The intersection of criminology and public theology is inevitably concerned with our ideas about the ultimate things, including our ultimate ideas about human nature and our ultimate ideas about humanity's relationship to the spiritual. They include the mystery of our sense of obligation (why should I behave in a particular way?), the relationship between law and morality, as well as perpetual questions of guilt and innocence, of desistance and change and of legitimacy and judgment. My own explorations in criminology and public theology formally began when Nigel Walker set Heinrich Heine's dying words as an assignment for a penology module (‘Dieu me pardonnera, c’est son metier’) couched in a friendly warning that I should not be ‘too theological’. I am not sure how well I have adhered to his advice since then; for better or worse, my research has included the moral question of ‘seriousness of offence’ which undergirds the sanction of imprisonment; the role of faith-based units in prisons and the development of ‘relational justice’ as a Christian-inspired dynamic for criminal justice and prison reform. These three strands are interrelated but, whether singly or collectively, I hope they show not only the different ways in which criminology and public theology challenges criminal justice orthodoxies but also, as I will suggest towards the end, some Christian conventions as well.

Public theology, sentencing and ‘seriousness of offence’

The first intersection of criminology and public theology I consider is the problem of ‘seriousness of offence’. In England and Wales, under section 1(2)(a) of the Criminal Justice Act 1991, this is the primary ground, in practice, for determining who is sent to prison. According to the Court of Appeal in Baverstock [1993] and Cox [1993] seriousness of offence refers to ‘the kind of offence which when committed […] would make all right thinking members of the public, knowing all the facts, feel that justice had not been done by the passing of any sentence other than a custodial one’.

But there are problems with this formulation. Most obviously, as Andrew Ashworth (1997: 7) asked, ‘[w]ho are these people, if not the judges and magistrates themselves?’