Rethinking Crime and Punishment, Rebuke and Love

Abstract

Why do we punish so hard and so much? What are the justifications for punishment? There is rampant confusion between wrongful behavior and the idea of “a bad person.” Our system of retribution denies the offender dignity. To Plato, it makes no sense to add further injury to injury, to hurt the hurter. His model is not of a bad person who needs to be punished but of a hurting person who needs healing. Shakespeare associates retribution with the onset of madness in Lear and Othello, and in Hamlet he writes an anti-revenge drama. And in this anti-revenge play where daggers are futile, rebuke is not futile.” In Leviticus 19:17-18, along with the injunctions against vengeance, against hating, and even against bearing a grudge, all alongside the command to love the neighbor, is the injunction: “You shall surely rebuke your neighbor.” The story of Jonah in the Bible mocks the idea of strict retributive justice: the inhabitants of the wickedest city on earth are rebuked, repent, and then are forgiven by God, who defies Jonah’s demand that justice requires their punishment. The Joseph story takes up retribution again, and again rebuke is restorative for perpetrators and for the victim. In not leaving the offense unrecognized, rebuke also restores justice for the community, the tribes of Israel. Rebuke and forgiveness, rather than ignoring the culpability of the offender, are designed to make it explicit. Forgiveness is relational, between someone who harms and someone harmed; and because their relation is broken, initiatives and responses are required from both for their relation to heal. From the side of the injured issues recognition of offense and rebuke, from the injurer, acknowledgement and confession, from the injured, an offering of help, from the injurer, remorse, from the injured, recognition of that remorse, from the injurer apology, from the injured, forgiveness. Forgiveness is a process, and its unfolding is not unlike narrative or theater: we see it at work in The Tempest.

Keywords: punishment, justice, restoration, retribution, forgiveness, rebuke

JEL Classification: K10, K30