“Forgive and forget” is not a biblical concept. Neither is the familiar Western image of justice as “a blind women with scales” a good fit with the Biblical image of justice. In the scriptures justice is more open eyed and rather than wanting the scales to tip one way or the other it seeks to help both the victim and offender move to a new place. In the biblical tradition justice is imaged as a process of transformation.
These are some of the insights presented in “A Justice that Reconciles” a resource for Social Justice week 2009 produced by Caritas Aotearoa New Zealand. It is a challenging document because nothing here is easy – certainly not for the victims, or for the offenders facing imprisonment or for the wider community that is growing increasingly concerned about its safety and security. It is certainly no easy task to embrace Jesus’ radical teaching on forgiveness.
With an increased fear about safety in the community comes a greater focus on crime and punishment. The sad irony here is that as the prison population increases and the volume of people dealing with issues around law and order (lawyers, police and prison staff) also rises, so too the level of uncertainty about safety rises. The demon of our time, according Zygmunt Bauman in his book “Post-modernity and its Discontents” is criminality i.e. people taking the law into their own hands to attain the standard that society promotes. It is, he suggests, a logical and inescapably product of a society that puts a premium on individual effort.
These challenging notions highlight the need to look at the wider social context if we are to seek true justice and restore harmony to society. Justice here has a social dimension i.e. it is concerned with the structural dimension of problems and their solutions and a distributive dimension i.e. it is concerned for how the world’s good are shared as well as legal dimensions. Increasingly in Western society, according to Bauman, being poor is being seen as a crime and welfare provisions as the wages of sin. Certainly the numbers suggest that a high percentage of the prison population worldwide, as well as here in New Zealand, come from those sections of the population that are poorest, most marginalised or disempowered by the political and economic system. The prison environment, in which identity and self esteem are further eroded, only adds to the sense of marginalisation already felt by many inmates. One key question seems to be “can we realistically allay community fears about safety if we do not address the underlying social issues?”. The more the inequalities and polarization of people increases the more there is to feed the discontent that threatens the safety of all.
A justice that reconciles suggests that we need to focus less on punishment (retributive justice) and more on reconciliation (restorative justice). It points to a way of dealing with issues that some cultural groups have traditionally used to resolve conflicts within their communities.
Taking an approach that seeks the best opportunity for healing for the victims but which also seeks to provide offenders with a way to turn their lives around seems a better option than one which seems to feed rather than defuse the level of discontent.
This is no easy call but is it one worth making?
Fr Pat O’Shea resides at St Columban's, Lower Hutt, New Zealand
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