Redemptive imagination: the fallacy of judging across borders of ignorance

Abstract

This essay draws from personal experience and asserts that the criminal justice system fails to meet the needs of communities because the response to crime is dictated by forces outside those communities and across boundaries of failed imagination and flawed knowledge. Communities in our land can no longer afford to allow the wounds created by crime to go unhealed, its victims to go without redress and without a voice, and its young people to be vacuumed into a brutal system of dehumanization that leaves them unable to return as productive members of the human family from which they were removed. Reconciliation instead of a self-destructive obsession with retribution is a vital interest for all communities in America. Rather than insisting that crime must not go unpunished, we must insist that the hurt caused by crime must not go unhealed. Only the path of reconciliation can give us any hope if we want to address the problems that create crime in the first place: poverty, ignorance, shame, fear, and the very system itself which claims to prevent crime.

Keywords:

• imagination
• restorative justice
• criminal justice
• local communities