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On February 29, the Woodstock Theological Center sponsored a forum titled "The U.S. Penal System: Restorative and/or Retributive Justice?" The aim of the forum was to raise questions that will lead to the reform of our current penal system. Clearly it is not working as it should. Some revealing facts: Today the United States has approximately 1.8 million people behind bars: about 100,000 in federal custody, 1.1 million in state custody, and 600,000 in local jails.... The United States now imprisons more people than any other country in the world-perhaps half a million more than Communist China.... Through the first three quarters of this century the nation's incarceration rate remained relatively stable, at about 110 inmates for every 100,000 people. In the mid-1970s, the rate began to climb, doubling in the 1980s and then again in the 1990s. The rate is now 445 per 100,000; among adult men it is about 1,100 per 100,000.... The enormous increase in America's inmate population can be explained in large part by the sentences given to people who have committed non-violent crimes. (Eric Schlosser, "The Prison-Industrial Complex," Atlantic Monthly, December, 1998)
Father Raymond B. Kemp, a senior fellow of the Woodstock Center, moderated
the discussion. The panelists were: Father Michael Bryant, Catholic
chaplain at the District of Columbia Detention Center; Andrew L. Sonner
of the Court of Special Appeals of Maryland; Pat Nolan of Justice Fellowship;
Thomas O'Connor of the Center for Social Research; Darryl Colbert of Catholic
Charities in Washington, D.C.; Matthew Mullane of the Faith, Peace and
Justice program at Boston College; and Michelle A. Roberts, attorney in
the District of Columbia. We present an edited and abridged version
of the forum.
INTRODUCTION
The Reverend Raymond B. Kemp is a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological
Center and coordinator of the Preaching the Just Word Program. He
is the former pastor of St. Augustine Parish (1974-1981) and Holy Comforter-St.
Cyprian Parish (1986-1992), and was secretary for parish life and worship,
Archdiocese of Washington (1981-1986).
This is a very personal subject for me, partly because of my
side ministry as a prison chaplain and because many of my friends are in
the system. But I'll leave that aside to get to the heart of what
this forum is about. At Woodstock, we believe that reflecting on
these issues is the meat, the warp and the woof, if you will, of reading
the gospel, and doing something about them. That is why Woodstock
is interested in creating a vehicle to help parishes (read: congregations,
mosques and synagogues around the country) do something that apparently
the political process is not real good at promoting. And that's what
John Courtney Murray would call a "civilized conversation" about the role
of prisons in achieving criminal justice.
We Catholics use lingo like "sin." Substitute the word
"crime" every time you hear "sin." We use the lingo like "conversion."
Does that sound like rehabilitation? We use "penance" and we even
have a "sacred penitentiary" in our Roman Catholic tradition. But
that lingo has stayed confined to sanctuary or confessional; it hasn't
really been explored. Sister Julia Upton, who's an associate provost
as St. John's University has written a book on the sacrament of reconciliation
and says, "We need to expand our notion of reconciliation." We begin
to do so in a very real way tonight. Last fall we had an afternoon of conversation
with Father Jim Consedine, a priest of the Diocese of Christchurch in New
Zealand, who's been working in the area of restorative justice for 21 years.
In January, I went with Jim Nolan, another Woodstock fellow, to a Fordham
University conference on-and I've never seen these two words in the same
line before- forgiveness and the law. We're here to look at something
perhaps a little bit more narrow when we look at the prison system in these
United States. I'm grateful to you for coming and I'm especially
grateful to the panel.
On arrival here you got a program, I hope, with a very famous
picture on the front: Pope John Paul II and the gentleman who sought his
life. And hopefully too you got a bibliography of readings (see page
10 here). We're looking at a system that has about two million people
incarcerated-that's half a million more than the next incarcerating country
in the world, Russia. So we're incarcerating 500,000 more than "mother
Russia."
What's going on? What's happened? What's right?
What could be right? What's wrong? What do we need to look
at? What questions should we raise if we at Woodstock want to create
a document that might be a discussion starter for parishes, for synagogues,
for mosques across the country?
HEALING A BROKEN SYSTEM
The Reverend Michael Bryant, Ph.D, is the Roman Catholic chaplain at
the District of Columbia Detention Center, and a licensed mental health
therapist. He is the past chair of the National Convocation of Jail
and Prison Ministry and a former pastor.
Twenty years ago, this past Christmas, I started as the District
of Columbia jail's full-time minister. At that time, I think I was
under the general belief, as many are in this country, that prisoners,
people who have broken the law, should be where they're at, in jail, in
prison, being punished for their lawlessness. And that our justice
system of these United States is fair, impartial, and balanced. But
then I listened to the stories of hundreds, now probably thousands, of
men and women who have gone through the District of Columbia jail, and
my early naivete has long since gone away. I now recognize that our
system of criminal justice is not fair, is not impartial, and is not balanced.
Most of us have little experience with the criminal justice system,
unless we're judges, police officers, or correctional officials, so we
only learn of the system by what we hear on the nightly news, and by what
our political leaders tell us. Every evening on the news, there are
often three or four stories that have to do with some horrendous crime
that has taken place in the community, leading us to believe that crime
is everywhere in our community, that we are under siege. And you're
led to believe, by the nightly news, that we need to be very frightened,
and that we need to have even harsher penalties for those who break our
laws and to respond even more harshly when, obviously, we're out of control
as a city.
The others who form our consciences and attitudes towards the
criminal justice system in this country are politicians. Like the
news media who run these sensational stories, obviously to win ratings,
politicians oftentimes will use a "get tough policy" on crime basically
to win votes, because it sounds good. It's a quick fix to very complex
social, economic, and racial problems that we have in our society today.
As I have listened to the stories of the people at the District
jail for all these years, some sad and some familiar themes arose.
Most of them grew up in poverty, in dilapidated public housing. Most
of them dropped out of high school when they were in their first or second
year. Their literacy level is at the fifth-grade level. Eighty
percent are addicted to drugs or alcohol, or a combination of both.
Sixty percent of that 80 percent are non-violent offenders. We in
this country have become harsher and more punitive in our response to people
that we are locking up.
We call it a "war on drugs." It's actually, I think, a
war on the poor of our nation. And we have seen less and less rehabilitative
programs in prisons across this country and less and less after-care programs,
drug treatment programs, in our communities. We have created policies
in this country where we have done away with parole on the federal level;
many states are following suit. We have "three strikes and
you're out" legislation in places like California. We have minimum
sentencing legislation, which adds up to extended stays in prison.
In the last 25 years, the length of prison sentences has grown some 500
percent!
We in this country have become harsher and more punitive in our response
to people that we are locking up. We call it a "war on drugs."
It's actually, I think, a war on the poor of our nation.
The United States, the land of the free, has one-quarter of all
the people who are incarcerated in the world. We have grown our population
of the incarcerated over these last 25 years basically with the poor and
people of color: 48 percent are black, 18 percent are Hispanic. Blacks
make up only 13 percent of our national population, Hispanics make up 9
or 10 percent. What's that all about? The remaining one-third
of those locked up in this country are white people. What they have
in common with their black and brown brothers is that they're poor, addicted,
under-educated, and jobless.
Our recidivism rate in this country is an astronomical 70 percent
for juveniles and 63 percent for adults. Depending on the jurisdiction,
we spend $30,000 a year to incarcerate one person. (That figure runs
as high as $75,000, in New York.) As taxpayers, we could ask why
we have a system that is failing 63 percent or 70 percent of the time to
rehabilitate people and put them back in the community. If you were
in private industry and your business was failing at those rates, you'd
certainly have to change some of the ways you're doing business.
I think many judges, and many people in corrections, and in policing
across the United States, would agree that our system is severely broken
and we need to begin to look at another form, another model, of justice.
The model that we use right now is called a retributive model of justice;
basically it's a model that punishes people. It's a retaliatory system
and it pays back in terms of years or months of pain by incarceration of
a person who obviously has violated the law.
It's called the restorative model of justice which is based on the
biblical understanding . . . . Justice is supposed to lead to healing.
There is another model that has begun to show promise in places
like New Zealand-it was used in South Africa by the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission-and in about 600 jurisdictions here in the United States in
some small ways. It's called the restorative model of justice
which is based upon the Biblical understanding of what justice really is.
Justice is supposed to lead to healing. When crime is committed,
the peace and security of the community is broken. It is smashed;
trust is gone, and it needs to be reestablished and put back into place.
Restorative justice begins that process working with human beings.
By contrast, in the retributive model, the state becomes the
victim and the actual victim in the case is sidelined and used oftentimes
as a prosecutorial witness in the case. The state becomes offended
by the fact you've broken this law, whereas the model of restorative justice
basically is saying: get the people involved. The one who has offended
and the victim sit down together with mediators and with representa-tives
of the court and begin to put the thing back together.
THE POLITICS OF PUNISHMENT
The Honorable Andrew L. Sonner is an Associate Judge on the Court of
Special Appeals of Maryland, and the Chair of the Maryland State Commission
on Criminal Sentencing Policy.
I remember somebody saying at the time of John F. Kennedy's funeral,
"Someday, today will be a long time ago." And I was thinking, "What will
people say about us when this day is a long time ago?" What will
they say about our prison population that is larger than that of all the
other industrialized countries except Russia-and sometimes we're in front
of Russia. We also have more people in prison than they do in all
of China. What will they say about us for having done that?
And we've done that in the last 20 years in which our prison population
has tripled.
Since 1973 we've sentenced more than 6,500 people to death and
executed over 500. We've had the death sentence overturned in over
2,200 cases. And we still have over 3,500 people in the United States
waiting to be executed. What will future generations say about us
for using the death penalty, and what have we said to a community about
the value of life, when we say we are justified in taking life because
of something that somebody did? And let me say as a former prosecutor
who spent 25 years out there, most of the time with the death penalty in
existence: we cannot do it fairly, no matter how hard we try or how sensitive
we are in trying to do it.
Right now, no prosecutor can get elected unless he or she promises
to be tougher than the guy who's in. You want a chief of police who
makes a whole lot of arrests. You want a judge who sentences for
a long period of time. You want a legislature who provides for more
minimum mandatories. The dialogue has gone haywire. And we
need somehow to bring sweet reason back into the process.
THE MORAL COMPONENT OF CRIME
Mr. Pat Nolan is the President of Justice Fellowship and served for
fifteen years in the California State Assembly. He served 25 months
in a federal prison on a charge of racketeering.
I got a view of things after serving fifteen years in the California
legislature. I also served 25 months in a federal penitentiary and
four months in a halfway house. And I had a chance to see, first
hand, the impact of the policies that I'd advocated as a legislator.
God really took the scales from my eyes and I'm grateful for my time in
prison, because he did expose me to what was going on.
As Father Mike said, the system is broken. It's horribly
broken. We lock up two million Americans. That's one out of
every 125 people in the United States of America. If you add parole
and probation, the people who are on supervised release, that's six million.
That's one out of every 42 Americans either directly behind the walls of
a prison or with a probation or parole agent to whom they report.
One in every 42. And yet victims aren't healed from their wounds.
Our communities aren't any safer. The crime rate is down, but there's
growing evidence that officials are "cooking the books," misreporting crimes
to artificially drop it. And even where it has dropped-like the deaths
in New York-we see the shooting of Amadou Diallo, and other incidents that
are deep wounds in our community.
One out of every 42 Americans is either in prison, on probation, or
on parole.
Father Mike also mentioned that two-thirds of ex-prisoners commit
another crime and are back in prison. If you take your car to a mechanic,
and
two-thirds of the time you have to take it back, you'd find a new mechanic.
And yet, we still continue the same thing. I had 25 months to sit
and think about what was wrong with my old view, the injustices, and how
to make it right. And I got ahold of a pamphlet put out by Justice
Fellowship on Restorative Justice called, "Beyond Crime and Punishment."
And this just opened my eyes to things. It essentially says we are
focusing on the wrong thing. We focus on law breaking, whereas crime
is really victim harming.
If all we do is focus on the broken law, then all you can do
is enforce the power of the government, the fist of government, and lock
people up, to punish them. If, on the other hand, you look at crime
as "victim harming," the solution should bring repair to the harm done
to the victim. And when you repair the harm done to the victim through
restitution and reparation, generally the victim becomes very forward looking
and doesn't want to harm and further punish the offender, but says, "I
don't want you to do this again." "What can we do to make you not
do this again?" "How can we change your life?"
Transformation becomes important. I saw the wasted lives
in our prison system; nothing's done to change these folks' lives.
Crime is a moral problem; it's not a legal problem. And that's the
role of the church. We have to call the people of America, call them
to their better selves-both liberals and conservatives. I'm a conservative
Republican, and as a conservative my attitude was, well, "Lock them up
and we'll forget about them." The reality is, the people we lock
up-95 percent of them-are going to get out eventually. They're our
neighbors, and my wife and children have to be concerned what they're like
when they get out. How we treat them inside is going to determine
how they are when they get out.
If we do nothing to deal with their underlying pathologies, and
the difficulties they have in dealing with life, they're not going to make
very good neighbors. So just selfishly we should care. But
also morally we should care, because they are our brothers and sisters.
If we accept Christ's redemption of our sins, we certainly can accept our
brothers' and sisters' sins as equally redeemable.
But liberals are also wrong. Liberals look at all the externalities,
like poverty and ignorance. However, the reality is that there are
plenty of people who are born poor, who don't have good educations, but
who don't harm other people. So we have to deal with the basics in
their lives. Most of these kids haven't been talked to about sin
and the basic moral rules of life.
It's like taking a kid and shoving him onto a basketball court,
but not telling him what the lines are for, what the goals are for.
Don't tell him the rules, and then when he fouls out, we kick him and hit
him, throw him in prison, and after five or ten years, we let him out and
we still haven't talked to him about the rules. Inside prison, we
should talk about the rules of life. Help them reform their lives.
Help them understand they're creatures of God, that God created them with
love. And he sent his son to redeem them of their sins, and if they
live according to those rules they can be happy with God forever.
Inside prison, we should talk about the rules of life. Help them
reform their lives. Help them understand they are creatures of God.
Instead, society tells them they're the products of molecules
bumping around for billions of years and that, by accident, they popped
into life as human beings with no plan, no love, and no future. Why
not live by your own rules? That's what society tells them.
We have an obligation to say to them: "That's wrong. God loves you,
He created you, God doesn't make mistakes. And here are the rules.
Simple rules to live by." We don't have enough police officers to
stop people from doing bad things.
If we do nothing to deal with the moral component of crime, they won't
be able to deal with poverty, ignorance, or anything else.
If we do nothing to deal with the moral component of crime, they
won't be able to deal with poverty, ignorance, or anything else.
And so we have to have that centrality of the gospel and then deal with
them as brothers and sisters to heal them and help them move on to a job,
a home, a good family.
AMERICA'S PENAL SYSTEM: RELIGIOUS ROOTS, THEOLOGICAL QUESTIONS
Mr. Thomas O'Connor is a founder of the Center for Social Research and
has studied the history and philosophy of American corrections systems.
A native of Dublin where he practiced law, he is about to assume direction
of chaplain services for the State of Oregon's corrections system.
Let's go to the time when the present penal system in the United
States was founded. It was the end of the 18th century and the beginning
of the 19th century. There were two systems, both of which were thoroughly
motivated by religious impulses. It was very clear at the beginning
that religiously motivated people thought that they could bring about rehabilitation.
But it wasn't religion in general because you have to have some specific
religion. We all come from some tradition or other. So there
were two traditions in the very beginning.
The first was inspired by the Quaker tradition, a sort of optimistic
theology about who people are and what's going on in people. Speak
to that which is of good in people and God will come out of people.
That was their philosophy. So they set about rehabilitation.
Their ideal was "let's put people in a cell where they can be silent, be
with God, meditate, hear the word of the Lord, hear the pastor speaking
to them, and in that spirituality transformation will happen, and rehabilitation
will take place." Their notion of rehabilitation was restoring a
person to virtue and happiness.
The other tradition came more out of a Calvinist theology, which
was a little more pessimistic about the nature of human beings, more focused
on who's saved, who's not. We know about sin in the world, so it's
a very legitimate tradition, but different. It meant that they built
different types of prisons than the Quaker-inspired prisons. They
built a prison that focused more on what they wanted to bring about, which
was obedience.
They felt that maybe not everybody is saved, maybe not everybody
can be good, but everybody can obey the law. So we instill habits
of work in people, help build their skills, and they will be rehabilitated.
But rehabilitation in this system is obedience and it became a notion of
passive obedience. It focused more on power and on force than on
spirituality. This is the system that focuses on punishment. This
is the present system in the United States. (The other system took
root in Europe, but it faded out in the United States.)
Let's go to a different tradition, the Catholic tradition, which
has never had a big impact on the criminal justice system in this country.
What can we learn from Catholic theological anthropology, its view of the
human person and of God?
One element is the importance of the sacraments and the belief
that God is in the sacraments. Take the sacrament of penance, a rich,
2000-year-old tradition on how to deal with sin. It is an incredibly
complex tradition of working with people to restore and rehabilitate them.
What's the notion of rehabilitation here? It's rehabilitation back
into the community. It's being reconciled to one another. Do
not leave the body, stay with the body-reconcile back into the community.
When you go to penance, there are four elements of it. Confession:
yes, I did something wrong; there's sorrow for that; I do penance for that
which I did wrong; then absolution takes place. You're forgiven.
It's over. That's at odds with our criminal justice system.
There are fourteen states in this country where, if you've committed a
felony, you can never vote again in your life. You can do your time,
pay back your money, heal a victim, but you're not forgiven. You're
never off the hook. In Alabama, one-third of the African-American
men are not able to vote. That's where the sacramental tradition
could help us.
There are four questions that any religious tradition has to
ask of the justice system: What is it? Does it work? Is it
good? And is it loving? Let me walk quickly through those four
questions.
What is it? At the moment there are two models of criminal justice.
One is let's punish people, put them in boot camps, deter them, because
that instills discipline and fear, and prevents crime. There's another
model of treatment: let's work with people because when you work with people,
you reduce crime.
Second question: Does it work? According to not one or
two but literally hundreds of studies, the punishment model-the get-tough
approach of long sentences, extensive supervision, ankle bracelets and
so forth-generally increases recidivism by at least seven percent.
Increases recidivism. The treatment model-again hundreds of studies
on this-is associated with an average reduction in crime by 25 percent.
Well, one system is not working, and the other one is. Why are we
doing the first and not the other one?
There are 14 states in this country where, if you've committed a felony,
you can never vote again in your life. . . . you're not forgiven.
Next question: Is it good? I really believe that people
think the punishment model is a good system. Because of their theology,
because of their tradition, because of whatever, they just believe this
is good. But the research says no. Boot camps don't work, yet
we keep building them. So we need a new criteria for judging what
is a good system.
Boot camps don't work, yet we keep building them. So we need
a new criteria for judging what is a good system.
Finally: Is it loving? I think until you get out
of the moral sphere into the loving question you don't get into the religious
field. Is it loving to execute someone? Even if it worked,
would it be loving? Even if it did reduce crime, should we be doing
it? Unless we ask these moral and religious questions, we can't really
deal with this issue. And criminologists usually answer only the
first two questions: What is it? And does it work? That's why
we need a religious tradition to ask the other two questions. But
the four questions need to come together.
THE NEW PLANTATIONS
Mr. Darryl Colbert coordinates the substance abuse out-reach program
of Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Washington and is the co-chair
of the substance abuse com-mittee of Mayor Anthony Williams' Health Policy
Council.
It's an honor to be up here with such a distinguished panel.
I'm not a diplomat, I'm not an eloquent speaker. I'm just someone
who has been on both sides of the street. I was listening to Father
Bryant say that 80 percent of the prison population faces some form of
addiction, and that 80 percent of the prison population has some type of
drug charges. Well, we need to stop calling prisons, "prisons."
Drugs are the new "slavery" and prisons are the new "plantations."
Bottom line. Look at the proportion of black people or Hispanic people
that are incarcerated. Racism is alive and well, and so is slavery.
You win a war on drugs, not by locking people up, but by getting
them off drugs. It's as simple as that. It doesn't take Einstein's
theory of relativity to understand that. If you don't have a demand,
the supply dwindles.
We need to start working with the social service agencies in
our dioceses. I work with Catholic Charities and I spend 24 hours
a day, seven days a week responding to the calls of priests in our parishes.
It's not only a problem in the District of Columbia, it's a national problem,
it's a world problem. We need to get out of the problem and start
looking for some concrete solutions. Prisons don't work.
When I went to jail, I got a master's degree in manipulation. I learned
more about breaking the law than I did about obeying it.
Can you imagine that the first time your father and you ever
hug is when he's coming back from Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas,
asking to see Darryl, and you're coming back from District Court?
You both are in R&D (receiving and discharge) and that's the first
time you ever hug in eighteen years. We have generations of families
on the plantations. I refuse to call them penitentiaries; they are
plantations. We need to remove the shackles. We need to stop
pointing the finger, stop accusing people, and start extending a hand and
helping people.
LOVE OF POWER OR LOVE OF GOD?
Mr. Matthew Mullane is Director of the Faith, Peace and Justice program
at Boston College and does research into the use of authentic Christian
notions of asceticism, suffering, and punishment as correctives for contemporary
social theory.
Why is it that we feel we can throw away the key? Punishment
as punishment. What's the logic of it? What's the effect of
it? It seems to be, and I take this from other books and other scholars,
that we punish in order to make the criminal feel pain. We punish
in order that they feel the harm they caused. We punish so they feel
shame. The problem is that shame is the motive for violence.
So by incarcerating folks-by subjecting them to terror within
the institution, to physical force, sexual violence- we've produced shame
which is the tinderbox of violence. Why doesn't the system work?
The system doesn't work because the offenders in the end are made to worship
power. The criminal justice system is a religion, and its belief
is that power is the ultimate reality. That's the goal of the retributive
system.
So we have to answer with Christ once and for all: there are
only two ways in life, to love power or to love God. We can't have
both. And redemption means to love God and to reject power.
THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF FAMILIES, SCHOOLS, AND COMMUNITIES
Ms. Michelle A. Roberts, Esq., is an attorney in the District of Columbia
who engages in criminal and civil litigation. She is the former chief
of the Trial Division of the Public Defender Service for the District of
Columbia (1980-1988).
When I was a kid, I believed if I worked in the criminal justice
system I could save my people. I was wrong for many of the reasons
that we criticize the criminal justice system. But part of what we
complain about is something that is not the fault of the criminal justice
system. The system has its problems and many of them have been discussed
already this evening, but a huge problem is that many of our institutions
have abandoned their responsibilities in our community. We have allowed
the criminal justice system to embrace and take responsibility for the
things that we're not doing. Our criminal justice system has suddenly
taken the place of our schools. It's taken the place of our families.
I represent young men who carry guns, and they're carrying guns
as I speak. And when I ask-and frankly I confess I don't ask a lot
anymore-but when I do ask, "Why do you carry a gun?," I am told,
"Ms. Roberts, it makes me feel powerful. I'm no longer afraid."
And you know what? That same young, probably in my case, black man,
doesn't have a daddy who helps him feel powerful. Doesn't have a
male adult that helps him not to feel afraid. Family is not available
to give him the feeling of power and courage that will prevent him from
needing to carry guns. People who are happy don't use drugs.
"I'm having a great life, I think I'll use some crack." It doesn't
happen if you're happy. It happens when you're sad. It happens
when you're illiterate. It happens when you're uneducated and have
no sense of God and tomorrow, and future. And that's why I see them.
When I was growing up in the South Bronx, aware that young black
men, my brothers' friends, were going to jail, it occurred to me that I
had a mission in life. I was going to save poor black men from being
caught up in the criminal justice system. Well I haven't done that,
and the reason I haven't done that is because it was a foolish wish.
I think I've done a great job in providing good counsel to people who needed
it. But to the extent I entered the system believing that the criminal
justice system was a way to make things equal, I was wrong. Other
institutions have that responsibility, and I at least would like to expend
some energy outside of the criminal justice system, in those institutions,
to make them do their job.
At the same time, the criminal justice system does have a responsibility
that it can't relinquish. It's this: it cannot punish for the
sake of punishment. I've seen the men and women who come out.
It's true, we lock them up for a long time, but most of them come out.
And they come out with rage, and fear. I don't want them living next
door to me, and they're my brothers and sisters. I'm afraid that
when they're reminded of that felony conviction, when they can't vote,
can't get that job because of the conviction, that rage will erupt in my
neighborhood. Next door to me. So I don't completely exonerate
the criminal justice system because it cannot simply punish for the sake
of punishment. Yet at the same time we have a responsibility to do
our jobs and not expect the criminal justice system to solve it for us.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY ON CRIMINAL JUSTICE
prepared by Raymond B. Kemp
George Anderson, S.J., "Restorative Justice: An Interview with Jim Consedine,"
America, February 24, 2000, 7-11.
David Cole, No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal
Justice System, New York: The New Press, 1999. Professor Cole teaches
at the Georgetown Law Center.
Jim Consedine and Helen Bowen, Restorative Justice: Contemporary Themes
and Practices, Ploughshares Publications, PO Box 173, Lyttelton, New Zealand,
1999.
Randall Kennedy, Race, Crime, and the Law, New York: Pantheon Books,
1997. Professor Kennedy teaches at Harvard Law School and is a graduate
of St. Alban's, Princeton and Yale Law School.
Lisa Barnes Lampman, ed., God and the Victim: Theological Reflections
on Evil, Victimization, Justice, and Forgiveness, Grand Rapids, Michigan:
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999. With a Foreword by
Charles W. Colson.
Marc Mauer, Race to Incarcerate: The Sentencing Project,
New York: The New Press, 1999. " . . .it is clear that, after
two centuries, we as a nation still cage the least fortunate among us to
solve our problems." From the final sentence of the book.
Eric Schlosser, "The Prison-Industrial Complex," The Atlantic Monthly,
December, 1998, 51-77. This is the article that caught our attention
at Woodstock. The author is preparing a book on the subject.
Many of the views expressed here we first heard from participants in Woodstock's
Preaching the Just Word project.
Stephen Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White:
One Nation, Indivisible, New York: Touchstone, 1997 and 1999. Esp.,
"Crime," 258-285.
Howard Zehr, Changing Lenses: A New Focus for Crime and Justice, Scottdale,
Pa.: Herald Press, 1990 and 1995. The classic America work on restorative
justice.