# Reforming Criminal Justice ![rw-book-cover](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61n0A0WT3VL._SY160.jpg) ## Metadata - Author: [[Matthew T. Martens and Derwin Gray]] - Full Title: Reforming Criminal Justice - Category: #books ## Highlights - Edward Everett Hale: I am only one, But still I am one. I cannot do everything, But still I can do something; And because I cannot do everything I will not refuse to do the something that I can do. ([Location 191](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BYTGBLC4&location=191)) - “My goal in writing this book is both to tell a history and to offer a hope. I have sought to recount accurately and fairly the legal history of my nation’s struggle toward justice, and, against the backdrop of that history, I want to leave you with hope for justice.” ([Location 205](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BYTGBLC4&location=205)) - As I’ve watched the national conversation concerning criminal justice play out among evangelicals in recent years, I’ve observed two roadblocks to meaningful dialogue and charting a way forward. First, many of the loudest voices on this issue are not particularly well-informed about how the American criminal justice system operates. The resulting discussion has not been a critique, or even an analysis, of the features of the criminal justice system. Instead, the focus has been either on the system’s inputs or on its outputs. By this I mean that much of the criticism of our criminal justice system has revolved around statistics about either crime or incarceration rates. ([Location 283](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BYTGBLC4&location=283)) - Other participants in the criminal justice conversation focus on what has come to be called “mass incarceration” and, in particular, the racial disparity of the American prison population as compared to the population at large. The United States is the world’s largest jailer, as others have frequently observed, accounting for approximately 19 percent of the world’s prisoners but only 4.25 percent of the world’s population.5 Even removing all drug crimes from the calculus, our country has the highest incarceration rate among Western countries by a wide margin.6 And the percentage of Black people imprisoned in the United States is five times higher than that of White people. ([Location 296](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BYTGBLC4&location=296)) - More telling, in my view, are these statistics: 40 percent of murders in the United States go unsolved while, since 2000, 1,039 men and women have been exonerated of murders for which they were convicted.8 Thousands of guilty wander free while more than a thousand were wrongly imprisoned. This suggests that something in the American criminal justice system is broken. ([Location 304](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BYTGBLC4&location=304)) - Which brings me to a second roadblock I have observed—namely, that much of the discussion occurs without reference to a comprehensive Christian ethic of criminal justice. Rather, much of the current Christian engagement on this issue sounds more like political talking points than a biblical framework. ([Location 314](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BYTGBLC4&location=314)) - The criminal justice system is, by definition, state-sponsored violence. Every criminal law, even a just one, is an authorization for the state to use physical force against an image bearer if he or she fails to comply with the law’s mandate. ([Location 318](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BYTGBLC4&location=318)) - What is disturbing, however, is not always unjust. ([Location 322](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BYTGBLC4&location=322)) - In short, I hope to demonstrate from Scripture that justice is, most fundamentally, an issue of love. What the Bible teaches is that justice is an act of love. That which is loving is no less than that which is just. ([Location 327](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BYTGBLC4&location=327)) - Get love right, and you will get justice right. But you will never set the justice system straight without a proper understanding of love. ([Location 333](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BYTGBLC4&location=333)) - This is a book about that love and what it means for the American criminal justice system. Crime is conflict. It is a product of a fallen world. God ordained government to address that conflict, and a criminal justice system is one facet of that conflict management enterprise gifted to us by God for our use until that day when conflict is no more. The question I set out to answer in this book is how to conform such a system to Scripture—which is to say, how to do criminal justice justly. In sum, my answer is that a criminal justice system marked by Christ’s love for accused and victim alike is, in a fallen world, a crucial element of what Augustine of Hippo (AD 354–430) called the “tranquility of order” (tranquilitas ordinis) and President Lincoln much later called “a just and lasting peace among ourselves.” ([Location 372](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BYTGBLC4&location=372)) - In significant part, what drives our approach to criminal justice is fear. Politicians play on it. News media sell it. And we have acted on it. In doing so, we have built a criminal justice system based on a fear of “other” people who, we think, will never include us as the accused, much less as the convicts. ([Location 384](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BYTGBLC4&location=384)) - For the Christian, the defining slogan of the criminal justice system should not be “law and order” but “love your neighbor.” ([Location 392](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BYTGBLC4&location=392)) - What sanctification looks like for the Christian participant in the criminal justice system is the subject of this book. ([Location 494](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BYTGBLC4&location=494)) - As law professor John Pfaff has observed, we don’t have a single criminal justice system in the United States; we have 3,144 criminal justice systems—one for each county in the United States, each with its distinct features, priorities, strengths, and weaknesses.6 ([Location 8057](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BYTGBLC4&location=8057))