorative alternatives. It has the possibility of shifting massive costs away from our burdened court systems and our bloated prisons. It is practiced in nascent form by a number of aboriginal communities Redekop chronicles. It was also practiced, he argues, in scripture. For all of the Old Testament’s promulgations of capital offenses, only 4 executions are recorded in Israel’s scripture—clearly the emphasis among God’s chosen was on the amelioration of hatred and not its fomentation through vengeance. This book has much to recommend it.
But I fear it will be undercut by its author’s excessive judicial and theological confidence in his position. “The sad fact is that retribution and punishment can never be justified, and they never ‘work’ in any of the ways claimed.” Never? We “find no evidence that punishment deters anyone from reoffending.” None? These sorts of categorical claims can be falsified by just one counter-example, and simply claim too much.
Further Redekop’s confidence about restorative alternatives seems to rest on a peculiarly optimistic anthropology. As his forward writer, restorative visionary Howard Zehr writes, it “pulls together what everyone already knows within themselves.” Really? If we all nascently know retribution is bad, why do so many Americans want so many of their fellows in cages? Restorative justice is much better than an effort to balance the scales with retribution, so it is “more intuitively satisfying” a response to injustice. To whose intuition? Jesus’ welcoming of the little ones shows the “fundamental goodness of children.” Actually it took the Enlightenment for anyone to believe in that. The image one is left with of restorative justice is a nice big meeting in which everyone agrees that a wrong was done, the perpetrator is sorry, and will work in his victim’s garden every Saturday for a month, like a good boy (a prisoner-friend tells me restorative justice cherry picks such cases of youthful indiscretion, and so says little to murder cases for example). Redekop rattles off lists of what an offender “must” do for his system to work: take moral responsibility for his actions, notice their consequences, be an active participant in the restoration process, and so on. The key question is what happens if he chooses not to do what he “must”? Proponents of retribution will point to these points of excessive optimism and reply, with world-weariness, that many criminals aren’t so amenable. What’s the old adage? “A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged”?
Punishment operates as a substitute for original sin for Redekop. It explains all the world’s ills, and we are left to assume its elimination would lead to the peaceable kingdom. The evil Hitler unleashed on the world is explained by the physical and emotional abuse he suffered as a child at the hand of his father. The claim fits with Redekop’s call to recognize the violence done to a criminal that results in his inflicting further violence without thereby excusing his own deeds. Yet it feels a bit precious to feel bad for poor baby Adolf, and not quite sufficiently thick in its explanation of the mystery of evil.
Redekop has a fully intelligible call for an end to corporal punishment on children—even parents who disagree should see the wisdom of his position. Yet both the Hitler claim and the proclamation against corporal punishment overshoot. Redekop is horrified that 94% of parents in the US still approve of the use corporal punishment against toddlers. He has some counter-proposals: child-proofing the house could prevent confrontation. Put yourself in the child’s place: if she cannot talk she cannot understand your instructions. Take the time to explain the rules. And love them. If we do these things—if Hitler’s dad had done these things—untold misery could be avoided.
If you find this route to avoiding corporal punishment plausible, I have the real doctrine of Original Sin to explain to you. Sin is there through no act of our own, but an act of our first ancestors, the replication of which we can’t avoid without Jesus’ saving work. Or, to put it in everyday terms, when a child is well-loved, knows and understands a rule, precisely then he’ll break it and smile at you. What to do then is a genuine problem! But it is no good pretending the problem wouldn’t exist if only parents loved enough. It is as old as Adam.
And worse still is Redekop’s explanation that most of those parents are evangelical Christians. He suspects that Nietzsche may be right that Christian visions of punishment in the afterlife yield punitive attitudes in this one. An interesting and even troubling suggestion that. Yet then he turns to researchers who show that evangelicals are more likely to spank. For they have a “narrow understanding of grace,” an arbitrary and judgmental punishing God, and the need to “beat” these beliefs into their children. The little ones are “taught to obey without question,” or even act out to make their parents’ abuse plausible, and thus “save” their parents. Finally they are born again themselves, and accept their parents’ beliefs before beating them into their own children. Redekop gives as an example Puritans’ corporal practices and specifically George Whitefield’s over-scrupulous memory of his misdeeds as a child.
But Whitefield turned out OK, didn’t he? So did one or two other recipients of spankings. And if Redekop really wants to turn around the prison-industrial system in the US, he’s going to have to appeal to the theological instincts of evangelicals and show them the Jesus they worship promises “release to the captives,” and eats with sinners instead of jailing them. The sorts of scholarly lampooning of evangelicals’ beliefs and practices suggests he doesn’t know them, trust them as potential allies, or want anything other than their faith to be removed, so their punishing can be removed, so the world can be safe. It is all a tad more complicated than that.
It is hard to believe that there was ever a time without mass incarceration. But there was. The Quakers who meant to reform our system of punishment by suggesting enforced solitude are much to blame for our “penitentiaries”—aptly named for their original vision, if not for our present practice. In a bastardization of the priesthood of all believers the Quakers convinced the rest of us to enforce monastic solitariness on all evildoers. The Catholic genius for monasticism assumed only some would be called. For those not called, ascetical rigor could be downright harmful (thanks to Oliver O’Donovan for this observation). We have plenty of evidence to show that is the case. Yet a few prisoners do take to the monastic rule of prison. Others preach the gospel, throwing seed on ground that turns out, surprisingly enough, to be more fertile than it looks.
One cannot read too much about what we do to those we lock up without despairing. It’s not easy to come up with alternatives—though restorative justice programs look more promising all the time, and drug treatment and mental institutions would be a start. With Donne and the black church we can see ourselves in those we imprison, and eschew any Manichean split between our essential goodness and their essential badness. And Christians have plenty of stories of the Lord using prisoners, blessing prisoners, bending their bars and confounding their captors. Couldn’t we expect delivery to the captives to be small potatoes for one whom the grave could not hold?
Find the first part of this article series by Professor Jason Byassee here, at Books & Culture.
