Introduction

Within criminology, the theological foundations of contemporaneous criminal justice are under-researched, and this book is a timely reminder of the importance of those relationships in both understanding the development of modern justice systems and creating new resources for practice. This is essential as the failures of justice, and a penal crisis, are ongoing. In the UK this crisis is obvious (see Prison Reform Trust, 2019) and shocking. Despite this knowledge, there is little change. An absolute belief in the necessity of punishment, retribution and deterrent sentencing is hard wired into our socio-political DNA, so much so that at the time of writing the solution for the Conservative government under Boris Johnson is to recruit 20,000 new police officers and build 10,000 new prison places: just more of the same failed policies. The purposes and justifications of punishment are at worst unquestioned and taken for granted and at best based on a fallacy that if we give the correct punishments (in the medico-scientific sense of dosage) then rehabilitation would follow (Stalin had the same view about ideology and transforming society). Many developments in the criminal justice system with respect to rehabilitation support this utilitarian and reductionist logic in the form of merging treatment and punishment. The ‘rebalancing’ of the criminal justice system in the favour of victims has made that system more punitive, to the disadvantage of both victims and those who have broken the law. There is an escalation to extremes with each part of the criminal justice system rivalling the others within the neoliberal market where people and organisations are competing for scarce resources (see Gough, 2019; Pycroft, 2019). The marketplace is the space of insecurity and anxiety. Both Jesus of Nazareth and Paul of Tarsus understood this, as demonstrated by the amount of time they both spent talking about buying and selling, debt and the relationship with communal violence. The gospel that they promoted is a skandalon (a scandal, literally a ‘stumbling block’) as it revealed the responsibility that we all have in carrying each other's burdens. The gospel is therefore completely at odds with individualistic and reductionist conceptions of modern justice.