Good Punishment & Changing Paradigms

Books

James Samuel Logan. Good Punishment? Christian Moral Practice and U.S. Imprisonment. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008.
Paul Redekop. Changing Paradigms: Punishment and Restorative Discipline. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 2008.

Reviewer

Andy Alexis-Baker, Ph.D. student, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI

In Changing Paradigms and Good Punishment?, Paul Redekop and James Logan respectively have added to the steadily growing literature on punishment.

Whereas Logan concentrates his acumen on the prison-industrial complex and its societal harm, Redekop looks at how alternatives to punishment can be lived out in the criminal justice system, family life, and educational systems. Redekop presents research showing that using corporeal punishment on children is more often harmful than not. Moreover, even non-corporeal punishments such as yelling or severe criticism can be equally as damaging as hitting.

In the latter part of his book, Redekop attempts to answer some biblical and theological arguments that pacifist parents use to justify using violence as punishment at home. For example, he posits that they use “literalist interpretations of select Bible passages” to justify corporeal punishment (185).

Yet, argues Redekop, by punishing in God’s name, these parents impart a malformed theology of God’s judgment and wrath -- one in which the child’s will is broken by a parents who use their power to violently enforce God’s law and the parents’ whims. (To borrow concepts from Logan’s book, the parents humiliate and degrade their children to show who is superior and who is inferior.) According to Redekop, this can create personality issues in children who are taught to obey parents and see their punishment as an act of God. This in turn can create a tendency to being people-pleasers and to passive aggressiveness.

Thus, based on his extensive experience within the restorative justice field, Redekop concludes we cannot justify punishment on a moral or a utilitarian basis. Families, churches, and the Canadian and American criminal justice systems should orient around restorative justice principles, and restorative justice should replace rather than supplement the current retributive system (74).

Replacing retribution with restorative justice is a goal that James Logan would surely sympathize with. In Good Punishment, he thoroughly examines the increased incarceration rate within the United States and the ways retributive practices degrade and humiliate both the individuals and the communities of which they are a part. Logan also details the widespread effects of mass incarceration on families and communities of color in particular, and the breakdown of social cohesion that results.

Logan focuses on how structural racism plays a part in making non-white skin synonymous with criminality and thus scapegoats entire communities. By scapegoating individuals and communities of color, society inscribes a white supremacy onto itself, allowing people to feel good about what they are not.

This runs against the grain of Christian practices of forgiveness, penance, and reconciliation, and therefore must be shaken off in the Christian community and denounced. In Christian theology, every person is a sinner and thus shares a very deep connection with other sinners. Not only do people who sin and get caught need forgiveness, the entire community always stands in need of forgiveness.

Working out from Christian community to the non-Christian world, Logan skillfully shows how the conditions of society create crime so that both the “criminal” and the society that creates conditions making crime attractive need repentance and forgiveness. Indeed, it is crucial for white people especially to understand how they need to be forgiven for creating the conditions under which some people are left so degraded and humiliated that their “choices” to get into crime are already conditioned by structural racism of American society.

Thus in Logan’s framework, criminality is not merely the problem of morally deficient individuals but a problem with which all of us must come to terms.

If all members of American society must reckon with the massive problem of imprisonment, theologians have not seemed to notice. Logan finds very few theologians have taken up the task of critically examining the “social costs of imprisonment on such a large scale” (7). Too often white theologians in particular have proposed theories for policing and prisons that do not take into account how much race matters in how one views the entire criminal justice system.

For support and as his primary dialogue partner, Logan draws upon Stanley Hauerwas’s theology on church practices of penance and forgiveness and the ways they help Christians remember sin rightly as something of which we all must be forgiven by God. Logan uses Hauerwas’s idea of “ontological intimacy” and asks how it could be brought to bear on the problem of mass incarceration beyond telling the system not to kill.

He thus pushes Hauerwas to deepen his thought to examine how Christian practices might help resist and change the way American society handles, views, and practices punishment. It is a welcome and sorely needed discussion that demonstrates Logan’s respect for, and challenges to, Hauerwas’s basic agenda.

In the final pages Logan suggests how Christian “ontological intimacy” could shape public debates on crime and prisons.

For example, he recommends Michael Parenti’s call for “less policing, less incarceration, shorter sentences, less surveillance, fewer laws governing individual behaviors, and less obsessive discussion of every lurid crime, less prohibition, and less puritanical concern for ‘freaks’ and deviants” (234). He then recommends “decarceration” and Angela Davis’s work on prison abolition. I would also add the good work of Critical Resistance, a national organization working against the prison-industrial complex, which has even established “no police” zones in Brooklyn, New York.

Both Redekop and Logan provide challenges to Christians, particularly Mennonites, to find new ways to work for more consistent peacemaking practices within the church and for using those practices as models for society.

Particularly when it comes to race, Logan shows that we white theologians and ethicists cannot afford to theorize about policing as if our social location and our skin color are inconsequential. If our proposals for dealing with “crime” are not grounded in a thorough look at race, we have just added to the problem rather than helped to resolve it. Redekop’s book shows us that working toward societal renewal makes little sense if we are not practicing nonviolence in our lives in deep and sustaining ways. How we treat our children, for example, matters a great deal.

I found both of these volumes enriching and challenging, and I will return to them in the years ahead as I work on these issues.