Since the time of the Reformation Anabaptists, other historic peace churches, and more recently many Christians of other denominations have refused to go along with those who use war as a means of dealing with fellow human beings that their society considers enemies. However, many Christians, including evangelicals, go along with our society in dealing with offenders by means of violence and force. Politicians promise to wage war on crime, which usually translates into more guns and other hardware as well as building more prisons. It usually also encourages stereotyping and even demonizing of criminals or lawbreakers, as often happens to an enemy in war. Above all, dealing with criminals usually means retribution, punishment. That, as we see again in war, is retaliation.

Criminal justice can also be compared to war with respect to law. It is often said, rightly, that war is the result of a breakdown of law. In a sense that is also true in the case of criminal justice. Too often people regard the apprehension and conviction and sentencing of offenders as a success of the law. But in a truer sense it is a failure of the law, because the real purpose of law is its observance. On that accounting crime is a breakdown of law, which results then in the resort to force, to police action to deter unlawful conduct.

Many Christians have trouble relating their faith and the world of criminal justice. These worlds are pretty far apart. In fact this should not be so. In the classic cadences of the Christian church's liturgy, Christians confess before God that they have offended against his holy laws. They further confess that, although guilty, they have not been condemned, but justified by faith. When we stop to think about it we realize the gospel and criminal justice do in fact concern themselves with common problems of ethical conduct, the confrontation of offenders, justice, and human community. The Bible is not unrealistic about the intrusion of evil into God’s god world. From the murder of Abel to the sins Paul addresses in the Corinthian church, God has made provision for dealing with sinners, those who disobey his will, his gracious law, and that provision is salvation, not condemnation. There is condemnation, to be sure, but only after offenders against God’s law have been offered and rejected his grace.

Now, court procedures may still include an oath upon the Bible or an oath before God. And yet the language and spirit of the Christian faith is notably absent from the sphere of American law and criminal justice. If we heard of a judge who pronounced sentence by saying, "Go and sin no more," we would expect him to immediately be relieved of his office, unless we thought we were hearing lines from another sacrilegious TV comedy. Even though many policemen, lawyers, and judges are members of Christian churches, the message of the church about sin, salvation, forgiveness, grace, faith, and regeneration rarely if ever penetrates the everyday world of our police offices, court chambers, jails and prisons. That world employs another language --law, crime, charges, arraignment, trial, sentencing, prison. It also, it is unfortunate to say, manifests another spirit. Christian faith and criminal justice seem to have gone their separate ways in the modern world. Or Christian thought has been pushed out of the world of law and criminal justice by modern secular developments, though the fault may all too possibly have been a growing irrelevance of the church

Many people in our society, Christians included, it is unfortunate to say, amicably accept a dual system. The church deals with sins that are non-issues in secular law, such as adultery and promiscuousness, maybe with greed and pride. Criminal justice deals with shoplifting, burglary, drunk driving, assault and homicide. Most Christians are content with such a two-track system. They consider the criminal justice system to be part of our Christian America and uncritically accept its spirit and its methods, ignoring the wide gulf that separates it from the gospel.

We may have developed a blind spot in the application of the peace message in the realm of criminal justice. Missing in the secular criminal justice system of our state and federal governments is a concern and, indeed, provision for offering offenders the gospel--that is, presenting them with the invitation to repent, receive forgiveness, be reconciled, make restitution where that is called for, be regenerated and transformed into ethical conduct by the spirit of Christ.

In that light reflect for a moment upon the standard practice in our current criminal justice system in its treatment of an offender. It asks only two questions. First, is the accused guilty as charged? This is a most appropriate question. We must avoid false charges against innocent people. Recent serious research has uncovered numerous cases of wrongful imprisonment of people in Los Angeles and Illinois, to cite only two examples. Second, if an accused person is found guilty the system asks: What is the punishment? What is not asked by any lawyer or judge is whether the offender wants, by the grace of God, to receive the gospel, repent, be born again, and make restitution to the extent that such is possible, and be reconciled with the victim.

Now, our criminal justice system proposes to include a Christian or at least religious component, chaplaincy service. But please note: such chaplaincy service comes into the picture only after the offender is in jail or prison, and when it does it collides head-on with the basic criminal justice system’s method and message. The chaplaincy ministry, if it is genuinely true to the gospel, tells the offender he can repent and be forgiven, receive remission of sins. But with too few exceptions the criminal justice system says: You will be punished for your offences regardless of whether or not you repent and ask for forgiveness.

The world of criminal justice assumes that punishment will change behavior, that fines or prison will, if not make people good, at least deter them from criminal conduct. Our criminal justice system thus places an inordinate confidence in punishment to deal with crime. This is ironic because Christians rightly claim the New Testament teaches us that grace, not law, is the way to deal with offenders. Most Christians tend to think of law in the religious sense as doing good works in order to merit God's favor and salvation. But as we can see from the New Testament, in Judaism law meant the use of punitive coercion to deter undesirable behavior. That is why the unconverted Saul tried to bring Jewish Christians to Jerusalem in chains. And that is why the Jews five times flogged the converted Paul to get him to quit preaching the gospel. But Paul contended that the law does not have the power to make people good. Only grace can do that. Yet still today our criminal justice system is committed to punishment as the way to make people good -- or at least make them stop their bad conduct, whether that is shoplifting or armed robbery. In this respect criminal justice, like an army in war, resorts to punitive action to force an “enemy” into ceasing what is considered unacceptable conduct.

Now, we can concede that societies will find it necessary to have some organization and procedure for stopping wrongdoers in order change their behavior and to protect society. We need not, however, take for granted the connection between what a given body of law identifies as crime and what it prescribes to deal with an instance of crime. For example, we can surely agree that stealing is wrong, but we need not concede that the penalty for theft should be cutting off the right hand of a thief. It is very hard, though, to get some conservative Muslims to make this distinction. So also it is most difficult to get some people in our society to call in question the penalty of imprisonment prescribed for violation of many laws. To question the penalty seems to imply questioning the morality of the law itself. It suggests being "soft on crime." Conversely, to endorse a law on theft seems to imply an endorsement of the most common penalty our society traditionally or currently imposes, jail or prison.

In an earlier era British society made excessive use of the penalty of death by hanging, and that for a wide array of crimes, including pickpocket theft. Several Southern U.S. states imposed the death penalty for rape until the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited the death penalty for rape on the grounds that it constituted cruel and unusual punishment. It was for the most part professing Christians who first wrote those laws prescribing the death penalty for theft and rape, and they considered that penalty justifiable and right. We now see the matter differently. What we do not seem to be willing or able to do much better than people of a former time is to make an impartial review of whether our present customary punishment of prison for most offenses is justifiable or even effective.

We should remember that our modern Western prison system is not even two centuries old. Penitentiaries were begun by the Quakers about 200 years ago to provide an alternative to the way of retribution, to provide offenders with the solitude that might, it was hoped, bring them to penitence. The primary intention of the penitentiary was the rehabilitation of the offender. But in the course of time it became punishment. As Charles Colson has said: "The very fact that in public discussion, at least in America, the two terms – ‘imprisonment’ and ‘punishment’-- tend to be used interchangeably suggest how bankrupt our thinking is in this field. If someone breaks the law, society says, ‘send him to prison.’ Any punishment other than prison is met with a howl of protest because society believes the offender has escaped punishment. Unfortunately, this is the way people have been conditioned to think" (Crime and the Responsible Community, ed. John Stott and Nicholas Miller, Eerdmans, 1980, p. 152).

Prison does punish. It inflicts exquisite suffering in the form of loneliness and, above all, loss of freedom. Isn’t it interesting that those people who say prisons have become "country clubs" or "Hiltons" (and they are the people who have never been in prison) are the ones who in other contexts seem to be the first to claim that they would die rather than lose their freedom?

The infliction of punishment, though it is an unquestioned axiom of our society, is precisely where our existing criminal justice system fails most pathetically. One of the phenomenal illusions of our society is this: while we think we will make offenders pay -- and continue to escalate prison sentences --our prison system is an organized, structured, institutionalized, systematic way of letting offenders off. This may seem to contradict what has just been claimed about prisons as punishment. Let me therefore explain.

The popular myth has it that convicts "doing time" are paying their debt to society. In fact, punishment is a substitute for offenders making right what they did wrong. It gives them or reinforces in them the illusion that their punishment somehow makes up for their offense. Those who have engaged in prison visitation have likely noticed how even prison inmates have internalized this idea. Like the society that has sentenced them to long terms in prison, convicts too often are conned into thinking that their punishment is "paying their debt to society.”

What happens in the punishment of imprisonment is not unlike what often happens in the case of a problem such as alcoholism. Alcoholics sometimes try to punish themselves for their addiction, but this punishment does not have the power to change their behavior. On the contrary, it becomes an attempted trade-off and thus an evasion of the real need -- to cease the undesirable behavior.

The problem with the punishment of imprisonment is not only the illusion it fosters that offenders are "paying" for their crime. Prison actually prevents the possibility of achieving what is really needed, namely, for an offender to make restitution and seek reconciliation. It prevents this goal in two effective ways. First, prison physically removes offenders from society, making it impossible for them to go to the people they have wronged to find reconciliation and, if needed, to make restitution. Second, prison economically removes offenders from gainful employment, making it impossible for them to earn the money to make restitution.

Someone who stops to reflect upon our prevailing system cannot help but see the absurdity of it. In what sense is a burglar "paying his debt" by his prison term? In a sense he is incurring more debt in that the citizen he robbed must pay taxes to maintain him in prison and often to put his family on welfare. In another sense society incurs a debt to him if its sentence is unjust and if, for a theft of only a few hundred dollars, society robs him of thousands of dollars of lost income which he could make if he held a job. If, for example, a burglar is imprisoned for six months for stealing tires from a store, he loses about $4000 in lost wages at minimum wage levels, but the storeowner remains resentful because his losses are never repaid.

Then there is also the injustice of robbing an imprisoned offender of his marriage, home, and family. So often imprisonment breaks up marriages and families when it leads to divorce. Prisoners are justifiably outraged because they know this injustice of robbing them of a marriage and family is often all out of proportion to the offense they perpetrated. We may say, "That's tough! That's the cost of criminal behavior." But that does not alter the fact that before God the scales have been reversed, then we may be guilty of a more egregious injustice than the offender committed, and God will hold us accountable for such an injustice.

Another evil of the prison system is that it reinforces an offender’s behavior by confirming the practice of inflicting suffering as a means to power. In this respect it is again like war. And it is also like a parent striking a child who has just struck another child, saying, "This will teach you not to hit other kids!" The real message the child gets, naturally, is that hitting is the way to power, the means to control and domination. It is also the lesson people take from war: violent coercion is the way to domination.
Something like this is what also happens in prison. It too often simply reinforces the violent mentality offenders have already developed. One cannot resist the impression that punishment represents the moral bankruptcy of a society that cannot think of an alternative way of dealing with offenders, that is deceiving itself about the failure of punishment.

What is wrong with this all too familiar picture? There is none of what the Bible calls expiation -- the removal of sin and wrong. Expiation is the removal of a barrier between two parties. Unless a wrong, an offense, is removed by the act of reconciliation and restitution, there is no restoration of community, of what the Bible calls Shalom. As already mentioned, incarceration discourages or even prevents reconciliation and the restoration of community.

Let us never forget that Christianity makes the mission of the expiation of wrong the heart of its message. And Christians should make the effecting of such restoration of offenders their area of expertise, their ministry. The redemption of offenders has been the church’s historic business. This answer is given already in Mosaic Law, which is often considered pre-Christian or even sub-Christian. Yet Mosaic Law calls for restitution and reconciliation in case after case, as we see in Exodus 21-23. The teaching of Jesus and the whole New Testament reinforce the principle. In all our dealings with offenders we should begin with the urgent and serious summons -- "invitation" is almost too mild a word -- to such offenders to seek reconciliation with the persons they have wronged, to make right what they did wrong, and to make restitution where such is called for and to the extent that such restitution is possible. There is even justification for the use of a measure of constraint in thus summoning offenders to make right their wrong.

Since removal of wrong -- the elimination of the obstacle between people created by an offense -- is indispensable to the restoration of offenders, several implications follow. First, regardless of protestations of leaders in our society that they would like to do away with the problem of crime, as long as the process is formally and officially structured to prevent the rehabilitation of offenders rather than to effect it, we can never have real rehabilitation of offenders. Indeed, we must say that a society that thus hinders the opportunities for removal of wrong rather than encouraging it will continue to be plagued by crime and will deserve to be.

The present criminal justice system does not always demand prison. We have provisions for probation, used mostly, however, without requiring the offender to make things right and without an adequate support system to help the offender find a new way. Reporting once a month to a probation officer is not adequate. As a result, probation too often ends up fostering in the offender’s mind the idea that he was simply "let off.”

We have been illustrating for the most part with property offenses, because up to 90 percent of all offenses are property offenses. Moreover, it is easiest to show the redemptive principle of restitution for such offenses. Though many people are rightly upset by crimes such as burglary, they may be more ready to entertain the idea of an alternative to prison in the case of theft than in cases of violent crimes such as assault, especially if they recognize the further cost of imprisonment in addition to the loss entailed by the theft as compared to the possibility of compensation by restitution. This is not to say that we cannot find redemptive ways of dealing also with violent crime. Many Christians have found reconciliation and forgiveness even in cases of homicide. But we will already have come a long way once we have accepted the non-punitive way in the high proportion of all offenses involving property.

We have not spoken up to this point about the protection of society from crime, but this does not imply that such protection is unimportant. For Christians fidelity to the gospel comes before security. Nevertheless, the Christian way of dealing with offenders according to the gospel happens to offer far more protection from crime than our present criminal justice approach. We must remember that incarcerating offenders often gives us a false sense of security. For every one hundred convicted offenders who go into prison today, ninety-eight or ninety-nine are coming out today. What kind of people are these ex-prisoners coming out? As Charles Olson has pointed out (in Crime and the Responsible Community, p. 153), "Society has spent millions of dollars over the years to create and maintain the proven failure of prisons. Incarceration has failed in its two essential purposes -- correcting the offender and providing permanent protection to society. The recidivism rate of up to eighty percent is the evidence of both." Where programs of victim-offender reconciliation and restitution are established, their recidivism rate is only a fraction of that of ex-prisoners.

We will always have some dangerous offenders who need to be detained. As we have padded cells in our mental hospitals, so we will need to restrain some violent persons for society's safety and for their own good. But as with mental cases, such detention can be effected in a humane way and in a way compatible with Christian love and non-violence.

Christians committed to peace and non-violence have long recognized the implications of their faith for the problem of war. We have not sufficiently recognized its implications for criminal justice. It is time for us to overcome this blind spot in our ethical vision.
Of course, criminal justice may not cut off as many people's lives in death as war does, though it does that in cases of capital punishment. And it did that also in the case of the Waco, Texas, Branch Davidians. Prison merely cuts big chunks out of the middle of people's lives --two, five, ten, or twenty years. Like war, criminal justice also destroys homes, not necessarily the houses, though sometimes again it does that, as in the notorious Philadelphia case some years ago, when a whole block of tenements was firebombed by Philadelphia’s police force and burned to the ground. But even if criminal justice does not destroy homes as property, it often destroys the families living in them, "innocent civilians," as when the absence of a father leads to the break-up of a family.

It is time for people committed to peacemaking to apply the meaning of their faith to the treatment of offenders. We can, of course, try to infiltrate the system to make it better with, for example, chaplaincy. The danger of this, however, is that it can excuse or even simply bless the existing system by merely salving wounds, as a medical corps tends to the wounded in war. Or we can speak prophetically to the system to criticize and improve it. Certainly we can discourage building more prisons. Best of all, we can set up new models of dealing with offenders that show a new way other than the retaliation of punishment, that instead make the reconciling power of the cross a reality in the world of criminal justice. Numerous Victim Offender Reconciliation Programs (VORP) have been set up in many parts of the country that demonstrate this alternative model in criminal justice.

Marlin Jeschke
January 23, 2002
From "A Peace Reader," edited by E. Morris Sider and Luke Keefer, Jr., Copyright Evangel Publishing House, 2002.