A primer on Catholic Social Thought and the future of criminal rehabilitation
A note before you begin: This piece is longer than our usual posts. We are asking you to stay with it anyway. What Robert and Clarke have written together from inside Colorado Department of Corrections is not an ideal blog post.This is a scholarly essay, memoir, theological argument, and a direct challenge to the reader, all at once. Footnotes! Dostoevsky! Collecting bullet casings in a Spider-Man lunchbox at five years old!?! Toss in the papal encyclicals around that testimony with the precision of someone who has thought very hard about what justice actually means and you will not regret the time you spend here.
Our Vision
We do not desire this essay to be informative only. Similar to a Restorative Justice ‘circle’, we hope to facilitate a conversation. Our dream would be to establish an open dialogue with university law schools–including administrators, faculty, and students–to establish virtual learning and working cohorts, where our incarcerated voices can be engrafted directly into advanced justice education. And not only ours, but an incorporation of actual victim/offender/community dialogue: An experiential practicum of the restorative work itself. To this end, we are both available for contact through the Colorado Department of Corrections.
‘The People’ have made their decision: “Robert Ray, you are hereby sentenced to death by execution.”
Part I – The Fire
Clarke T. Cayton
Every prisoner must come face to face with the ‘self’ that committed their crime. Be it murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping, aggravated assault, each of us are confronted with a complex grief. A consortium of shame and perplexion: Who are we? What made us this way? Can we change? Are we even allowed to change?
These powerful questions are not rhetorical. They form the foundation of a radical exercise of
accountability, currently transpiring behind prison walls. Over the course of the past year, Robert Ray and I have gathered in a circle with eight fellow inmates at Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility. Each one of us voluntarily taking a requisite step toward the discovery of the causative factors, which resulted in our choosing to harm others.
Drawing from both ancient tribal reconciliatory practices and modern psychosocial redemptive theory, the ‘Restorative Justice’ movement is illuminating a healing path for incarcerated men and women in prisons across the country, closing the loop of victim-offender-victim cycles of violence. The process is human-centric, rather than offense-specific. Our crimes are not excused, but rather explored; self-investigated through the lens of cumulative trauma and the societal influences that have molded us. We who form the circle are not seeking justifications. What we desire is understanding, leading to personal transformation.
We begin to touch–and not without great trepidation–on what Jesuit Priest and philosopher Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. describes as,
[T]he salutary exercise which consists in starting with those elements of our conscious life in which our awareness of ourselves as persons is most fully developed… In each one of us, the whole history of the world is in part reflected. And however autonomous our soul, it is indebted to an inheritance worked upon us from all sides…
What is their role within us? What will their effect be? They will merge into the most intimate life of our soul and either develop it or poison it.
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This self-reflective experience very rapidly becomes a deep, inner work, requiring bravery not often exposed in non-carceral settings, as we dare to tell our dark truths. Sharing with one another inflicted wounds long neglected, and in most cases outright rejected by the justice system that has condemned us.
For the purpose of inviting you to explore this restorative model with us, and as an introduction to an alternative-orthodoxy of justice, we wish to grant you privilege into this sacred space, this fire, as we like to call it. We invite you to sit with us. Learn with us. Hurt with us. Heal with us. The apprehension you may feel at the outset is mutually shared, I assure you–all the more reason for the courageous summons.
We call this fiery circle a ‘brave space’, not a ‘safe space’; because a safe space is a place absent of pain, while a brave space invites the pain in, holds it collectively, and awakens each other to the healing of our shared woundings.
So please, join us in our circle. It is Robert Ray’s turn to speak:
Part II – Just a Kid
Robert Ray
As far back as I can remember, an empty stomach, cries of pain, drug dealing, and murder plagued my reality. By first grade, I had already found the means to make cash and put food in my belly.
As I bounded out the front door of our house, my little bare feet playfully dodged used syringes, drug baggies, and rust-colored remnants of dried blood pools, I entered my concrete playground. I joyfully scavenged my claim, lifting little golden bullet casings, which I kept secure in my Spider-Man lunch box. It was ‘Jackpot!’ when I could pluck one as long as my finger. It wasn’t much, but it was shiny and it was mine. And that small bit of gold made me feel like I had really struck it rich.
My mom, step-dad, four siblings, grandpa, uncle, and I lived in a cramped 4-bedroom housing project on the South side of Chicago. Rent was $16 a month, but my mom struggled to pay it. Sleeping four-to-a-bed, with bodies pressed closely together to preserve warmth, we endured another brutal Chicago winter without heat. Because the monthly ration of food stamps only went so far, many nights we were fed just ketchup and crackers. On rare occasions, my mom purchased stolen meat from our neighbor at a discount. Anything to keep us alive another day.
I wasn’t a helpless kid, though. I did my part. Whenever I found a baggie of crack, I knew to give it to my mom who would take it to the same neighbor to sell for a kickback. In return, I collected a finder’s fee–a crisp, brown $1 food stamp. I was in business!
My enterprise grew when I discovered my first dead body. I remember being transfixed. She wore a sky-blue jacket, and was face down in the alley. I had seen dead bodies before, but this one was the first I had found that no one knew about. And this one was different. All the other deaths were violent: gunshots, knife wounds, always blooded. But not this one. I just stared at her as she lie there, motionless, as if she was peacefully asleep. All this confused my simple mind.
I didn’t know what to make of it, but I knew I had to tell someone. When I left the alley, I saw a police officer, and I ran to tell him about the lady I had found. He smiled at me and put his big hand on my shoulder. He held out a shiny quarter saying, “Every dead body you tell me about, I’ll give you 25 cents.” Now I had a real job!
I told everyone about my new employment and word got around. Not long after, a neighborhood gangster pulled me aside. “I don’t want you talking to the police no more,” he said. I remember the reassuring way he said it too. This wasn’t spoken as a threat. It was sage advice, like he knew something I didn’t. He was now going to look out for me. I watched as he pulled out a huge wad of cash from his baggie pants. Flipping through the large bills until he found a single dollar. He placed it in my hands, sealing my allegiance. And my fate.
I was 5 years old.
Part III – Casuistry
Clarke T. Cayton
Now that you have been exposed to the fire and singed by Robert’s truth, you might find yourself contemplating, “Yes, that’s a tragic story, but what does any of this have to do with Restorative Justice?” The answer lies in a foundational, yet recently forgotten concept: casuistry, or case-centric jurisprudence. Casuistry doesn’t begin with legal codes or abstract legislation. It begins with a person. A whole person. And their whole-truth.
Robert Ray is not just sharing a personal memoir with the circle. He is disclosing a case study in causation: how one child’s world of deprivation, systemic neglect, and normalized violence becomes a loaded chamber for criminalization; not driven by inherent evil, but by inherited despair. Restorative Justice explores the upstream, asking not just what crime was committed, but what were the watershed moments that funneled the currents that built up into a violent rapid. This is our criminogenic expedition. Our task is to retrace the headwaters of our turbulent histories.
Casuistry has deep Catholic roots, especially in the Ignatian spirituality tradition, where it was defended vigorously by the Sons of Loyola during the rising tide of Enlightenment rationalism and its new model of legislative absolutism. As Europe centralized legal authority into the hands of the State, something profound shifted: the definition of victimhood itself.
No longer was the victim the person harmed. Now, in the eyes of the court, the victim became ‘The People’; an abstract proxy for society. This epoch, while politically expedient, voraciously severed justice from its human nexus.
Over the past few centuries though, the seemingly once dormant Jesuit principle of casuistry is beginning to resurge, as there are renewed voices challenging these abstracted modes of justice. As opposed to promulgating legal methodology, emerging Catholic Social Thought pursues a simple moral truth: that harm is inherently human, and justice must be as well.
When Robert Ray speaks of his childhood, what we hear is not an excuse. It is a case, and this casuistic reading of his life reveals how he too was a harmed person long before he harmed anyone else. Poverty, violence, abuse, systemic neglect; these were not incidental factors. They were shaping forces. And as Fr. Teilhard de Chardin has so insightfully explained, each one of us represents an accumulation of these types of exposures, which merge into the most intimate life of our souls, either developing it or poisoning it.
Casuistry compels us to ask, What exposures formed Robert’s conscience? What choices did he have? What agency did he exercise, and when and how did that agency begin to narrow? This is not an argument for moral relativism. It is a demand for moral interrogation, because accountability is not a reflex. It is a process. Being that responsibility must first be discerned, before it can be owned.
Restorative Justice, on a practical level, validates this necessary application of casuistry, not within a sterile court of law, but within a human community. It also affirms that regardless of the crime committed, what matters most are the people affected by it. “Casuistry sees cases in terms of relationships among people connected by a common injustice,” writes Academic Jason Morgan. He continues, “[Thus] requiring the careful, attentive, thoughtful, and imaginative application of fair judgment in order to right the wrong, and restore all parties to good graces with one another as best as can be done.”
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Based on his own testimony, we can plainly see that Robert Ray was victimized from the outset by society, aka ‘The People’. You may feel some pity for his unfortunate upbringing, but quickly dismiss any personal responsibility, since that wasn’t your neighborhood and he’s not ‘your people’.
This is the distance that must be overcome for an effective–and restorative–system of justice. One not contingent on punitive verdicts, but on healed human relationships. “Whatever is opposed to life itself,” we read in GAUDIUM ET SPES, such as any type of murder, abortion, or willful self-destruction; whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as torments inflicted on body or mind, or attempts to coerce the will itself; whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, or deportation; all these things and others of their like are infamies indeed. They poison human society, but they do more harm to those who practice them than those who suffer from the injury.
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You might recall G.K. Chesterton’s famous quip to the question: What is wrong with the world? When, in all his typical bravado, he responded, “I am”. The injustices of society are the responsibility of ‘The People’. Not some of the people, all of the people. You. Me. Everyone. The Pastoral Constitution further testifies, “Of such (atrocities) is man at once the cause and the victim.”
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We all have inflicted harm, and we all have been injured because of it. The fragments of this painful truth lie buried, deep within the souls of everyone in the circle. Just under the surface of this practice is revealed a profound revelation: honesty and accountability are not linear principles; they are reciprocal components of a whole society that includes everyone, in prison and out.
We invite you again to sit in the fire, to listen to a little more of Robert’s testimony. Not with
an ear of sympathy, but an awakened responsibility, as someone implicated in the community
of his whole-truth.
Part IV – To Live or Die
Robert Ray
At nineteen, I got a tattoo that covers the entire left side of my torso. In bold, black, unapologetic letters, it reads: “Victim of the Ghetto”. My tattoo wasn’t a rash decision, it was a declaration. It was a mark that proclaimed, “This is where I come from: a place where I fought for everything I had, where I survived by sheer will, and where the world doesn’t care about my struggle.” The tattoo, dark and permanent, isn’t the only mark I carry on my skin though. Over the years, my body has collected a map of scars, each one narrating a story of life and death.
One time, I walked into the bedroom that I shared with my two older brothers, and found a black handgun lying on the bed. I picked it up. The handle was so big I could barely grip it. I managed to spin it doing my best cowboy reenactment, but my tiny index finger slipped and hit the trigger. I collapsed to the floor, clutching my stomach.
My brothers ran in. I screamed and pleaded with them not to tell mom. I was more afraid of getting whooped than dying, I guess. I went unconscious in the backseat of the car on the way to the hospital. I wouldn’t awaken again until after my emergency surgery. As I lay on the recovery bed with tubes protruding out of my small 9 year old frame, police officers came to ‘talk to me’. Over and over they tried to get me to blame my brothers and say that it was them who shot me. But I wouldn’t do it.
Over the course of the next ten years, instability reigned my world. A series of evictions forced our relocation at least eight times. Sometimes I would be living in a house with as many as 25 people. These homes would be epicenters for child abuse, domestic violence, drug use and dealing. At 15, I started to be expelled from school. My life was now even more consumed by the streets. I always had a gun on me, but only because everyone else did too. I had to be strapped if I was to survive this gulag. Boys my age, some friends, some enemies, were getting mowed down. By now, I had become accustomed to the damning reality that even our survival was a perpetual hell.The war was over who could carve out an existence that wouldn’t be exploited, abused, extorted, or oppressed. It was a twisted curse: the cost for some to live, is that others died.
There was a death quotient, and I never knew when my number might be up.
Part V – MEA CULPA
Clarke T. Cayton
“The violence of most violent men is ultimately spawned by the hostility and abuse of others,” writes Psychologist Robert Johnson. “Paradoxically their violence is a twisted form of self-defense that serves only to confirm the feelings of vulnerability that provoke it in the first place. When their violence claims innocent victims, it signals not a triumph of nerve but a loss of control.”
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At some stage in Robert’s early adolescence, the victimization he had endured metastasized to his soul and symptomatically corrupted his moral outlook. The perpetual transmission of this social malady took another victim, and by means of what was indoctrinated by his community to be survival, society condemned as criminal. This is where the waters of actual responsibility become more murky.
All people, criminals and non, have absorbed in varying degrees the transgressions of the world. And again, in varying degrees, have become transgressors themselves. The twenty-first century Jewish philosopher and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel has confronted this ambiguous tension and boldly claimed, “In any free society where terrible wrongs exist, some are guilty, but all are responsible.”
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Human dignity, which precedes and prevails beyond society itself, according to the papal encyclical PACEM IN TERRIS, is the foundation of “the moral legitimacy of every authority: by flouting them, or refusing to recognize them in its positive legislation, a society undermines its own moral legitimacy.”
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When a society fails to adequately govern on the basis of human dignity, it can only resort to oppression and violence to control its subjected citizenry. Just as the world we have been born into has shaped our person, our person in return has given birth to a new world. For good or ill, this is the sacred responsibility bestowed to humankind when God entrusted to us the earth. Yet, how very quickly ‘The People’–that moral majority–do distance themselves from those who fall victim to it. How convenient it is to label the criminal class as a brood of irredeemable outcasts. This illusion of separateness is precisely what the great novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky has given challenge to: proposing a critical reflection for magistrates on the presumed guiltless-ness of the populous, when considering the criminality its own society gives birth to.
“For no one can judge a criminal”, Dostoevsky writes,until he recognizes that he is just such a criminal as the man standing before him, and that perhaps is more than all men responsible for his crime. When he understands that, then he will be able to be a judge. Though it sounds absurd, it is true. If I had been more righteous myself, perhaps there would have been no criminal before me.
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It is a humbling truth, that justice is not clean, and fault is not outrightly restricted to the convicted. If we are to be judges, not just in courtrooms, but in political arenas, then we must all begin by judging ourselves first. This is a view the beau monde of society cannot accept without gnashing their teeth. In full disclosure, it is just as embittering for criminals. Every felon must grapple with the same distorted worldview, inculcated by legislated law, which has constructed an entire justice system upon a ‘dogma of blame’.
In this adversarial structure, the Prosecution–speaking for ‘The People’–is tasked with placing blame squarely on the Defendant. The Defense–representing ‘The Accused’–is tasked with diverting blame anywhere else. The premise being identical to both sides:
“Someone or something is to blame, but it is not me!” In such a hostile judicial proceeding, ‘MEA CULPA’–the simple human confession that ‘I am at fault’–becomes a forbidden utterance. When a Defendant pleads guilty, it is often the result of strategic bargaining, not moral reckoning. These ‘plea deals’ distort the truth and warp reality for the sake of adjectival efficiency. The court dismisses any moral accountability by establishing legal guilt, as opposed to factual guilt. When exercised, this procedure generates a wake of confusion and discrepancy, deepening the trauma of victims, smearing the humanity of the convicted, and further destabilizing the community that connected them. Justice is declared to be delivered not when the truth is told, but when the process has been upheld. The judicial procedure supplants all personal accountability, and any hope for human resolve.
The only entity actually served in the courtroom is the abstraction: ‘The People’. To ‘The Accused’, the verdict is declared: “The People find you guilty for all the crimes committed by you, and by us. And in your suffering you shall die in your sins, while we are absolved of”ours.
Justice exercised as scapegoating is not justice. It is moral cowardice disguised as civil order, which permissively allows society to consolidate its brokenness into the identity of one criminal, so as to exonerate the rest.
Restorative Justice proposes a substitutive solution. It asks us to abandon the zero-sum calculus of blame in favor of a shared responsibility; a willingness to explore the whole truth. What happened? Who was harmed? Who did the harming? What caused the harming? What is required to heal both the harm and the harmer? How can we as a community address the fundamental causes of the harm? Obviously, this path is much harder. It necessitates humility and vulnerability, not legal strategy. It demands honest facts, not just harsh verdicts. But it avails an outcome that our current system can virtually never deliver: healing and reconciliation, which also just so happens to be the very elixir to criminal prevention.
And so, we join the brave circle once again. We are about to hear of Robert’s condemnation. Don’t look away from this scene, and inquire if you are capable of confessing ‘MEA CULPA’, when his sentence is delivered.
Part VI – Death Row
Robert Ray
Growing up, I had come to believe that I wouldn’t live past 15. Since that was the age when you either got killed by a gang, a cop, or some other random act of violence. If you happened to make it to the age of high school graduation, you were already living on borrowed time. And by 2006, I was already four years past my life expectancy.
So when I was indicted that year with a string of charges that could land me on Death Row, I didn’t even flinch. Death was always lurking is every shadow, whether on the street or in the courtroom. What did strike me, however, was what the death penalty represented. It communicated a message that I got loud and clear. I was not a criminal. I was just trash-meat that could be thrown out with the garbage. I had no value. No worth. And now, no hope that I could be anything different.
As I sat in the cold courtroom, feeling like a specimen for everyone to examine, I was surround by a sea of white faces. The prosecutors were white, the bailiffs were white, the news journalists were white, the court reporter was white, the jurors were white. If my momma couldn’t make it to court, I would be the only black face in the whole room. I thought to myself, “How can anyone even begin to understand my world, my reality, my life?”
I sat there, as stoic as I could be, but bewildered by all the legal jargon swirling around me. All I knew, is that the only thing happening was an argument over when and how I should die. Old age, rotting away in prison? Or sooner, at the icy hands and sharp needle of the State of Colorado?
The jury made their decision, “Robert Ray, you are hereby sentenced to death by execution. And in an instant, the world went dark to me…”
I went on to spend many years in isolation, with nothing but the company of my own thoughts and nightmares. No media, no human contact, other than the guards who I was already dead to. I would sit alone, in the silence and replay the story line of my life.
After a number of years on Death Row, I noticed something starting to change inside me. Violence was becoming repulsive to me. When I witnessed blood-spilling, it churned my stomach. It was as if a part of me was waking up from a deep darkness. I began to see for the first time how great a toll all the exposure to killings had taken on me. I began to realize that my environment was not the way things should be. That it had to change. And so did I.
Then came the crying. I had only shed tears one time in my life, when my young son died in 2003. I had been conditioned that showing emotion only demonstrated weakness, something I couldn’t afford in the world I came from. In this isolation, I suddenly found myself drenched in tears. Over anything. Even things I didn’t understand and could not explain. “Why am I crying?”, I asked myself over and over. “I don’t do this.”
It wasn’t until I spoke with a therapist that I began to make sense of what was happening inside me. When I told him my story, my truth–the whole truth, he said something that struck me. He told me to imagine a soldier at war. In combat, the guy next to you may be killed, but you can’t let that affect you. You have to block that out to survive. He told me my life had been a two decade-long war.
I never realized it, but I had been living in a constant state of traumatized hyper-vigilance all my life. It had been that way since my earliest childhood awareness. Now after years in isolation, the habitual fear and danger had subsided. I started to have space to ‘feel’ for the first time. The therapist looked at me and said, “It seems you can cry for others, but I want to encourage you to cry for yourself.”
I didn’t understand. Why would I cry for myself?
Part VII – Justice for All
Clarke T. Cayton
It is incredibly difficult to develop empathy–even for oneself–when one is continually subjected to systemic harm. What Robert Ray has endured on Death Row is not simply an ‘incarceration’. It is an unfathomable, dehumanizing abyssal. So telling in his previous statement is the deep humanity welling up within him to grieve for others, but an inability to weep for himself. But how can a dead man cry?
I propose that when a man is stripped of the dignity of being a man, it is God alone who
weeps within him. To complete the cycle of harmful victimization, we must wax beyond the criminal acts themselves, and investigate the structure that reacts to it: prison. The carceral machine is the distributive punishment arm of the justice system. It is prolifically designed to enforce pain and suffering as retribution for those convicted of causing pain and suffering. But this raises a moral paradox: If the instigating act of harm was unlawful and immoral, what justifies
replicating that harm under the auspices of justice? Sister Helen Prejean has devoted her life to imprisoned men who have been condemned to death. In a 2025 article for America Magazine, she wrote, “No matter how grievous the crime, we may never entrust to frail, human authorities the God-like power to take life. I once asked Pope John Paul II if the church respected the ‘inviolable dignity’ only of the innocent. What about the inherent dignity of all humans, even those guilty of crimes?”
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This is precisely where Catholic Justice Advocates must, and often do, intervene. Father Raffaele Grimaldi, inspector general of chaplains in Italian prisons during Francis’ papacy, remarked, “The popes appeal is based on the Gospel, an appeal to the conscience and responsibility of others. We know that prisoners are there for reasons of justice, but we must never separate mercy from justice. Otherwise, justice becomes revenge.”
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So how does this elaborate system of vengeful harm operate without devastating moral and social consequences? Frankly, it doesn’t. It operates as an underworld of injustice itself. As previously stated in GAUDIUM ET SPES, it is far more harmful for those who enact it, than those who are injured by it.
The shroud of integrity covering the abusive system is manufactured by a precisely compartmentalized process that negates any singular or personal responsibility. A series of political, prosecutorial, judicial, and penal actors are employed to deliver a sequence of retributive interventions, with no direct accountability for the inhumane outcome. When the pain measure is met, even unto death, ‘The People’ sing, “Justice has been served!” But this delusion of justice, praised by society, in fact greatly harms this same society by reintegrating further harmed people back into its own communities. And the victimizing and perpetrating and abusing continues without end. Often resulting in calls for even greater militarized responses under the banner of being ‘Tough on Crime’.
So we, the harmed-harmers, must put a stop to this wretched cycle. We do not demand punishment for our punishers, past or present. What we want is ‘Justice for All’. Justice that accounts for all. Justice that heals all. We can only launch this revolution of justice by naming the harm and forgiving the harmer. Through our own work and transformation in Restorative Justice practice, we now believe in the power of forgiveness and reconciliation. Ideologically, you may find yourself squirming as you wrestle with what feels like a dangerous concession regarding forgiveness.
“Forgiveness is not a substitute for justice,” writes Yale Center for Faith and Culture founder Miroslav Volf. Forgiveness is no mere discharge of a victim’s angry resentment and no mere assuaging of a perpetrator’s remorseful anguish, one that demands no change of the perpetrator and no righting of wrongs. On the contrary, every act of forgiveness enthrones justice; it draws attention to its violation precisely by offering to forego its claims. Moreover, forgiveness provides a framework in which the quest for properly understood justice can be fruitfully pursued.
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We, as imprisoned men and women, have reclaimed our dignity, not because the system granted it to us, but in defiance of the system that has tried to strip it away. We refuse to allow the harm done to us to perpetuate any further in our lives. We choose to break the cycle. The systematic abuse we endure will not be avenged on the community. Why?
Because our hearts have been changed. You could say we have been de-poisoned. Matthew Labonte, one of our Restorative Justice brothers at Territorial, has shared: I discovered forgiveness was at the center of the work I do in the circle, which of course, is also the beginning of the work that I am called to do in my life. Forgiveness wasn’t something I could expect, or even ask of others. Because forgiveness is a gift, and like most gifts, is precious in the offering. The small miracle is that once I found myself willing to offer it wherever it was needed in my life, it was offered to me. I think it took me understanding the great sacrifice in offering forgiveness before I could grasp the humility and repentance necessary to receive it.
Volf praises this restorative principle and asserts that, “Only those who are forgiven and who are willing to forgive will be capable of relentlessly pursuing justice without falling into the temptation to pervert it into injustice.”
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Let us revisit the circle for a concluding testimony and a call to action. This is all good and
necessary dialogue, but what are we going to do with it? Our restorative theory must inform
our judicial praxis.
Part VIII – Why I Cry
Robert Ray
In 2020, Governor Jared Polis abolished the death penalty in Colorado, and with that, I was freed from the icy grip of Death Row. Suddenly, there were opportunities for me that I had never known before. It felt awkward at first to believe that my life mattered again. Why? Just because some law changed?
All I knew is that even if the rest of my life would be lived behind the walls of prison, I was going to give my all to live it. In 2024, I interviewed for Restorative Justice. I didn’t fully know what it meant at the time, but I was sure I wanted to be a part of it.
When the volunteer facilitator asked me why I wanted to participate, I told them, “Because I am searching to be healed. I need to understand why I cry. I want to learn how to accept responsibility for harm that I have caused.”
I made it to the circle. I entered the fire. I sat alongside nine other men, each of us carrying our own heavy burdens, each of us carrying our own shame. On day one, many of the men bravely shared their charges and convictions. I emphasize the word ‘bravely’ because throughout my time on Death Row, convictions like the ones being revealed in the circlewould definitely have resulted in an injurious attack or possibly even a murder, if exposed to other prisoners.
As one inmate spoke about his sex offense, I felt a flood of mixed emotions. At first, my mind and body tensed up and I became angry, reacting the same way I had for decades. Then, chills rushed over my skin. I was in awe to see for the first time a man being completely vulnerable, weeping in front of other men–prison convicts no less! I had never before witnessed so much honesty, pain, and grief.
As other men shared more in-depth about their crimes and childhoods, something unexpected happened inside me: I started to feel a heavy load of sadness for each person in the group. I also felt extreme sadness for myself. For the first time, I cried for me and all the victimization I had suffered as a child. I also cried for all the victimization my fellow Restorative Justice brothers had suffered as children. Their stories were as mangled as my own. I sat in the circle asking myself, “How does someone who’s been through so much not end up in prison?”
I began to understand how I can, and must, take accountability for harm I have caused to so many others. Before Restorative Justice, I seriously could not see how my mindset alone was responsible for all the violence that manifested around me. I only viewed myself as a “Victim of the Ghetto”. But this circle, and these brothers, helped me discover how self-limiting my tattoo really was. I realized I could choose to no longer be defined by those imprisoning words.
We are all victims of something or someone. Some of us have been victimized by violence, poverty, neglect, broken homes, sexual abuse, etc. And many of us have carried on this legacy of harm. I am not at fault for the victimization I endured. That responsibility rests on those who hurt me. I am responsible, though, for the victims I have harmed. And I choose to end the cycle of violence. I choose to forgive those who I have been victimized by. And I seek to make amends, that I may be forgiven by my victims. This is the only way forward for me, for you, for all of us.
Part IX – The Summit of Restorative Justice
Clarke T. Cayton
Restorative ‘circle-work’ is not merely a dynamic program for incarcerated individuals, but represents a single component within a universal philosophy of justice; one that places human relationships at its center. In this manner, it reflects the divine initiative to seek healing wherever fracture has occurred. As Robert Ray’s own experience testifies, our practice does not excuse our wrong doing. On the contrary, it allows for a far more searching and honest examination of fault, personal accountability, and amendment. By transcending theoutsourced proxy-victim of the court system, the circle restores dignity to the actual victim harmed; where their name, and their truth can also be spoken, honestly and reverently.
In some cases, the actual offender and the actual victim will even chose to engage in reciprocal dialogue together. This becomes the pinnacle fulfillment of restorative practice.
Honest. Human. Healing.
What propels this powerful intersection of reconciliation is the removal of the adversarial weaponry of retribution. When the demand for criminal defense is discarded, a profound response is enabled: empathy. Genuine sorrow, grounded not in fear of repercussion, but in recognition of harm caused to a fellow human being. When the victim has the opportunity to experience this empathy, the mystery of mercy also arises. The victim, perhaps for the first time, is exposed to the causations of the offender’s actions–not as a justification, but as a complex-truth. The reality that the person that harmed them was, in many cases, just as harmed as themselves, brings the humanness of the offender also into view. This realization can become a powerful catalyst for mutually shared empathetic connection. Again, these are not grounds for creating justifications, but they do provide contexts and reasons of understanding, which are critical to both victim and criminal rehabilitation.
The societal network surrounding these harmful acts also have a critical role to fulfill in this space. As claimed above, every crime is the product of an ecosystem of injustices. Therefore, the host community must be willing to examine where these abuses lie. Then, as an informed society, collectively bear the weight of responsibility–that until corrective measures are taken–more stimulus for criminality will spread, and more victims will be victimized.
This social proactivity in no way precludes the necessity for serious responsiveness to
felonious acts. The objective of restorative justice is not the elimination of victim reparation or criminal consequence, but to fundamentally ensure that the intervention enacted does not perpetuate further harming and victimization. There remains in this model a legitimate role for incarceration, but within a radical reorientation of purpose.
Many offenders, following their criminal conviction may pose an ongoing threat to their community. In order to provide both necessary civil protection and effective rehabilitation, a highly controlled environment is mandatory. Social reintroduction is informed then by an integrated restorative process, coupled with progressive therapeutic milestones, and proofs of reformed abilities to manage civil conduct.
In summary, the community at large is responsible for triaging and mitigating conditions of injustice that give rise to crime. The offender is tasked with truthful accountability and meaningful repair. And the victim is given the right to guide the reconciliatory process, in as much as it is viable and rehabilitative.
In most cases, this reparation may require more than what the offender can personally provide. This is where the community must make amends to the victim as well, for their share of the offense. Remember, the objective of Restorative Justice is not punitive punishment, but personal healing for all.In practical terms, complete reparation is beyond the scope of actual possibility. To anticipate that any literal recompense is capable of fully restoring to a victim what has been taken from them is naïve and ignorant.
This is where we must return again to the role of forgiveness. While absolute effort is made by the offender and the community to make personal and practical amends, the remaining debt of loss can only be restored through the victim’s forgiveness.
This casuistic process is as delicate as it is essential. As Matthew Labonte articulated so well above, forgiveness can never be coerced. It can never be demanded, nor obliged. It can only be offered. Forgiveness requires a heroic virtue, a virtue many victims may not initially, or ever, feel strong enough to exercise. This must also be understood and respected by the offender and the community. Amendment should occur only when the victim is ready to make amends, and not before. Victim advocates can play an essential role in helping navigate this preparation. It is important to state, however, that as a victim nears in readiness to forgive and amend, the victim participates in their own healing and restoration. The resistance to forgive is very natural, but this aversion only nurtures the pain, and stores the poisonous harm. The universal truth is that the whole world heals one forgiveness at a time.
So we, the offenders: Robert and Clarke, and literally millions more like us are asking you ‘The People’, for your help. We are asking you to help our victims heal. We are asking you to help us heal. We are ready to make amends.
Works Cited
1. Abbr. passage from: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu, (HarperCollins – Perennial Classics, 2001), pp. 22-23.
2. Jason Morgan, ‘A Case for Casuistry’, Philosophy Now, (2020).
3. Abbr. passage from: ‘Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World’ – GAUDIUM ET SPES, (December 7, 1965), www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_cons_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html.
4. Ibid.
5. Robert Johnson, ‘A Life for a Life?’, Justice Quarterly, 1, No. 4 (December 1984), 571. Quoted in: Changing Lenses, by Howard Zehr, (Herald Press, 1995), 36.
6. Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets, (HarperCollins – Perennial Classics, 2001), 19.
7. Pope John XXXIII, ‘Establishing Universal Peace in Truth, Justice, Charity, and Liberty’ – PACEM IN TERRIS, (April 11, 1963), www.vatican.va/content/john-xxiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jxxiii_en_11041963_pacem.html.
8. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamozov, trans. Constance Garnett, (The Lowell Press), pp. 1014-1015.
9. Helen Prejean, ‘Sister Helen Prejean on Joe Biden’s act of Advent mercy’, America Magazine, (January 3, 2025), www.americamagazine.org/faith/2025/01/03/helen-prejean-biden-death-penalty-249608.html
10. Almudena Martinez-Bordiu, ‘Prison is Where “I Learned to be a Priest”, Chaplain says after 23 Years of Service’, National Catholic Register, (March 11, 2025), www.ncregister.com/cna/prison-is-where-i-learned-to-be-a-priest-chaplain-says-after-23-years-of-service.html.
11. Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation, (Abingdon Press, 2019), pp. 123-124.
12. Ibid., 124.
Editor’s Note: If you made it to the end, congratulations! This submission was selected because, much like the Jeremy Moss piece that launched the series, the structure was novel. Pairing lived experience with the scholarly material that explains and contextualizes that experience is an interesting take on “applied learning” – almost as a retro.
