What is Justice?

How often have you ever gone to a church service and been confronted with a controversial issue being presented? On top of that - the issue is extremely polarizing and instead of seeing or getting into a heated debate, you instead walked out still pondering the discussion that took place during the service?

That's never happened to me before. Well, that is until today when I visited the fellowship of The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Topeka, or UUFT as they refer to themselves (to me, it sounds like a new brand of shoes or something).

Today was Social Injustice Sunday among all of the Unitarian churches, and the Topeka church decided to tackle an issue that I'd never heard discussed as a social injustice, and this is Incarceration. It was quite a paradigm challenge to be presented with these facts and figures, and then something I've never seen, the congregation had "talk back time" to respond to the information presented. How novel -- you get to share while at the service. How cool!

In a nutshell - we all know there is something WAY wrong with our prison system. But did you know we have more imprisoned people than any other nation in the world?? Didn't know that. Furthermore, 1 in 4 of the worlds imprisoned population is in America -- interesting. We don't really have more crime than other societies, but it appears we deem more offenses criminal than other countries. Then you can throw in Racism, Mental Illness, and Drug Offenses into the mix and it was quite thought provoking.

Now - what got me thinking in my head was why . . . why so many imprisoned? And the thought that occurred to me is the concept of justice. What is justice? Is our version of justice much harsher than the rest of the world? Why is that? Why do we want someone locked up for the rest of their lives or put to death. Why do we have the 3 strikes rule? Why are their "protected races" and harsher punishments for so called "hate" crimes than regular crimes? It really made me think about all of this. Maybe to be a more just society, we need to rethink our definition of justice -- especially in crimes that are non-violent in nature (do we really need to lock up drug users, or help them? do we really imprison people that right bad checks or just take away their ability to write checks?)

Now don't get me wrong - I'm not a crazy person that thinks prison is wrong. But I am a person that is wondering now what do we do with people when we lock them up. I mean, do we honestly think that if we just lock someone up they will change when we let them out? Isn't that the biggest form of denial ever??

I like this thought provoking thing that just happened . . . now just what to do with it . . .