“INSANITY”, they say, “is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
England and Wales have the highest prison population per capita in the whole of Western Europe. So, as our prisons ran close to maximum capacity last autumn, the Government was forced to establish an early-release scheme as an emergency plan to free space. And now we learn that Scotland has been forced to follow suit. Even the Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, admits, however, that the whole estate will be full again within three years, long before the new prisons that she promises will have been built; and a former Justice Secretary, David Gauke, says that the prison service is on the brink of collapse.
This is why I believe that it is high time that we dug into the myths that sit at the root of the crisis rather than were mesmerised by the headlines.
Oasis, the charity I founded, works within the youth criminal-justice system in England. I sit and talk with children and young people in custodial care every week of the year. The vast majority have complicated and chaotic lives; and all have been exposed to chronic insecurities.
Many have experienced trauma, abuse, violence, or untimely bereavement; they have grown up in local-authority care, have been excluded from school, experienced drug- or alcohol-related dependencies, have mental-health problems, or have been exploited and groomed by others in violent neighbourhoods or online — or any combination of the above.
The old world of black-and-white thinking about morality would describe these children and the adults whom they all too often go on to become within the criminal-justice system as deeply morally flawed. The reality is that they are victims of circumstance, who have often adapted appropriately to the dysfunctional world that they are forced to endure.
The anger, the aggression, the defiance, the silence that you witness — these are survival strategies driven by pain and fear. Therefore, all those “Let-the-punishment fit-the-crime” corrective approaches that attempt to deal with behaviour without addressing the drivers behind behaviour were always doomed to failure.
DURING the past 40 years, we have learned more about the science of how the human brain works than through the rest of human history. The study of interpersonal neurobiology has also taught us that all this can be, and often is, intergenerational: trauma in one generation leaves its legacy in the next. And trauma changes the brain, not just a person’s feelings. A parent who has suffered psychological damage as a child may well be incapable of being socially and emotionally stable and attuned to his or her child’s needs. And the cycle begins again.
There is never a gap between good science and good theology, and a wise society, let alone a Church, will listen to both.
The famous code of Hammurabi, the sixth King of Babylon, dates back to 500 years before Moses. Hammurabi’s code is one of the first legal texts in recorded history. You can see it, written on a giant basalt stone, in the Louvre, in Paris. Inscribed in the Akkadian language, it was discovered in present-day Iran and stands at more than two metres high. The punishments that it sets out for law-breaking are harsh: many offences incur death or disfigurement. They are saturated in the philosophy of retaliation.
Here is an example: “If a man destroy the eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye. If one break a man’s bone, they shall break his bone. If one destroy the eye of a freeman or break the bone of a freeman he shall pay one mana of silver. If one destroy the eye of a man’s slave or break a bone of a man’s slave he shall pay one half his price. If a man knock out a tooth of a man of his own rank, they shall knock out his tooth. If one knock out a tooth of a freeman, he shall pay one third mana of silver. . .”
Now, for anyone who has read the Old Testament, all this sounds very familiar, except that, in the Law of Moses, it reads: “You are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.” And then, it simply stops!
In that one move, Moses takes a giant moral step forward. Hammurabi is hierarchical: a Babylonian citizen’s eyes and teeth are worth more than those of a freeman, which, in turn, are worth more than those of a slave. What Moses does, for the first time in history — as far as we know — is to create equality: an offence against a slave is to be treated as seriously as one against the highest in society.
But, for all its advances, the Law of Moses is still based on the same old principle of retaliation, and, just like Hammurabi’s code, although it limits this — a tooth for a tooth and nothing more, rather than a man’s life for one of your family’s teeth — it still teaches it.
But then comes Jesus! “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth. . . You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.”
The philosophy of retaliation is binned; love and restoration are the only way forward.
THE problem with retaliation — with any penal approach to life — is, as we have seen, that it simply does not work. It never has. It costs a fortune; it is a disaster socially, awful economically, bankrupt scientifically, and a non-starter in terms of any authentically Christ-centred theology. Except for the fact that we have abolished the death penalty, however, the penal approach is where much of the philosophy behind our justice system remains today.
All of this raises huge questions for society, just as it does for Ms Mahmood, at the Ministry of Justice, and Rachel Reeves, at the Treasury, and ministers in other government departments.
The critics, of course, tell us that love is “namby-pamby”. My answer is that love isn’t easy, it’s tough. Locking a prisoner in a cell for 20 hours a day as a punishment is the easy pathway. Sitting with someone. Listening to them. Working through their story with them. Demonstrating you care. That’s tough.
But there are also very big questions for the Church. How should all this affect our theology and understanding of sin, both personal and institutional? How should it influence our social-policy and pastoral work? How could we help rather than hinder those who have suffered trauma?
It is a lot to wrap our heads around, which is why I believe that a deeper multi-disciplinary conversation between theologians, psychologists, psychotherapists, and criminologists would help the Church into a less “black and white” understanding of “sin”, and society into a more effective justice policy than our current thinking sometimes allows. Instead of shouting about being “tough on crime”, it is time we learned to be “smart on crime and its causes”.
If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, it is time that we did things differently, to avoid a future for our justice system which looks just like the present.
The Revd Steve Chalke is the founder of the Oasis group of charities. The charity runs Oasis Restore, a secure school in Rochester (Feature, 24 May 2024).
oasisrestore.org
