PLEASE NOTE: Below are excerpts of my paper for the above-noted Journal. At the very end of this post, one may click on the highlighted text, and read the full article in PDF. And of course one may also read it on the Journal’s website. Sign-up is free.
I chose to add “Notes:” at the end of each excerpt, that match those in the excerpt.
I chose also not to make clickable the numerous books and articles cited.
I chose finally to include all the References at the end of this post.
excerpts:
NOTE: Appreciation goes to Dr. Brad Jersak, friend, encourager, mentor. In October 2020 at his invitation a Q & A format was adopted for a presentation on what most commonly is known as “Restorative Justice.”[1] What follows is a reworking of that material and addition of new. I decided to retain the Q & A format.
Wayne, you claim that the modern nation-state is closer in origin to what was dramatized by Marlon Brando’s character in The Godfather: namely the modern Western nation-state originated and operates on similar principles to a criminal protection racket. Historian/theologian William Cavanaugh states:
The main difference between Uncle Sam and the Godfather is that the latter did not enjoy the peace of mind afforded by official government sanction.[2]
I understand you to mean: the State vis à vis external enemies—of whatever in-the-moment flavour—and in its exercise of population control (that is control of its domestic enemies—criminals).
Yes. One could get at this in several ways, of which I’ll give three pointers:. . .
Notes:
[1] It can be found here: Northey, “Restorative.”[2] Cavanaugh, “FIRE,” 413.
…
Noted 20th-century American sociologist Charles Tilly in “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime” posits an irrefutable maxim:
If protection rackets represent organised crime at its smoothest, then war risking and state making—quintessential protection rackets with the advantage of legitimacy—qualify as our largest examples of organised crime. [1]
Drawing mostly on Western European history, he continues:
This essay, then, concerns the place of organised means of violence [“protection rackets”] in the growth and change of those peculiar forms of government we call national states: relatively centralized, differentiated organizations the officials of which more or less successfully claim control over the chief concentrated means of violence within a population inhabiting a large, contiguous territory.[2]
Not unrelated, famed psychiatrist Karl Menninger in 1966 wrote The Crime of Punishment,[3] a book that has stood the test of time—claiming punishment in the United States is hugely disproportionately meted out by white élites to the poor (lower classes and minorities); and is greater annually in commission of crimes against prisoners than the sum total of crimes committed by all criminals in prison. Hence “the crime of punishment.”
Or in Jeffrey Reiman’s telling book title: The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison: Ideology, Class, and Criminal Justice.[4]
In 1993, activist, author, and theologian Lee Griffith published The Fall of the Prison: Biblical Perspectives on Prison Abolition. In it we read:
But prison abolitionists have always been a small minority. In the mainstream of Christendom, church and state have been and remain prison collaborators.[5]
To that he says by way of understatement:
‘Correctional’ management may be perfectly comfortable with the teachings of the contemporary church. But it is likely that the teachings of Jesus would wreak havoc.[6]
I shall return at length to Griffith’s theme, one seldom raised in the Restorative Justice field.
Notes:
[1] Tilly, “Organized,” 169, 170.[2] Tilly, “Organized,” 170.[3] Menninger, Crime.[4] Reiman, Richer.[5] Griffith, Fall, 175.[6] Griffith, Fall, 176.
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For the full PDF, please click on: The Kenarchy Journal, Volume 2, Article
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