Put briefly, under the three-strikes rule, after committing a third qualifying offence, an individual would be sentenced to the maximum possible penalty for their crime, without parole. If the second or third offence in question was murder, the court would sentence the perpetrator to a life sentence without parole.
In either case, the parole-less sentence would be mandatory, unless the court considered that this sentencing would be "manifestly unjust".
Without in any way downplaying the tremendous injustice and suffering endured by the victims of violent crimes, the repeal of the three-strikes rule is worth celebrating because it is a victory for the Christian virtue of hope.
In a sermon on Holy Saturday in 2020, Pope Francis spoke of how Jesus’ resurrection from the dead reveals all of humanity to have been given the "right to hope" by God. By rising from the dead on Easer Sunday, Jesus "plants in our hearts the conviction that God is able to make everything work unto good, because even from the grave he brings life". This message follows from the Pope’s earlier remarks in 2014, where he condemned life sentences as incompatible with a belief in the fundamental human dignity of all persons. A life sentence imprisonment without the possibility of parole, Pope Francis observed, is "just a death penalty in disguise". From a Christian perspective, a sentence without parole denies the individual the possibility of believing that they might make amends for what they have done and re-enter society; in short, it denies them of Easter Sunday’s message of hope.
There is a remarkable Christian icon (pictured above) by Fransican Robert Lentz called Christ of Maryknoll. The icon shows Christ peering from between two layers of barbed wire while reaching out across this barrier with his bare fingers. What perhaps makes this image so powerful is that it is left deliberately ambiguous to the viewer which side of the barbed wire Christ is approaching from: is Christ reaching from outside the wire towards the prisoners confined within, or is Christ perhaps the one who is behind the wire? The icon may be conveying either of these situations, but I think it is best seen as depicting both. The figure of the ressurected Christ — and the message of hope that this entails — must be understood as reaching out towards those on both sides of the prison wire.
This connects to a wider point about the nature of justice. Justice, from a Christian perspective, should not only be retributive — a matter of someone "paying the price" for what they have done. Rather, justice should also look to transform or restore the condition of the individuals involved. Justice, in this sense, should aim to be healing. By mandating that the maximum sentence be imposed upon individuals for their crimes without parole, the three-strikes rule effectively communicated that the convicted would remain a wound upon society.
The author of Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky, once wrote that "[w]hen he has lost all hope, all object in life, man often becomes a monster in his misery". While many systemic problems remain to be tackled around crime and punishment in Aotearoa New Zealand, the end of the three-strikes regime at least lessens human misery, by sowing the possibility of greater hope.
Dr Greg Marcar is a Harold Turner Research Fellow and Teaching Fellow at the Centre for Theology and Public Issues (CTPI) at the University of Otago.
