Modern Crime and Punishment
We are all very aware that the question of justice, crime, and punishment is a vexed issue for post-Christian society. In the course of the last three hundred years, just about every option, every alternative has been employed. Yet is it almost impossible to find anyone who is satisfied or gratified with current policy.
The Unbelieving world is—to put it mildly—in a confused mess on the issues. One reason for this is that actions and policies around justice involve the “big questions”. What is justice, after all? What is crime? Is theft right or wrong? Well, it all depends who is stealing from whom? If the government or the electorate steals by institutionally “redistributing” income, and calls such redistribution “justice”, then theft does not occur. But if I as a private individual engage in a bit of personal redistribution the law currently says that I am a thief.
If the government inflates the money supply with fiat monetary creation, that is lawful and legal. If I as a private individual pass off a few counterfeit dollars, that is theft.
In modern western democracies crime is what the law says it is. And the law is a wax nose to be changed according to the fancy of legislatures. Thus, crime is a fluid construct. It amounts to little more than the current prejudices of an age institutionalised into legislation. Crime has no eternal or general reference point. Therefore, neither does justice. If crime is a wax nose—to be bent and shaped any which way—so is justice. The concepts of justice and injustice in the modern world are nothing more than current bias, prejudice, and cant.
The radical positivism and relativism of the modern world is writ large in the justice system. This is one reason why no-one is happy with modern Athenian policies of crime and punishment. Instinctively, man—made in the image of the Living God—senses that this relativistic state of affairs is wrong. But the modern Athenian, having accepted that Man is god and is his own ultimate law, has no alternative or answer. If man is ultimate, everything is radically relative.
Moderns have sought to remove the angst that is generated by such ideas by nuzzling up to “international” courts and standards of justice. The United Nations has been fervently and feverishly supported by the shallow minded who cling to it as offering the hope of developing a universal world-wide framework for justice. But the UN inevitably has devolved into a mocking spectre as its Commission for Human Rights is controlled by some of the most repressive and unjust governments in the modern world.
Crime, justice and punishment within the Christian world-view marches to the beat of a very different Drummer. God alone is just. All that man is entitled to do when administering justice is reflect His justice. Man is to be a minister of God’s justice, not a definer and proscriber of right and wrong. Here, then, are some of the fundamental concepts of justice within Jerusalem:
1. Justice is grounded in right and wrong. God alone, as the One who defines truth and lies, right and wrong, light and darkness, sin and righteousness, has the original and eternal authority to punish all sin and wrong. His absolute and infinite holiness means that all sin and wrong is unjust and will be justly punished. Therefore, justice upon earth has an eternal reference point—and therefore the concept of justice is fundamentally meaningful.
2. Perfect justice in this world is impossible and attempts to create a perfectly just society are both utopian and revolutionary. Perfect justice will be revealed and manifested only when the Kingdom of God is finally and fully come upon the earth, when Jesus Christ descends from heaven to take up His permanent and perpetual dwelling place upon the earth. Therefore, the administration of justice in our age is limited, partial, incomplete—but nonetheless real, and, when derived from God’s commandments—true and righteous. Therefore, within Christian civilisation justice and its administration is a holy and blessed thing.
3. All sins are not crimes. The administration of justice in this age is partial and incomplete: therefore, not all sins are punished in this age; not all wrongs fall under the criminal code; not all evils are punished by the State, which is the minister of God for the punishment of wrong doing. In fact, very few sins and evils fall under the criminal code. Only the most extreme forms of sin are to be punished in this life by the justice system.
Thus, we know that to become angry at our brother is a violation of the sixth commandment—thou shalt not kill. But only the most extreme form of anger—murder—is punished under the criminal code. The administration of justice in this age is reserved for the most extreme forms of rebellion against God and man. This means that the role and power of the State within Jerusalem is limited and very strictly circumscribed.
4. Crime (that is, what is found in the criminal code) and its punishment is not concerned with redemption. The whole idea of modern criminology where the administration of justice is to accomplish the redemption of the criminal is a misguided perversion. In the Christian frame concepts such as rehabilitation of the criminal, his restoration back into society, his reformation to live a productive life in the future and so forth are an anathema. They are as grotesque as holding a pistol to someone’s head and telling them if they do not convert to live a holy life they will be shot.
It is at this point that modern systems of justice deny the possibility or concept of justice itself. When the administration of justice is focused upon making people better, justice has no meaning. Imagine, if you will, that researchers demonstrated that if you paid a common petty thief a million dollars all the statistics showed that he would likely give up thievery and become a model citizen, the justice-as-redemption model would applaud. But justice has become a nonsense—which is precisely what has happened in post-Christian societies.
We do not discount that when a person is dealt with fairly and justly, and when the punishment appropriately fits the crime, the outcome may well be that the criminal comes to his senses and forswears crime in the future. But that is not the intent of justice and the punishment of the criminal. The whole focus of justice is punishment—so that the one who commits the crime gets what he deserves. Otherwise, it is not justice.
Another way of putting this is to state that justice is neither to be measured nor defined by its outcome or result.
When the State uses crime and punishment to attempt social outcomes or desired social results usually the result is gross injustice. This utilitarian theory of crime and punishment—that both crime and its punishment should be determined by what will result in the greatest good to the greatest number—can be used to justify terrible policies. For example, to return again to the issue of penal colonies in Australia, one reason the policy of penal colonies was developed was due to the number of people being convicted of capital crimes in those days.
If we go further back and ask why that was the case we find that by 1815 in the United Kingdom 225 forms of theft carried the death penalty. Usually, this was commuted to a lengthy prison term in a penal colony on the other side of the world. Why such harshness? Why was (even minor) theft regarded as a capital crime?
The cause was a deliberate attempt to achieve a certain social and political outcome. Britain had been deeply threatened by the French Revolution and the possibility of a similar revolution in England. Therefore, in an attempt to prevent such an horrendous crisis, punishment upon even the slightest lawbreaking by the poorer classes became harsher and harsher. The policies of crime and punishment were “adapted” to keep the poor masses intimidated and under strict control. It was both shameful and utterly unjust. But such injustice is inevitable when justice, crime, and punishment are used to achieve social or political outcomes. Such notions are intrinsic to crime and punishment in our day—and are similarly unjust as a result.
5. Justice is not to be constructed around preventing subsequent evils and crimes. Thus, if someone has imbibed a large amount of alcohol and drives a car, under current Athenian systems of justice he is likely to be prosecuted and punished as a criminal—even though he has not thus far damaged or caused harm to anyone (but himself). What Athens is trying to do is prevent evils by criminalising certain activity which increases the probability of harm to others. Sins are punished as if they were crimes in the hope of other sins or crimes being prevented. The purported likely outcome is used to define the prior causal actions as criminal.
All “preventative” justice is intrinsically unjust. It is using the law in a vain attempt to make people righteous, rather than to punish actual criminal activity which damages life, limb, or property.
6. A fundamental principle of justice is that the punishment should require restitution to the victim of the crime. If one has damaged life, limb, or property, the punishment fitting the crime must apply—which means that the one who has suffered as a result of your criminal actions should be compensated and restored as far as it is humanly possible in this life. The restitution of victims has been completely neglected in the modern world—largely because the criminal justice system has become focused upon rehabilitation and social engineering.
Until modern societies once again turn to the Living God their justice systems will continue to be bi-polar—lurching from punishment to redemption, remaining fundamentally confused over the meaning and principles of justice itself.
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