Forget Them Not

A Holistic Guide to Prison Ministry

Hemenway

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781498272285
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

To witness effectively and powerfully to Christian testimonies of care and compassion, of justice and mercy, of healing and wholeness, it is necessary to foster awareness of the realities of the present system of retributive justice if there is to be any hope of transformation to a system of justice which is restorative. Forget Them Not provides a history of the prison system as a means of punishment contrasting it with the relatively recent but growing practice of restorative justice. Joanne Hemenway explores the concept of disconnection as radical evil, as a separation from God who is the source of our being, and shows how our present approach to punishment fosters this evil. The present system, with its motif of retributive justice, generates shame, rejection, and loneliness which stokes the fires of anger and rage. This breeds deep disconnection which only serves to fuel further cycles of violence. Hemenway presents three vignettes designed to help explore forgiveness in the context of both retributive and restorative justice. To promote healing and connection, Forget Them Not introduces compassionate witnessing in prison ministry as a way to develop awareness and empowerment.

1

Why Punishment?

If we hope to work our way toward a more effective approach to crime and violence, it is incumbent upon us to look at where we’ve been and to explore where we might go from here.

—Marc Mauer, The Race to Incarcerate

If we are to grow in awareness and empowerment in our congregational prison ministries, it is, indeed, incumbent upon us to consider where we have been, where we seem to be headed, and where we would hope to go. If we hope to minister effectively with knowledge and strength, we ourselves must be ready to be transformed in order that we, as compassionate witnesses, may transform the world. Jesus of Nazareth was unequivocally a compassionate witness; his ministry was rooted in care and compassion, forgiveness and mercy, healing and restoration. Since it is true that redemption lies in remembering, it is indeed incumbent upon us that we take the time to remember, to look back to the historical roots of punishment and imprisonment.

Punishment as Retribution

Punishment as a mechanism for inflicting pain in retribution for an offense committed has a long history. Whether one considers that history in secular or religious contexts, punishment as retribution seems to be just a part of the human condition. There are, of course, different nuances in the term punishment. While the general understanding of the word implies a certain severity of penalizing for a transgression, other understandings of the word, such as correction or disciplining, hold different implications, such as bringing about improvement or educating. Indeed, at times there has been varying emphasis on aspects of improvement or educating, yet in considering the history of imprisonment as punishment, the punitive, retributive stance has been the driving motivation.

The prison as institution, as place for punishment for crimes committed, is simply a conventional and customary supposition in these early years of this new millennium. In their introduction to The Oxford History of the Prison, editors Norval Morris and David J. Rothman state, “it is tempting to think of them as permanent and fixed features of Western societies. Meting out punishment by a calculus of time to be served seems so commonsensical today, that it becomes difficult to conceive of a moment when prisons were not at the core of criminal justice.”1 However, when viewed over centuries of human evolution, the prison as it exists in the postmodern world is a relatively new invention as mode of punishment.

Retaliation: The Psycho-Neurological Foundation

Punishment as retribution may be as old as the human race, for its seeds are embedded in the psycho-neurological circuitry of our brains, wired as we are for protecting our self, offspring, or territory. While punishment can indeed provide a means of correction, a means of education, such an approach requires a much more rational way of responding to a wrong committed. Instead, more often than not, it is our emotional way of responding to a wrong committed that is intertwined with our desire or need to punish retributively. The common, universal emotions of fear, anger, hurt, and rage are located not in the rational, thinking part of our brains, the neocortex, but rather in the amygdala, a small cluster of nerve pathways from which arises all emotion and passion. In his book, Emotional Intelligence, author Daniel Goleman notes the amygdala to be “like a psychological sentinel, challenging every situation, every perception, with but one kind of question in mind, the most primitive: ‘Is this something I hate? That hurts me? Something I fear?’ If so . . . the amygdala reacts instantaneously, like a neural tripwire, telegraphing a message of crisis to all parts of the brain.”2 Our tendency toward retributive punishment may well be linked, then, to this small almond-shaped organ nestled in the innermost recesses of our brain. It may well be linked to “the desire for vengeance which all of us are capable of feeling when we believe we are seriously wronged. It seems almost a universal human impulse.”3

Probably, each one of us, to a larger or lesser degree, knows the experience of being hurt or threatened and the natural, immediate urge to strike back. It is, however, only through centuries of evolving civilization that personal retaliation and revenge have been channeled into more socially acceptable avenues of release. Dr. Karl Menninger states, “Personal revenge we have renounced, but official legalized revenge we can still enjoy. Once someone has been labeled an offender and proved guilty of an offense he is fair game, and our feelings come out in the form of a conviction that a hurt to society should be ‘repaid.’ ”4

Such an explanation may aid in understanding the source of ancient modes of punishment through mutilation, disemboweling, and dismemberment. While these ways of punishing seem uncivilized and barbaric to our present day way of thinking, it was really not so long ago that such practices were standard means of inflicting punishment. As late as the mid-eighteenth century, in early modern Europe, brutal and savage means of punishment were inflicted on human beings. In his book, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault describes the punishment of a fellow charged with murder in France in the year 1757. Publicly displayed, half-naked, transported from the church through the streets to the scaffold, his flesh was torn from his limbs, while a mixture of boiling sulphur, oil, wax, and lead was poured onto his open wounds, culminating in his body being drawn and quartered by horses and his remains burnt up in a fiery blaze.5 Such public demonstrations of punishment, while partially intended to reinforce a sense of righteousness on the part of the government and instill a sense of repentance on the part of the offender, primarily “bolstered the power of monarchs and magistrates and made it concretely visible.”6 Reinforcement of this kind of power must necessarily raise the question, For whom is the punishment, and whose interests does it serve?

Punishment in Ancient Societies

The juxtaposition of state power and punishment had not always been primary. While punishment of those who had transgressed had always been a component of ancient societies, the understanding and the purpose of punishment has differed. Such differences are found during the years of the Middle Kingdom, 2050–1786 BC, in the civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. In Egypt, there was an acknowledgement of a higher, sacred order, which was dependent on the right balance of creation. Here, “every injury inflicted on (or by) an Egyptian troubled the sacred order, which the pharaohs were bound to re-establish through their judiciary, legal procedures, and punishment.”7 Within the area of Mesopotamia, there arose the Code of Hammurabi, the talionic law, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Although the more common understanding of the law is that it allowed for revenge and retaliation for wrongs inflicted, its actual purpose was to limit the revenge to an amount equal to the harm inflicted. States Menninger, “Hammurabi apparently instituted the law to control practices of family and tribal revenge that went further than the offenses being repaid and which were perpetuated in feuds.”8 While Hammurabi’s Code is one that is familiar and often alluded to with regard to punishment, a less well-known code of punishment that was implemented a good three hundred years before the rule of Hammurabi is the Law of Ur-Nammu by King Ur-Nammu of Sumeria. This code was much less harsh and more humane in its practice, for “the crowning, dramatic feature of Ur-Nammu’s law code was the elimination of vengeance from criminal procedures. Restitution and monetary fines rather than the infliction of pain were the official consequence of wrongdoing.”9

While we may find some reassurance in knowing that in the earliest of human civilizations there did exist a m...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Why Punishment?
• Chapter 2: An Alternative to Retributive Punishment: The Hope of Restorative Justice
• Chapter 3: A Theology of Mutual Relation: A Vision for Healing
• Chapter 4: Three Vignettes: Fostering Forgiveness in the Framework of Restorative Justice
• Chapter 5: Healing and Connection through Compassionate Witnessing
• Chapter 6: Three Models for Congregational Prison Ministry
• Appendix