December 11, 2000

WARDEN JIM WILLETT (center) explains the death chamber to Texas Baptists Ken Hugghins of Hunstville, Stan Allcorn of Abilene, Mattie Compton of Fort Worth and David Wright of Houston. Standing at the foot of the burney is Chaplain Jim Brazzil.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE:
To store or restore?
___By Mark Wingfield
___Managing Editor
___Does a society's practice of criminal justice reflect its view of God?
___Should what a person believes about God influence his or her views on issues such as crime, prison sentences, prison conditions, criminal rehabilitation and capital punishment?
___Or put another way, faced with a Texas prison population that has tripled in nine years, what would Jesus do?
___It's a tough question, and one that too few Christians are pondering, according to a variety of Baptists who are involved with criminal justice.
___The hundreds of prison and jail ministries operating around the state are good and helpful, these Baptists contend, but these ministries alone are not enough to solve a problem that has Texas prisons bursting at the seams.
___"Throughout my life, crime-related problems have been No. 1, No. 2, No. 3 in opinion polls, yet organized religion has been silent on it," noted Patrick Anderson, a Baptist who teaches criminology at Florida Southern College.
___Bible vs. reality
___The Bible has quite a lot to say about crime and punishment, grace and forgiveness, added Charles Johnson, pastor of Second Baptist Church in Lubbock. He presented a paper this summer at a Baptist World Alliance meeting in which he traced the biblical record on capital punishment.
___In reality, the Bible presents a tension between justice and grace, he said.
___But even that point is lost on too many Christians, the pastor acknowledged. "There's a tendency in the church toward biblical irrelevancy. ... It takes a very mature Christian disposition to do what the Bible says. Most churches, including my own, don't get around to the Bible near enough."
___Conversations about criminal justice and Christianity seem to be "off-limits to people," Johnson lamented. "They think, let's let the lawyers and politicians figure this out."
___Meanwhile, Texas has led the nation in passing tougher laws, creating longer prison sentences, locking up more people and executing more people, noted Emmett Solomon, retired director of chaplaincy for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in Huntsville.
___That may please a majority of the voters, but it's not living out the biblical mandates of justice, mercy and restoration, agreed Solomon and others involved in criminal justice issues. Nor is it making the world a better place to live, they contend.
___"The state's outlook ought to be more Christian than it is," Solomon said. "But the reason it's not is because we in the faith have not focused on the things Jesus focused on. We don't focus very much on helping the underprivileged, the down and out, those who are different than we are.
___"We ought to operate with the understanding that forgiveness is available to all," he suggested. "Christianity offers exactly what prisoners need--forgiveness and the ability to start all over again. We Christians claim that very generously from God, but we're a little bit like the unjust steward; we claim it but we don't issue it very much."
___Texas individualism
___In Texas, Christians have bought into a cultural mindset that works against caring for criminal offenders, Young and Solomon both said.
___"Texas has a heritage of rugged individualism," Solomon explained. "In this rugged individualism, the people who are not strong and rugged, shame on them."
___Young completed the thought by explaining: "We (wrongly) believe if a person doesn't try, he's not worth our time and effort. The church helps those who help themselves."
___Yet the Bible clearly teaches Christians are to help those who fail, Young added, quoting the words of the Apostle Paul in Galatians 6:1: "Brothers, if someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual should restore him gently."
___Of course, that assumes a moral society and a connectedness between citizens, added Charles Johnson, pastor of Second Baptist Church in Lubbock.
___"Right now in our criminal justice system, there's no real connection between the victim and the victimizer. In fact, we work hard at maintaining that alienation. We don't want the victim and the perpetrator to have any kind of relationship.
___"Minus that relationship, though, you cannot do what the Bible calls for," he concluded.
___Seeking healing
___"One of the things our current system doesn't do at all is foster healing," added Solomon. "Punishment doesn't really foster healing. The victims are kept out of the process to the point the offenders often don't realize they've done harm. The victims are never seen or heard from. The offender hardly realizes he hurt anybody. He sees it as him against society, not him against a person he hurt."
___This is where groups like Restorative Justice Ministries and Prison Fellowship have been attempting to pave a new way--working through the system while not being a part of the system.
___The concept is illustrated by Jim Brazzil, a Texas Baptist chaplain who walks alongside inmates at the time of the execution in the Texas Death House.
___The chaplain himself was a victim of crime a few years ago. Someone broke into his home and stole electronics and other items. Even though he deals with heinous crimes on a professional level daily, this simple robbery made him feel victimized.
___The perpetrator was caught three days later, although he already had disposed of Brazzil's belongings. The man was tried and served time, but there was no connection between him as the victimizer and Brazzil as the victim--no restoration.
___"He never saw me, never knew how much I was hurt by that," Brazzil said. "That's retributive justice," not restorative justice.
___Brazzil is impressed by a project going on in some Texas prisons called Victim Offender Encounter. In each session of this program, offenders are voluntarily paired with two crime victims (though not the person they victimized) once a week for 12 weeks. Each participant tells his or her story.
___"The victims are able to get their bitterness and pain out, and the offenders are able to come to grips with their responsibility," Brazzil explained.
___"I believe offenders are going to have to come to grips and see their pain," he said.
___Unless programs like this branch out and flourish, the criminal justice system will continue its spiral toward more cells and more returning inmates, insisted Solomon.
___Without healing, change cannot occur, he said. "This punitive approach does not bring healing. It brings destruction. It's aiding and abetting the destruction of the lower classes in Texas."
___Numerous studies have shown that "punishment alone does not change behavior," added Jim Young, director of restorative justice ministries with the Baptist General Convention of Texas.
___Punishment without healing or restoration creates a "vicious cycle" that keeps the same individuals going in and out the revolving doors of America's prisons, he said.
___"You tend to be influenced in your behavior by the people you associate with," Anderson said. "So if you lock someone up at 18 with a bunch of offenders, ... how do you expect him to turn out?"
___Americans have "gone overboard in seeing incarceration as the one and only method of punishing people," he said. "We can't keep going on like this. Pretty soon, we'll have to put a fence down the Mississippi River and put offenders on one side and everyone else on the other."
___Who can be redeemed?
___On the other hand, getting involved in a Jesus-kind of criminal justice ministry could pay huge dividends in the future, Young asserted.
___He cited statistics first suggested by George Beto, a pioneering head of Texas prisons in the early 20th century. Beto contended 20 percent of inmates are not salvageable, 20 percent will be salvaged with or without help, and the remaining 60 percent could go either way.
___If Beto's assessment is correct, it's that 60 percent hanging in the balance who desperately need a nudge toward restoration, Young suggested.
___And that gets back to the question of whether or not Christians really believe the gospel is powerful enough to change a person, regardless of what he's done.
___The answer is as close as the Bible, suggested Anderson.
___Look for stories of criminals in the Bible, and you'll have to start early in Genesis, he said. "You find one brother brutally murdering the other." Then there's Moses, who killed an Egyptian. And Joseph, who was imprisoned by Pharaoh. Then there's Samson, Daniel, Jeremiah, and "everybody in the Gospels did time," he said.
___"Take a look at the criminals in the Bible, and it's interesting that they also tend to be the greatest figures in the Bible. Yet they are murderers, adulterers, lawbreakers."
___Even King David, described as "a man after God's own heart," was an adulterer and murderer, Anderson said.
___Which leads, once again, to the question of whether the church really believes sinners can be changed and redeemed for a better future.
___"I do believe people do change," Brazzil said. "I believe with all my heart God is in the life-changing business. If he is not, everything we have done is in vain."
___That doesn't mean Brazzil is speaking either for or against the death penalty, he said. As a chaplain in his capacity, he won't take a public position on that controversial subject.
___And it's not that the other Baptists advocating for a more Jesus-based mindset on criminal justice are ready to throw away all the jail keys either.
___"There are consequences to actions," Young said. "Jesus did not do away with temporal consequences to actions. He did away with eternal consequences."
___But actualizing God's vision for the world must include a vision of justice and righteousness, Johnson asserted.
___"When it comes to the specific issue of criminal justice, it means holding people accountable for the egregious crimes they have committed. That is basically a redemptive activity. Sometimes people have to be punished to be conditioned toward righteousness.
___"But the Bible also talks about restoration," he continued. "Punishment is a portion, a piece of a larger goal of restoration, which is putting people back in a right relationship with the community."
___And that's a role the church must face up to rather than shirk, Johnson and the others said.
___The church's role
___Anderson, who also holds a degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, recalled working as a juvenile probation counselor in Fort Worth while attending seminary.
___He determined it would be helpful to some of his young charges if he could get them connected with churches. So he began asking churches if they would take one troubled youth to summer camp with their youth groups.
___"I couldn't find one church willing," he recalled.
___His suggestion was met with comments such as "We can't expose our children to juvenile delinquents."
___The irony, Anderson said, is that many of the "juvenile delinquents" he was working with came from church-going families. "They were the children of deacons, preachers and Sunday School teachers."
___The practical application of "What would Jesus do?" with real life is extremely difficult when it comes to criminal justice, acknowledged Anderson, who has devoted his career to studying both theology and criminology.
___"It's hard to say, 'All criminals welcome here.' What are we supposed to do?"
___Yet ex-offenders already are all around us, he added. "In the church I attend, we have people who have done time. Not everybody knows that. And every time I speak in a church, I have someone come up to me afterward and say, 'I have a brother in prison' or 'I have a child prison.'"
___What good, church-going people tend to forget, Anderson said, is that "even the worst offender has a parent, a spouse. All this is tied together. People are lost and searching. Somehow we think of criminals being different from the rest of us, and they're not.
___"That's what makes the gospel so great--the worst folks can be transformed. Isn't that something to give us great joy? That's maybe the best of the gospel. Does it work on really bad folks? We have a tendency to make it work on really good folks."


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