We need to move from if you do your crime you need to serve your time to you need to make your life worthwhile and achieve your goal. Transformational justice is nothing but enlightened learning. Criminals are the products of societal systems that contain faulty learning elements that need to be corrected. They need to be rehabilitated so that society is safe and recidivism rate for them is considerably reduced. They do not need to become the new class of untouchables who need to be shunned, and who are constantly reminded of their crimes. Instead of hardening their hearts we in our compassion need to be ingenious in devising ways to soften and open their hearts so that redeeming values can enter in. All in various measures need redemption. The primary function of religions is to teach salvation and redemption so that we can move from an imperfect state to a more perfect state. While deterrence is important, a forward-looking vision of society where a criminal comes to terms with the victim through interactional justice and sound human relations needs to come into focus.
Our world needs to take care of the most vulnerable in society. The legal system in many ways needs to become a voice of the voiceless rather than a strong arm of the rich and the powerful protecting their interests. In most democracies in the world the legislators are the rich and the powerful influenced by powerful lobbies representing national and multi-national corporations that provide them with expensive financial incentives, gifts, and perks. If they were not rich when they were elected they soon become rich. Often the small criminals who engage in petty crimes are caught while the big criminals who suck the blood of hard working laborers and stash their ill- begotten wealth and black money in secretive, unreachable vaults in banks abroad walk in our midst smelling like roses.
Often legal loopholes protect them. There is widespread corruption in India often involving small sums. Corruption in the USA involves large sums. The global melt down and the economic slowdown in the world about two years ago started in the USA with irresponsible and corrupt financial practices with greedy and get-rich soon financial sharks with unethical conduct and unscrupulous ways. Most people who were affected in the financial melt-down were the hard-working people like me who saved some money for their old age. The two rich husband and wife doctors from India sentenced recently to be put behind bars for their fraudulent billing practices to defraud the US government of huge sums of money are not any different from the other criminals. Their greed blinded them.
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