Guest Post: Parole Failures Show That Our Culture Has Lost Sight of Grace

Immanuel Kant 1724-1804

The author of the piece below, which I post with his permission, is Ian Huyett, a Staunton resident and a former student attorney at the Virginia Capital Case Clearinghouse Clinic, where he represented three parole candidates. His paper “‘As I Had Mercy on You’: Karla Faye Tucker, Immanuel Kant, and the Impossibility of Christian Retributivism” was published in the Summer 2018 issue of Religio et Lex.

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Paul (real name withheld) looked at the unopened letter from the Virginia Parole Board with terror and hope. He had reason to be skeptical. The Board rarely grants parole. On the other hand, a lot had happened during the 35 years that Paul had been incarcerated.

Locked up for fatally shooting a man during a trailer-park robbery at 24, Paul was now 59. The wild-eyed, long-haired drug-user who had been arrested was gone, replaced by a kindly, balding patriarch—known to other inmates as a positive role model and mentor.

The Board had received dozens of references on Paul's behalf—describing how he had excelled in his education, taught inmates to read, saved a man's life, inspired young prisoners, designed and taught classes, and become an ordained minister. Another state's parole board had repeatedly recommended that Paul be paroled. A ministry had even offered him housing and a job upon release.

Yet, as Paul opened and scanned the letter, his eyes leapt instantly to one familiar phrase: "nature and circumstances of the crime." It was another denial letter. Paul's accomplishments could not tilt the scales against his long-dead, 24-year-old self. For some on the Board, redemption was simply not relevant. Paul feared he would be forever defined by the sins of his youth.

Paul's denial is a failure, not just of policy, but of philosophy. In criminal justice, the idea that decision-makers should ignore a criminal's changed character is often called "retributivism." Retributivists hold that the sole purpose of punishment is to rectify a past crime by inflicting suffering on the guilty party. On this view, whether that party has changed over time is a non-issue.

Retributivism can be traced to the Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant. And, while Kant may seem like ancient history today, retributivism is, in fact, a relatively new idea. For over a thousand years—dating from at least the rise of Christianity—great thinkers took it as a given that criminal justice should encourage personal transformation.

Jesus, after all, advocated pardoning criminals who were in fact guilty. In the Gospel of Matthew, he rebuked a hypothetical creditor for having his debtor thrown in jail. After Jesus' death, Roman critics of Christianity objected that many Christians were former violent criminals. As one exasperated Roman exclaimed, “What other cult actually invites robbers to become members!”. The early Christian leader Tertullian boasted of these complaints, saying "Thus the name [of Christ] is credited with their reform."

During the Middle Ages, critics of the church's military orders complained that they were made up of the scum of Europe: former rogues, thieves, and murderers. But to Bernard of Clairvaux, the leading European thinker of his age, this was "both happy and fitting." Jesus, said Bernard, "recruits his soldiers among his foes." Thomas Aquinas, too, wrote that tribunals should employ "mercy which looks to the conversion of the wanderer."

To these thinkers, justice was rooted in God's love for human beings. But in the Enlightenment worldview of Immanuel Kant, all moral duties became a series of abstract demands—reducing criminal justice to the impersonal satisfaction of blood guilt. As the Enlightenment displaced Christianity, then, the West lost its relational understanding of justice. Because Kant's duties do not yearn for us to be saved, they will not care if we are.

That there are prisoners like Paul exposes both the prevalence and the weakness of retributivism. Paul's story shows that redemption is not only possible, but that it is transcendent. His transformation, in the midst of the shadow of violence, points to a light beyond the shadow.

If we draw on a source of experience deeper than Kant's, we will discover that criminal justice—like the rest of the human story—should be more complex than our Parole Board's one-dimensional denials. In order to change policy, though, we must first challenge ourselves and our culture. We should ask ourselves whether we, too, have unconsciously drifted—like American moral and legal thought—away from what matters most.

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At 4:30 pm Tuesday, December 4 there will be a public conversation on parole in Conference Room 8 at JMU's Festival Center with Virginia's Secretary of Public Safety Brian Moran and Parole Board Chair Adrianne Bennett. Park in Lots D1 or D3. All are invited.