Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice That Restores

by Dominique DuBois Gilliard

Therefore, Lewis, like Augustine, Aquinas, and Calvin before him, saw punishment not only as a virtue but also the key to justice, accountability, and transformation in the offender. This meritocratic view of justice insists that punishment and reconciliation are codependent, that when wed they induce justice and right relationships. This theology has arrested the evangelical mind. We have been discipled to think that crime is sin, and sin fosters unrighteousness and separation from God, provoking God’s wrath. God’s wrath then necessitates punishment, and punishment leads to accountability, transformation, and ultimately reconciliation. This is what evangelicalism, broadly speaking, understands biblically based justice to be. In accounting for this, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, in Prison Religion: Faith-Based Reform and the Constitution, says, “Whether one can conclude that dominant contemporary Christian theologies of punishment actually contributed directly to the increased punitive nature of U.S. society, there is no question that the two are culturally congruent and mutually recognizable.”15