The starting point for redemption is forgiveness, which is the space of possibility where we actualize new possibilities for people through meeting them as they are in themselves. We take forgiveness as our starting point of action (arche) rather than end (telos). Why? Because to repent (see Chapter 5) people need forgiveness first, with subsequent repentance reciprocated and reinforced (see Braithwaite, 2016; Fiddes, 2016 in relation to forgiveness and restorative justice). In Judaism the Hebrew word avon means both crime and punishment (von Kellenbach, 2013), with crime being harmful to both the victim and the offender. Within Judaism, the possibility of repentance is a basic human need, so much so that God created it before he created the world, as without it humanity could not exist (Ronel and Ben Yair, 2018).

Forgiveness is not a conditional formula, an operationalization: As Verdeja (2004: 26) states, ‘as forgiveness becomes instrumentalized, it is drained of its transformative power and simply becomes a tool in larger political and social projects. It ceases in other words to be a moral action in its own right when it is appended to broader moral or political ends’. Forgiveness opens the space of possibility and provides for a genuine encounter where there is no distinction between structures, agency and time (see Chapter 2). Forgiveness counters the negatively reinforcing failures of rehabilitation and enables a process of redemption that is a higher-order (non-reductionist and non-metaphysical) solution to problems perpetuated by the culturally determined problems of revenge. This desire for metaphysically justified revenge expressed as the need for satisfaction (see Chapter 4) is entropy and dissipation of the self. In the Cohen Brothers’ film of Cormac McCarthy’s (2005) novel No Country for Old Men, the Sheriff tells his father that the man who had shot him and left him in a wheelchair had died in prison, and wants to know what his father would have done if he had been released. The father replies ‘[n] othing’ and when the Sheriff expresses surprise, the father responds, ‘[a]ll the time you spend tryin’ to get back what’s been took from you there’s more goin’ out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.’ This is not an expression of forgiveness, but an understanding that revenge will not change harms caused, or discover new and creative energy, but, rather, will dissipate what remains.

To quote Martin Luther King Jr, ‘[t] he fierce urgency of now’ (Washington, 1986: 167, emphasis added) is our concern. The ‘nowness’ of redemption enables an analysis of the relationships between the perpetrators of crime, their victims and wider society, and new inclusionary and creative strategies to be informed through a radical awareness of the ‘here and now’. The ancient Greek word arche denotes a beginning or source of action (for example archaeology) and in the French, the same word denotes a place of safety. Redemption is a space where the infinite (transcendent/virtual) is actualized in the finite (immanent) (von Baltasar, 1990; Shestov, 2016) thus allowing for creativity and innovation and a safe place of being.

Poiesis

This creativity comes from poiesis, as an immanent apprehension of the other. This apprehension (seeing) seeks an actualization (embodiment) of the new by understanding forgiveness as a space of possibility, the place to start rather than the end point (see Chapter 2) of a process. In Greek philosophy poiesis is the bringing forth of something new and is the foundation for poetry and poetics. Heidegger saw this making new as emergence in the form of the blossoming of the blossom, or the transformation of the caterpillar into a butterfly. For Plato the new that emerges is a shadow of its true reality, and he rejected poiesis as its creativity was threatening to social order, so much so that he expelled poets from his Republic ‘[b] ecause it has a terrible power to corrupt even the best characters …’ (Plato, 2003: 349). For Aristotle emergence is always a form of mimesis (see Chapter 4), with its own inherent potential and drive. Our argument is that poiesis and an occupation of the space of possibility un-conceals (think of the way in which the blossom is revealed through its motion from the inside out) the dynamics of structure (matter), agency (mind) and time, with each enfolded in the other, and is able to differentiate between a non-competitive mimesis and an acquisitive mimesis as the basis of ethical choices (see Chapter 4).

For Bachelard (1969) poetics opens the way for creative imagination requiring active participation with the other and for which there can be no passive phenomenology.

The phenomenology of Girard and also of Heidegger are read by Vattimo and Zabala (2011) as an interpretation of the meaning of history being one of emancipation from violence, but the work of Girard reveals how our own will to power in seeking to overcome that violence can undermine those efforts and ideals (how else does Heidegger become a Nazi?). It is the founding murder as the initial condition for social formation which is revealed in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Forgiveness un-conceals this violence and offers a new social order through embracing rather than sacrificing the ‘monstrous other’. This forgiveness demonstrates why the old solutions of religious sacrifice (even when dressed up in the new clothing of ‘the rational’) in criminal justice no longer work. Using Girard’s work, we argue first that my desire to punish you is not authentic, but is a socially transmitted fantasy of regaining that which has been lost. It is group contagion linked to scapegoating mechanisms and social order based on archaic sacrifice. Second, my desire to punish you is my desire to differentiate myself from you. This differentiation spirals into an escalation of extremes, which heightens similarities rather than differences. It is this sameness which is the cause of violence. Third, that religion has controlled rather than caused mimetic violence in archaic societies through the scapegoat mechanism. This mechanism no longer works (because we know the victim is innocent) although we keep on trying to use it (this explains the punitive turn and the rhetoric of harsh sentences). The Judaeo-Christian tradition offers us the radically new resources that we need. These resources start with the individual and the need to overcome my own violence and will to power.

Post-Enlightenment philosophical influences on criminology

The critical tradition has been essential in exposing the lies and deceits of history, including the will to power of Christianity, but does not reveal radically new solutions to that violence. In this sense, its solutions are perpetually conservative and elitist; or according to Voegelin forms of Gnosticism (discussed in Chapter 2). In the dialectics of Hegel and Marx, the personal, subordinated to an impersonal and inexorable logical process (see Milbank, 2006) cannot value the individual or voluntarism.

You know how it is. You go to write something, a letter, an essay, an article, a book, or you start working with a new and challenging service user. In your mind, you are clear what you are doing, you are excited having glimpsed the possibilities to do good work. Waking up of a morning your crepuscular semi-conscious state has made wonderful connections, you glimpse ‘the thing in itself ‘ its haecceity, you are up for the challenge. You go to work, make that cup of coffee, sit down with a blank piece of paper or computer screen, talk to colleagues, meet the service users, but then it’s gone! You seem to be dragged in by the complexity of the challenges, with the connections not quite so vivid or obvious – the enargeia is dissipated. Why is this? In part because the reductionist and calculating mind, in needing to try to make sense of the intuition, its content, presentation and acceptability to others, loses the whole picture. This is not helped by working in bureaucratized neoliberal institutions (including universities), where your work is shaped and performance managed, subjected to endless reviews, the demands of file keeping, and supervision. The risk is that despite the importance of the work and our own motivation, as with Brideshead Revisited and Charles Ryder’s sojourn with the army, we are stripped of all enchantment (Waugh, 1964).

In the work of enchantment there is no conclusion, only the ongoing work of self to be more open to the other through apprehending what is real, discerning the traces of metaphysical violence and responding with the gift of love. Central to our argument is that modern theological and philosophical resources allow both a rereading of the Judaeo-Christian contribution to the development of ideas of justice, punishment and their consequences, and also what it means to be an authentic practitioner through learning to see. Within these resources we find rich seams of dialogue between different perspectives that allow us to develop a peacemaking perspective in criminal justice based on being-for-others. We are not evangelical about our criminological position but are simply providing a point of orientation and departure.

This book develops and articulates our reading of the Judaeo-Christian concept of redemption, offering sentiment as much as thought on the practices of criminal justice and the role of the practitioner. We are acutely aware that the topics of redemption, and forgiveness, appear marginal to a criminal justice that is ostensibly victim retribution focused and thus are unlikely to become a mainstream discourse; nonetheless, our argument is for the potential for changing the dynamics of practice between individual workers, individual victims and individual criminals, using these resources. Criminal justice practice as a project of modernity has relied increasingly on the use of ‘hard’, medico-reductionist, ‘psy’ disciplines (psychology and psychiatry) because they seem to offer scientific objectivity and clarity of meaning, which can then underpin and justify treatment programmes and managerial accountability. The superiority of these approaches is asserted over the ‘soft’, socially complex, ‘re’ disciplines (rehabilitation, restoration and redemption), which appear too uncertain and contradictory. This book is firmly located in the background noise and messiness of those ‘re’ traditions and through the rereading of foundational texts and the use of hermeneutics seeks to explore the richness of that tradition in the sense of what it means to be human in the face of the ‘other’. Our approach enables both an analysis of the failures of the criminal justice system but also provides new (and a retelling of not so new) perspectives and resources for practice in that system. We ground our central message in the dynamic nature of reality. A key argument is that change to the compulsive desire for punishment comes from the ‘bottom up’ and that the creativity of the criminal justice practitioner enables change to happen at a whole systems level. We are unashamedly placing the subject and subjectivity as central to this narrative and the focus is more on that relationship than the institutional dynamics as we feel that practitioner authenticity is fundamental to the therapeutic relationship.

Ultimately we analyse rehabilitation as a failed utilitarian concept and argue that the dynamics of redemption are much closer to understanding, articulating and achieving an interpersonal justice.

This book is a narrative that has emerged from dialogue between the authors, seeking to make sense of their substantial lived experiences in criminal justice, health and welfare, and educational settings. Both are white, male academics. Aaron Pycroft is a British Roman Catholic. The Catholicism comes from Dublin via my maternal great-grandfather, whose daughter married my grandfather, a working-class communist descended from French Huguenots. My paternal side of the family, apart from being on occasion described as poachers and pirates, were wildfowlers and brick makers and low Anglicans. Clemens Bartollas is a North American Presbyterian pastor from West Virginia with extensive experience of juvenile justice, working with gangs and also serving as an expert witness in death row and murder cases. In making these differences and commonalities explicit, we are overtly seeking to embrace those differences and commonalities, and through understanding each other’s perspectives, to have our own examined, challenged and maybe changed. Both authors have approached criminal justice from different directions, with varying experiences of social services and justice systems, but our conclusions are remarkably similar. Ultimately, our desire is to encourage criminal justice practitioners and students who want to be practitioners to explore the roots and horizons of their personal and collective practice. In this book we bring together perspectives in Catholicism, and its traditional emphasis on sacrifice and atonement, with Protestant understandings of grace and justification and their application to understanding processes of justice. We are seeking at least the beginning of a dialogue, centred on a concept of redemption. Underpinning our approach is an acknowledgement that as human beings we are open to our environments and criminologists who are a part of the system(s) that we study. Thus, we bring who we are to understanding the issues involved. However, we do not reduce our work to the sum total of those cultural, theological and spiritual traditions, thus these reflections form a part of our professional and personal (including confessional) journeys of discovery in the light of the texts, traditions and ideas discussed.

This is not easy work and takes us well beyond normal academic disciplines and silos. The work is deeply personal but then reflects ‘the thing in itself ‘ of justice, namely, that crime, and what we should do about it, is deeply personal.

An act of punishment or its effects will not lead to a good life (Gr: eudaimon). Punishment as a metaphysical and rationally calculated moral equivalence to a harm done perpetuates violence. If this approach were effective in changing behaviours then the harshness of current penal systems would see the courts, prisons and probation caseloads radically reduced. The actuarial in criminal justice treats the virtual as real and through closing down the phase space of encounter (taking away rather than giving energy) ensures the locking in of failure. The teleological enterprise of rehabilitation, with its emphasis on risk and public protection, cannot actualize what is truly human; thus, the creation of a self-perpetuating pathology becomes its own frame of reference, devoid of achievement or human value (see Bettelheim, 1960). Rather than perpetuating violence, redemption is the actualization of possibility (the infinite in the finite), changes made real rather than remaining virtual and achieved by holding open what can be variously described as the ‘gate of repentance’ (Moore, 1927: 529), the initiatory dimension (Oughourlian, 2012) or the inauguration of an eschatology, where we meet and accept the person as they are within an immanent space. This space is one of love, where the gaze of truth enables an enfleshment of that which has hitherto only been imagined (virtual).

Idols and icons

Stanislas Breton (1988: 105) states:

The lack of differentiation in the processes of criminal justice leads to a permanent crisis, and escalation to extremes as defined by acquisitive mimesis and exacerbated by utilitarian approaches to rehabilitation. The work of Merleau-Ponty (1968) provides us with an opportunity to understand the single fundamental phenomenon of flesh (Fr: la chair derived from Lat: cathedra; Gr: kathédra) and the embodiment of difference in the Christian tradition. For him life is la chair, of which we are all a part, where ‘the sentient being is embedded within an indivisible whole, an insurpassable specular being, a visibility and tangible in itself ‘ (Voss, 2013: 122). Merleau-Ponty (1968) extends the argument about flesh and touch to seeing and develops his thought in tandem with modern art. He argues that science is concerned with explaining rather than seeing (see Chapter 2) and likewise philosophy treats seeing as a mode or variant of thinking. Christianity as biblical hermeneutics reveals a radical alterity through the embodiment (la chair) of difference (the body of Christ). For us this leads to actual peace and social cohesion through breaking the link between ritual purity and sin. Jesus, in conversation with the Pharisees, inverts the creation myth of Judaism to place difference (alterity) at the beginning (arche) on the first day of creation (see Falque, 2015). The first chapter of the Book of Genesis says that on the first day God created the heavens and the earth, and then only on the sixth day did he create male and female; whereas Jesus says (Matthew 19:4) ‘[f] rom the beginning of creation, God made them male and female’. Thus, difference is ontologically a part of creation, intended to exist, and is the basis for forgiveness, repentance and redemption through an embodiment of that difference. This alterity focuses on the stranger and even the monstrous other, which resides in every person. As Richard Kearney (2010: 152) states:

Redemption is an active process that engages with the dynamic nature of reality and its entanglement of energies. Through being a person-for-others (see later), and the making of ethical choices the redemptive practitioner transubstantiates (see later) matter. The redemptive practitioner is a conjunctive (not disjunctive and separate) part of the unfolding and meeting of the trajectories of past, present and future, enabling an articulation, visualization and actualization of the person as they are in themself and for others, whether having been designated criminal or victim. This seeks to heal the harms wrought by the catastrophic violation of individuals, families and communities that is criminal justice in the UK and US. These harms represent the failures of the utilitarian processes of disjunction and reductionism, the metaphysics of deontology and the elitism of virtue ethics. For Dietrich Bonhoeffer these philosophical frameworks as cor incurvum in se (Latin: the heart turned in on itself) allow no room for radical and real otherness (Clements, 2000). This is a development on the theology and ethics of Karl Barth, which challenges individualistic ideas of morality, held by economically and privileged Christians (or systems and organizations founded in Christianity) who attempt to exonerate themselves from complicity in social sin and injustice (McBride and Fabisiak, 2020).

As a matter of urgency criminal justice, practice and its underpinning criminology, theology and philosophy need to focus at the level of the individual practitioner and their resources for ethical and normative practice as the dynamics of change come from the bottom up (see Chapter 1). For Bonhoeffer this practice is one of freedom not from others, but for others, precisely as God acts towards us (McBride and Fabisiak, 2020). The ways in which we teach and train practitioners is fundamental, not least because reductionism into separate disciplinary silos means that many resources remain hidden from each other, or treated with suspicion. In part, the hermeneutical narrative of this book is an attempt to realize new perspectives across ‘science’ and ‘humanities’. Of importance is the ways in which practitioners interpret their own lives within the context of the processes and institutions of justice for example as a practitioner within the criminal justice system what are the sources of the self that are used in interpreting and creating a biographical narrative in engaging in that work?