Introduction

Contact with the criminal justice system can be a difficult experience. Criminologists writing about those sentenced often talk about the pains of punishment or the pains of imprisonment (Sykes, 1958; Dubber, 1996; Crewe, 2011), which can involve various deprivations, most obviously a deprivation of liberty but also a deprivation of autonomy, of personal security and of goods and services (cf. Sykes, 1958). This is not surprising as pain is integral to punishment; as the legal philosopher H.L.A. Hart (1960: 4) has observed, punishment ‘must involve pain or other consequences normally considered unpleasant’. Similarly, the criminologist Nils Christie (1981: i) has noted that, ‘imposing punishment within the institution of law means the infliction of pain, intended as pain’. Others have talked in terms of the pains of police custody (Skinns and Wooff, 2020) or of probation supervision (Hayes, 2015; McNeill, 2019). Those working within the criminal justice system can also find it a painful experience being under pressure from targets and creeping privatisation (see Chapter 9 by Lol Burke), or the day-to-day difficulties of dealing with those society deems too much of a risk. The pain for victims is exacerbated by often being the forgotten element in many criminal justice processes (Christie, 1977).

This chapter draws from Christian public theology and criminology, and considers hope to be an alternative to such pains. The chapter also looks at philosophical writings where pertinent, in particular Kantian conceptions of dignity and Paul Ricoeur's work on an economy of gift which draws on both philosophy and theology. While there is some limited criminological engagement with philosophy (for example, Arrigo and Williams, 2006; Millie, 2016), engagement with theology is almost non-existent; and a secular criminal justice might be reticent to learn from the non-secular. However, the starting point for this chapter is that much can be learnt from a Christian perspective without necessarily having to believe in God. According to the theologian Duncan Forrester (1997: 30), religion can be divisive due to it having an assumed ‘privileged access to the truth’ and a ‘naive idealism which pays scant respect to the facts of the case and the constraints’.