NCJ Number
204107
Journal
Punishment & Society Volume: 6 Issue: 1 Dated: January 2004 Pages: 85-86
Date Published
January 2004
Length
2 pages
Annotation
This article presents responses to some of the principal articles of the conference “Religion and the Criminal Law-Legal and Philosophical Perspectives.”
Abstract
In response to the article “Christianity and Criminal Punishment,” it is argued that Christian thinking about punishment should be organized around the value of love. Christians should be cautious about their support of punishment -- in practice if not in theory. The reasons for urging Christians to view criminal punishment cautiously are so powerful that they undermine the claim that punishment is consistent with Christian love. In the article “ Penance, Punishment, and the Limits of Community,” the author summarizes the influential ideas on punitive relevance of penance, communication, and community. He is concerned about finding a secular way to regard people that have done terrible things as people that are not beyond the bounds of moral community. He finds their humanity in the fact that they are communicative beings. In response to this article, it is argued that there is already a clear and powerful secular rationale for regarding wrongdoers found in the fact that they are rational beings. These differences are explored regarding the issue of capital punishment. In “Corporate Crime and the Religious Sensibility,” it is argued that corporate criminality is best understood in terms of concepts that are embedded in religious sensibility. This sensibility is revealed when corporations are regarded as entities that cannot be analyzed into elements in non-organic relations with each other. The argument with this article is that this global concept is far too general and vague to be useful. The tendency to view corporations as persons in some spiritual sense may have consequences, such as imbalancing power among actual persons. In “On What Sin (and Grace) Can Teach Crime,” the author makes moral conscientiousness central and argues that criminal responsibility should be based on the answer to the question of whether the defendant did his or her best under the circumstances. It is doubted that the emphasis on conscientiousness will carry the moral and legal weight that is assigned to it. This capacity is as susceptible to causal influences as any other aspect of the person.