Restorative justice is an approach to crime and punishment that seeks to bypass the dynamics of the courtroom. It features the opporturuty for victim and offender to construct a mutually agreed-upon means of reparation. Its proponents frequently invoke three ethical claims in defence of the practice: that punishment is not a necessary response to crime, that justice must be understood in a contextual rather than a foundational sense, and that the character of the offender can be amended through the restorative encounter. Each claim will be analysed and critiqued from perspectives drawn from traditional and contemporary Christian ethics.

The contemporary practice of criminal detention is a protracted exercise in needless violence predicated upon two foundational errors. The first is the inability to view those enmeshed in its rubrics and institutions as human beings fully capable of responding to an affirmative accompaniment rather than maltreatment and invasive forms of therapy. The second is a pervasive dualism that erects an illusory barrier between criminal detainees and those empowered to supervise, punish, and/or rehabilitate them. This book maintains that the criminal justice system can only be “rehabilitated” by eliminating punishment and policies based upon deterrence, rehabilitation, and the hyper-incapacitation of the urban poor in favor of the original justification for the practice of confinement: conversion. The latter will be presented as a progressive expansion of one’s intellectual, moral, and spiritual horizons that is self-generated and leads to the goal of including everyone and everything in a careful embrace.

On several occasions in recent years, the Catholic bishops of the United States have sought to present the Catholic position in matters pertaining to crime and punishment. While in many ways laudable, these statements pay insufficient attention to important historical and conceptual foundations of criminal justice in the Catholic tradition and reflect an inadequate understanding of current trends in present-day correctional policy.] M Y TASK HERE IS TWOFOLD. First, I present, by means of historical analysis, an understanding of the principal components of the Catholic position on criminal justice including the justification for the punishment of offenders, the end that punishment seeks to achieve, and the means to attain that end. 1 Secondly, I offer a critique of the way that the tradition is currently being presented especially by the Catholic Church in the United States. 2 After discussing the three principal elements in punishment theory-justification, ends, and means-my historical section places special emphasis on the practical methods that the Church devel-ANDREW SKOTNICKI, O. CARM., received his Ph.D. from the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California. He is currently associate professor of religious studies at Manhattan College, Bronx, N.Y. He has recently published: "The Prison Chaplain and the Mission of the Church," New Theology Review (2004) and "Contemplation and Criminal Justice," Studies in Spirituality (2003). He is now working on a book provisionally entitled: The Imprisoned Christ: A Catholic Theory of Criminal Justice.1 As religious influence upon the penal system began to wane toward the end of the 19th century, partly due to the rise of the social sciences, criminology as a sub-discipline of sociology began to emerge. "Criminology" and "criminal justice" initially were largely synonymous terms comprising those scholars whose analytical studies were instrumental in shaping penal policy. Criminal justice now also expresses the entire field of strategies and practices relating to crime. It thus carries with it all of the ambiguity associated with those same strategies and practices. Despite the incongruity of the term to some, it has been used consistently by Catholic Church officials in their writing on this subject. 2 The principal focus on the American Church is due to its laudable attempts to provide a Catholic response to crime and criminal justice. There have been no comprehensive attempts by the Vatican since Pius XII to present an overall Catholic position. The perspective of Pius XII was, in my opinion, extraordinary and is employed in part in order to critique the position of the American Church.

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The Gregorian reform of the eleventh century created the conditions for significant changes in the social and ideological structure of Western Civilization. This paper will discuss two important concepts to emerge from that period and the similarities that exist between them: the prison and Purgatory. Each is a place of temporal confinement whose aim is the reform of the inmate for the purpose of fruitful reintegration into a sacred community. Their primary point of contact during their long period of incubation was monasticism: itself a place of voluntary incarceration that provided the spatial contours and structural regimen for the universal penal edifice.The relation between prison and Purgatory hinges on the substantive changes brought to the practice of confinement by the early Church with its employment of time as an agent of conversion. This striking marriage of retributive and reformative impulses traces its lineage to the practice of penance and the particular way it was appropriated in the monastic setting. In conjunction with these carcereal developments, the monasteries were also instrumental in sowing the imaginative seeds for the shape of the world after death. An entire literary genre of visions and travels to the netherworld developed early in the common era. These stories of cosmic voyages and pilgrimages into places of turmoil and regret for earthly misdeeds came to echo the configuration, the temporal sequence, and the redemptive hope of monastic incarceration. 1 Finally, with the creation of a universal and binding system of law in the post-Gregorian era, the Church enacted the decrees mandating the ecclesiastical practice of penal confinement, and recognizing the cosmic place of confinement known as Purgatory: God's prisoners being tried, punished, and redeemed in each.