Catholic Social Teaching And The Practice Of Criminal Punishment

With the increasing number of crimes, the attitudes of “fighting violence with violence” continues to be reinforced in a “culture of death” pervading in society. Aside from the perception of capital punishment as a quick solution to eliminating criminals, there is an attitude of indifference coming from the belief that the people who are affected by the society’s decision to kill are insignificant. Human life then becomes cheap, easily summed up in statistics and figures. What is vastly overlooked by the capital punishment is the violation of the executed person’s inherent human dignity, which is highlighted in Dora W. Klein’s journal article, “The Dignity of the Human Person: Catholic Social Teaching and the Practice of Criminal Punishment.”

Second, much of the public has an attitude called “popular punitiveness,” referring to a mindset that “if some imprisonment is good, then more must be better.” Third, though prisons are dehumanizing to some extent, much of America’s prisons go beyond such dehumanizing quality. The country’s harsh prison conditions include prison guards’ beatings, inmates’ gang rapes, psychological violence, inadequate health care, and the torture of extended solitary

Criminal offenders are treated as subhuman beings. Saint Augustine taught to “hate the sin but not the sinner.” However, as seen in Klein’s article, this is not the case for America’s prison system where the distinction between the crime and the criminal has disappeared. The same goes for the Philippines’ raging “war on drugs” in which, as Phelim Kine notes, “the current status quo in the Philippines puts human rights, rule of law, and the safety and security of Filipinos in immediate peril”. The criminal justice system is meant to be rehabilitative, granting criminal offenders a second chance. However, raw and unstable convictions capital punishment closes that opportunity.

Furthermore, the aforementioned conditions are inconsistent with the belief that all people exist at all times in a relationship with God and with their fellow human beings. Despite committing the most heinous crimes, offenders must not be viewed as subhuman or as monsters. Rather, they are to be viewed as human beings created by and existing in a relationship with God. Although they should be punished for their crimes, it should be done in a manner that does not deny their inherent human dignity. Their punishment can and should guide them towards their eternal