Changing Lenses:
A New Focus for Crime and Justice
By Howard Zehr
Crime victims have many needs, most of which our criminal justice system ignores. In fact, the justice system often actually increases the injury. Offenders are less ignored by this system, but their real needs — for accountability, for closure, for healing — are also left unaddressed.
Such failures are not accidental but are inherent in the very definitions and assumptions which govern our thinking about crime and justice in the West. That is, they lie in the lens of “paradigm” with which we view crime and justice.
This way of viewing and responding to crime, however, is not the only way. In fact, it has not been the dominant lens for most of the Western history, and certainly is not the biblical view.
Changing Lenses examines our assumptions about crime and justice, which it terms a “retributibe” lens or paradigm. It then looks at historical, biblical, and practical alternatives. This book proposes a “restorative” model which is more consistent with experience, with the past, and with the biblical tradition. This model is based on the needs of victims and offenders, on past way of responding to crime, on recent experiments, and on biblical principles.
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