Pages tagged "Crime"

“You end up with broken families. You end up with communities that are being plagued with more violence and more crime. And you end up with people not reaching their God-given potential.” This sort of remark about the impacts of mass incarceration on life in America is typical for liberal politicians and Friends. In this instance, however, the New York Times was quoting Republican Senator Rob Portman of Ohio (3/13/2014). Remarkably, a bipartisan coalition is developing to move public policy in the criminal justice arena in a way that respects that of God in all persons – including those in prison – and at the same time advances public safety.

Public Secrets and Justice: A Journal of a Circuit Court Judge

The terrible sufferings of our forefathers in the prisons of the seventeenth century have given us as a people a special interest in the management of prisons and the treatment of crime. . . [There is] much work still to be done, in creating a right understanding of the nature and causes of crime, and in emphasizing the need for redemptive treatment rather than retributive punishment.

Written by Sabrina Jones and Marc Mauer

It feels like I failed this morning.

Dear Friends: During WW II, on February 14, 1945, I walked with my childhood friend from our school in Prague and he invited me to go to his house to play. For some reason, I decided rather to go home. When I came to the door of our apartment, suddenly an explosion occurred on the street I had been walking on just one or two minutes earlier. Had I been slightly delayed, an air bomb would have killed me. The following day I learned that another bomb had killed my friend on his way home. That day I escaped death twice.

Dear Editor: Matthew Lowen’s book review of Prison Profiteers (May/June 2014) was a good and disturbing reminder. The Prison Industrial Complex is all about financial profiting; and nothing about crime reduction, intervention, and rehabilitation. It is about building more and larger prisons, and longer sentencing; and nothing about justice in sentencing.