introduction:
i’ve been thinking a lot about redemption, ever since a messenger and intermediary said to me in 2016 that my problem was guilt.
she was, on due reflection, wrong. guilt is good, if its reasons for provoking can be assuaged in competent and compassionate manner.
what i still suffer from is an absence of process, in the secular society i cherish, for redemption.
my supposition:
let’s presuppose the following: let’s say that religion served a real positive purpose which in its relative absence now in many of our societies has not been supplanted with other processes as compassionately. i say compassionately with circumspection, of course. religion itself has effected many horrible historical — and even current — events in humanity’s journey.
an example, then, of the redemption i mention?
well. here we are!
discretion is a very humane aspect of criminal justice systems, when used in the spirit of the law and its kindly interpretation.
i studied international criminal justice in 2017 at master’s level and on one occasion stumbled across the following anecdote in the academia i was reading: italy, well known for the misuse of family power and structure, may also invoke the good of family leading to a better criminal justice praxis there.
most crime in all criminal justice systems is committed by young men between the ages of 18 and 26. after that age, almost automagically, its incidence tails off. some suggest there may even exist physiological reasons for this: that young male brains get hard-wired to begin settling at around the upper age band quoted.
either way, we have a criminal justice reality: young men who commit crime are also victims of crime, in the sense that they are the most vulnerable group to enter criminality, and get very little proactive support to stay out of the criminal justice system. more often, in fact, they get targeted — maybe targeted into it — via prejudice and presumption of very many, damning and defining, societal forces.
in italy, then, this was the example: a law-enforcement officer heard of a young man around 17 who had just about committed his first crime; certainly infraction. the officer knew of the family, and instead of “inducting” the youth directly into a path which later would be heading irreversibly towards criminality, he went behind the back of the youngster and straight to his parents.
he explained the situation gently and non-threateningly, explaining that the family could help. here, we could argue, was good discretion operating to the max: even, that it shouldn’t have been necessary to use discretion to keep the young man out of being typed so young as criminality’s cannon fodder. maybe it could be conceivable that the officer’s own kpi-structure and law-enforcement praxis would consist primarily of keeping people out of the system — enabling and allowing them to redeem any initial acts so that criminality became something they themselves wanted to veer from — instead of counting up the number of criminals captured and banged away.
proposal:
on the of the above, and in relation to things i’ve already published on a new concept of criminal justice which i’ve termed natural justice, i’d like to propose that we take the renewed need for a societal infrastructure of redemption to be revisited.
in the absence of father confessors, that is in the absence of many people finding them unsatisfactory to their needs (where they work, no change needed of course!), we should create serious halfway houses between the criminality and zero good of #darkfigure and #neocrime as i understand them at one extreme (the 20 to 40 percent that is the crime and related loopholes invisible to criminal justice) and religiously delivered confession and relief at the other. which for secular societies no longer functions easily.
yes: a natural justice, after all.
final observations:
thinking more philosophically, it’s possible that the behaviours acted out as described in this post, which may then duly and rightfully lead to criminal prosecution, are encouraged because we need to be redeemed — to feel it, i mean. and unless in secular society you enter the criminal justice system, a societal-level redemption is not within reach. if we provided other ways which had nothing to do with criminal justice stigma, perhaps — too! — fewer would wish to be criminals.
i’ve often felt, as a by-the-by and in analogous way, that open-source and social-networked online communities have become so popular and active because in such spaces — the really competent and well-run ones i mean — we find the reality (or even just simulacrum, but at least this) of a democratic discourse that real democracy increasingly is lacking.
what’s clear is there are exist basic human instincts and impulses, and they must always act in pairs.
doing democracy is one; where nowadays the reward for its practice where this doesn’t invoke the relationship of abused partner?
and so doing ill is another; where nowadays the redemption which doesn’t involve punishment and disgrace?
mil's page 