Riot on the streets answered by stern prosecutions and prisons over-full – will that ensure order, bring peace?
We have often been here before. Read, for example, Austin Lovegrove’s informative and entertaining book, Images of an Australian Enlightenment: The Story of Lachlan and Elizabeth Macquarie’s Treatment of the Convicts as a History Tale for Today (2019).
Macquarie, the Governor of New South Wales 1810-21, was expected to give convicts transported from England to Australia justice. But he and his remarkable wife thought convicts could become good citizens, if only they were affirmed and enabled, rather than put down and out. There was love, faith and hope in his policy. He wanted ‘parsimony in punishment’, intense work for rehabilitation, grounded in what Churchill in 1910 was to specify as ‘an unfaltering faith that there is a treasure, if you can only find it, in the heart of every man’ (pp 182-5). Despite the wisdom and humanity of his administration, Macquarie was driven out of office by the dominant punitive culture in England and Australia.
Today, Stef Jones (https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001xwqv) retrains prison leavers to become mechanics, repairing and refitting abandoned and unclaimed stolen bikes. Thus they learn new skills and get a new life. Stef says, ‘My product isn’t a bike, it’s a bloke that doesn’t go back to prison’. A Macquarie for today?
But it is not easy for the powerful managers of justice to choose to open the way for those who have hurt or who threaten society. Righteously angry, people let the sun go down on their wrath, so sin reigns on (Eph.4. 26,27).
Paul’s wise warning was reiterated by President Biden speaking after 7 October:
“Justice must be done. But I caution that, while you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”
In an essay not to be missed, Omer Bartov writes with profound knowledge and sympathy for all sides, As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel | Israel | The Guardian.
Hurt drives the demand for punishment. It is hard to get past hurt, or to see anything but a danger in those who hurt. We have no room in our hearts to see, let alone work for, the redemption of the offenders, and of our future with them. Repentance, turning towards the coming kingdom of God, believing good news for and with all, is very difficult. Bartov explores this deep, everyday, human crisis. He is not deterred from grieving, from pleading, holding the faith that there is treasure to be found in the God-depths of human beings, even though anger makes the night.
First published on the Network Leeds blog, 3rd September 2024.