Christianity and Criminal Justice Essay

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Christian Worldview of Law Enforcement

Forgiveness is a critical component of Christianity: humans are all imperfect and living in an imperfect, yet God-created world. Because of that, it is essential to view others with compassion and tolerance. Increasingly, the perspective of restorative rather than retributive justice has been infused into the philosophy of law enforcement today. "Restorative justice is an idea that says, at its core, justice has to be about repairing or addressing the harm caused to social relationships when wrongdoing happens," ("Defining restorative justice," 2015). It often involves community service by the offender to mitigate the harm done to the wider environment or members of the law enforcement community facilitating dialogue between the aggrieved party and the offender in a constructive manner ("Defining restorative justice," 2015). The idea is to heal both perpetrator and victim through forgiveness and humanization.

Law officers themselves often find solace through scripture. According to one officer: "This is our daily experience, we walk through evil. We need to thank God every day, at the beginning and the end of each shift, for letting us walk through, the evil, rather than being consumed by it. We DO fear the things we experience. As officers, we need a strong spiritual foundation to support what we have to deal with" (Hall 2013).

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Religion offers law enforcement officers a sense of hope and fulfillment, even when they are dealing with the darkest aspects of humanity. A police officer can quickly become cynical, given the daily horrors he or she is exposed to on a daily basis. Religion help provides a context and meaning for that suffering and also suggests that religion can be viewed as a way to keep officers from lowering themselves to the level of the criminals whom they are trying to apprehend.

Although police must occasionally use force to protect public safety, they also have many capacities in which they serve which have nothing to do with violence. For example, police may act as mediators and facilitators. The Washington D.C. Police Department, for example, offers a mediation service, the Community Dispute Resolution Center "assigning complaints to be mediated by a pool of well trained, experienced, and diverse mediators" ("Mediation," 2015). This embodies the Christian principle of resisting violence and turning the other cheek and acting with forgiveness rather than anger. Often it takes a strong person to forgive -- far stronger than lashing out….....

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"Christianity And Criminal Justice" (2015, January 18) Retrieved June 6, 2026, from
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https://www.aceyourpaper.com/essays/christianity-criminal-justice-2148269
   

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