Prisoners In Christ

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How Can Community Be Restored?

March 1, 2013 - Uncategorized

How can community be restored when so many people have been impacted by the corrosive effects of crime and punishment?  When offense occurs, do we make a collective effort to bring healing to the victim?  Or, do we appease the impulse to dispatch retribution to the offender?  And, if so, after punishment is imposed, does it bring an end to the cycle of offense?

Last year more than 700,000 people were admitted to our nation’s state and federal prisons.  According to the restorative justice model, this number represents a multitude of present victims and, potentially, future offenders.  These “stakeholders” 1 include the reporting victim, the offender, and radiates out to family, friends and the community.

One example of how the insidious nature of the cycle of offense transforms victims into offenders is seen where children with an incarcerated parent have an 80% likelihood of spending time in prison themselves.2 In 2007, more than 1.7 million children under the age of 18 had a parent living in prison.3

For any push toward restoring community to be meaningful there must be consensus on principle.  As Christians, living in a society that is divided over how justice should be administered and healing can be achieved, we have inherited our principle in the ministry of reconciliation. And yet, since the late 1960’s we have withdrawn from the domestic human rights arena.

History has taught us that wherever the principle of reconciliation is applied, en masse, the cycle of offense is interrupted and humanity is restored.  With people like Mandela, King, Ghandi, Bonhoeffer, Jesus and the apostle Paul, social change began with a love for people.

Today we acknowledge the cries for a change in the human and social condition, but it appears as though we have forgotten how to administer the principle of reconciliation , e masse, as the Body of Christ.  Can community be restored?  Absolutely!  But not until the body becomes malcontent with human suffering.

Parting Thought:

The gospel at its best deals with the whole man, not only his soul, but also his body, not only his spiritual well-being, but also his material well-being.  Any religion that professes to be concerned about the soul of men but not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social condition that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religions awaiting burial.”4

Sources:

  1. Howard Zehr, The Little Book of Restorative Justice. Pennsylvania: Good Books, 2002. 13
  2. “Coping with Incarceration – From the Other Side of the Bars” Corrections Today, Vol. 59, No. 6 (October 1997), 96-98; www.nomorevictimsinc.org
  3. Lauren E. Glaze and Laura M. Maruschak.  “Parents in Prison and Their Minor Children.” Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice.
  4. Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. Edited by James M. Washington. (New York. Harper Collins 1986) 38.