our nation's entire approach to crime and criminal justice minimizes the moral dimension to the crime problem!
...exclaims Chuck Colson in a recent Breakpoint commentary. The left, he says, has "insisted that poverty and oppression are the chief causes of crime and that more and better-funded social programs are the answer," while the right sees the problem as a "lack of 'toughness'" -- penalties that are too lenient.
We see these same characteristics in the suggested approaches to just about everything, don't we? For example, when kids act up: "Dote on them," suggests the left. "Crack down on them," admonishes the right. Got a lazy husband or a slovenly wife? "Love on them," coos the left. "Enforce standards," commands the right. What about a student, or athlete, who's not performing well? "Praise them!" insists the left. "Fifty pushups!" or "Extra homework!" barks the right.
According to a 1977 study titled The Criminal Personality, crime is caused by people making wrong moral choices, says Colson. The solution to crime is "conversion to a more responsible lifestyle." In the 1987 book Crime and Human Nature, authors Wilson and Herrnstein explain that "crime is caused by the lack of moral training in the morally formative years. "
The answer to the problem of our penal system, then, is a moral one, according to Colson. And I'd suggest that, by extension, the solution to every human problem is a moral one, involving moral training -- training that neither indulges nor harshly punishes. The first type creates a sense of entitlement; the second crushes. But right moral training teaches proper responsibility to the true requirements of life, including both helping and receiving both help and correction when necessary.
We cannot pretend, however, that there are no moral aspects to the approaches of either the left or the right; both, on their own, are immoral. Yet the truly moral (or right, or appropriate, or godly) solution will address matters of oppression, poverty, and discipline as necessary, but not to the exclusion of the others and not as an excuse for bad behavior on the part of either corrector or correctee.
