New hope comes into a world of impossibility

By Sue Weishar, Ph.D.

By Alex Mikulich, Ph.D.

We live in an odd in-between time, neither free of the racist politics of the past nor committed to achieving racial justice within our multi-racial reality. In the 2012 U.S. presidential election, the casualties of racism include not only the lives lost to death-dealing racism, but also truth and justice.

By Alex Mikulich, Ph.D.

In the last issue of JustSouth Quarterly, my article, “Stop Casting Stones: The Failure of Punitive Crime Policy,” focused on what does not work in criminal policing. A key point to remember about the failure of punitive crime policy is that getting “tough on crime,” through more arrests, more incarceration, harsher sentences, and imposition of the death penalty contribute to a “vicious cycle” of violence itself.

Surprisingly, the United States lags in income mobility

By Fred Kammer, S.J.

By Alex Mikulich, Ph.D.

Restorative Justice (RJ) is an alternative criminal justice practice that emphasizes repairing the harm of unjust behavior. As Howard Zehr, a leading founder of the RJ movement explains, RJ emerged in the mid-1970s to address three problems of how the traditional system: 1) fails victims, 2) does not call offenders to account, and 3) does not address broader community needs.¹

By Sue Weishar, Ph.D.

In a remarkable development, a harsh immigration enforcement bill¹ that passed the Mississippi House of Representatives on March 15 with strong support from Governor Phil Bryant and Mississippi Tea Party members died in a Senate Judiciary Committee on April 3, 2012, the last day that action could be taken on any general bills passed by the opposite chamber.²

Why People of Faith Should Be Concerned

By Fred Kammer, S.J.

ECONOMIC INEQUALITY IS REAL AND WORSENING

Having monitored economic inequality for 30-plus years, the current “news” about growing inequality seems almost to be too late and too little. Accusations of “class warfare” against those who question our current economic realities in the United States ignore the “stealth class warfare” of four decades that has brought us to this yawning gap between rich and poor in both income and wealth.

The Failure of Punitive Crime Policy

By Alex Mikulich, Ph.D.

It’s obscene.

The obscenity is not only in the increasing rate of homicide in New Orleans—up 14 percent from 2010 to 2011—or the loss of innocent lives, or the senselessness of the murders committed. The height of obscenity arrives when we, as a city, acquiesce to the loss of life as if those who died do not matter, or as if “they got what they deserved.”

The collective failure to mourn the loss of every life and failure to recognize how every victim is one of our own marks our own inhumanity.

By Fred Kammer, S.J.

In their 1986 pastoral letter on Economic Justice for All, the U.S. bishops remind their readers of the three classical forms of justice: commutative justice (dealing with fairness in contracts among individuals and private social groups), distributive justice, and social justice. In the context of the nation’s recent awakening to economic inequality—prompted in large part by the Occupy movements—it is most helpful here to revisit the meaning and roots of the concept of distributive justice. In the bishops’ words:

Life, Death, and Voting Rights in the Texas Colonias

By Michael Seifert

I was invited to come forward and so I walked through a high-vaulted room filled with attorneys. Three black-robed judges looked down at me from their seats high above us all. The judge in charge, a stately looking woman, smiled and welcomed me. Another woman came up and made me promise to tell the truth. The Whole Truth. I did so promise, and I took my seat.