The criminal justice system still employs punishment.  But a new cause on the left calls for abolishing prisons and judicial punishments altogether.  The self-described “abolitionists” also want to abolish police and the criminal justice system altogether, replacing them with “getting people the help they need.”

As an example of how the ongoing, wide-ranging Catholic sex scandal and its cover-up are undermining the church’s moral authority, notice how the Pennsylvania revelations change how we hear the Vatican’s new prohibition of capital punishment.  Oh, yes, we can’t help but think, you bishops don’t want to punish anybody.

Indeed, the very concept of punishment has been fading from child-raising, education, ethics, and theology.  Hardly any pastors, including from conservative church bodies, teach about eternal punishment anymore.  Our sensibility today recoils from it.  Which was not the case not long ago.  The Deists rejected Christianity and all revealed religion in favor of, supposedly, a religion of reason and reason alone, but they retained the notion of rewards and punishments after death, which they believed was essential to cosmic justice and a moral order.

The criminal justice system still employs punishment.  But a new cause on the left calls for abolishing prisons and judicial punishments altogether.  The self-described “abolitionists” also want to abolish police and the criminal justice system altogether, replacing them with “getting people the help they need.”

Read this sympathetic article on the movement in Politico by Ruairí Arrieta-Kenna, Abolish Prisons’ Is the New ‘Abolish ICE’:  A growing group of leftists wants to get rid of the entire prison industrial complex in America.  Read it all, but here are a few excerpts:

At first blush, the idea might seem fringe and unreasonable; where, for instance, would all the criminals go? What happens to rapists and murderers? But the movement’s backers counter that it is the only truly humane direction we can head in as a society—that is, if we really aspire to live in a world rid of interpersonal harm and racial inequality. And they might actually be making headway. . . .

Read More