An article reported in Religous Intelligence this month said that Britian’s Angelican Bishop of Liverpool backed calls for a commission to examine prison services. The former chief inspector of prisons said that investigation was urgently needed. In a call for support, the Bishop of Prisons, Rt. Rev. James Jones made an elegant argument for support of restorative justice, stating:
“People end up in prison as a consequence of a failure to relate to other people justly and properly and a failure to imagine what their actions have done to other people and how they have damaged them.
“If prison is a place for people who have failed to relate humanely and justly, and is there to reform and restore the offender back to society, it follows that it should be a place where offenders learn how to relate humanely and justly.
and…
“The weakness of the criminal justice system and the prison experience is that it depersonalises crime. The strength of the restorative justice process is that it repersonalises the crime by making the offender deeply aware of the human impact of their offence.”
