1 - Introduction

Summary

This book develops and articulates our reading of the Judaeo-Christian concept of redemption, offering sentiment as much as thought on the practices of criminal justice and the role of the practitioner. We are acutely aware that the topics of redemption, and forgiveness, appear marginal to a criminal justice that is ostensibly victim retribution focused and thus are unlikely to become a mainstream discourse; nonetheless, our argument is for the potential for changing the dynamics of practice between individual workers, individual victims and individual criminals, using these resources. Criminal justice practice as a project of modernity has relied increasingly on the use of ‘hard’, medico-reductionist, ‘psy’ disciplines (psychology and psychiatry) because they seem to offer scientific objectivity and clarity of meaning, which can then underpin and justify treatment programmes and managerial accountability. The superiority of these approaches is asserted over the ‘soft’, socially complex, ‘re’ disciplines (rehabilitation, restoration and redemption), which appear too uncertain and contradictory. This book is firmly located in the background noise and messiness of those ‘re’ traditions and through the rereading of foundational texts and the use of hermeneutics seeks to explore the richness of that tradition in the sense of what it means to be human in the face of the ‘other’. Our approach enables both an analysis of the failures of the criminal justice system but also provides new (and a retelling of not so new) perspectives and resources for practice in that system. We ground our central message in the dynamic nature of reality. A key argument is that change to the compulsive desire for punishment comes from the ‘bottom up’ and that the creativity of the criminal justice practitioner enables change to happen at a whole systems level. We are unashamedly placing the subject and subjectivity as central to this narrative and the focus is more on that relationship than the institutional dynamics as we feel that practitioner authenticity is fundamental to the therapeutic relationship.

Ultimately we analyse rehabilitation as a failed utilitarian concept and argue that the dynamics of redemption are much closer to understanding, articulating and achieving an interpersonal justice.