Bringing Justness to Justice
“What does the Lord require of you,” asked the prophet Micah, “but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
In the 2,700 years since those words were first uttered, Jews and Christians have written volumes on kindness and humility. But Christians — and Americans in general — have frequently given little thought to what it means to “do justice.” Instead, they have been content to leave such matters in the hands of politicians, who are only too eager to burnish their tough-on-crime credentials by criminalizing ever more activities and mandating longer prison terms for offenders.
The result: While only five percent of all humans live in the United States, the self-proclaimed land of the free incarcerates almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), nearly 2.2 million people are housed in U.S. jails and prisons, and almost 5.3 million are otherwise under the supervision of the justice system. One out of every four Americans now has a criminal record.
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