NCJ Number
145919
Journal
Journal of Crime and Justice Volume: 16 Issue: 2 Dated: (1993) Pages: 3-9
Date Published
1993
Length
7 pages
Annotation
This paper urges criminologists to engage in a "compassionate criminology," which recognizes that people are connected to one another and to their environments.
Abstract
Compassion, wisdom, and love are essential for understanding the suffering of which we are all a part and for practicing a criminology of nonviolence. Crime policies of the last 25 years have stemmed from a conservative ideology and political administration. Criminal justice policy and funding have focused on fighting those who suffer from the harms of a mean-spirited capitalist economy. Domestic criminal justice has paralleled the violence of warfare abroad. A society of meanness, competition, greed, and injustice is created by minds that are greedy, selfish, fearful, hateful, and crave power over others. Suffering on the social level can be ended only with the ending of suffering on the personal level. Wisdom brings the awareness that divisions between people and groups are not between the bad and the good or between the criminal and the noncriminal. Wisdom teaches interbeing. We must become one with all who suffer from lives of crime and from the sources that produce crime. Public policy must then flow from this wisdom. 6 references