This book is a narrative that has emerged from dialogue between the authors, seeking to make sense of their substantial lived experiences in criminal justice, health and welfare, and educational settings. Both are white, male academics. Aaron Pycroft is a British Roman Catholic. The Catholicism comes from Dublin via my maternal great-grandfather, whose daughter married my grandfather, a working-class communist descended from French Huguenots. My paternal side of the family, apart from being on occasion described as poachers and pirates, were wildfowlers and brick makers and low Anglicans. Clemens Bartollas is a North American Presbyterian pastor from West Virginia with extensive experience of juvenile justice, working with gangs and also serving as an expert witness in death row and murder cases. In making these differences and commonalities explicit, we are overtly seeking to embrace those differences and commonalities, and through understanding each other’s perspectives, to have our own examined, challenged and maybe changed. Both authors have approached criminal justice from different directions, with varying experiences of social services and justice systems, but our conclusions are remarkably similar. Ultimately, our desire is to encourage criminal justice practitioners and students who want to be practitioners to explore the roots and horizons of their personal and collective practice. In this book we bring together perspectives in Catholicism, and its traditional emphasis on sacrifice and atonement, with Protestant understandings of grace and justification and their application to understanding processes of justice. We are seeking at least the beginning of a dialogue, centred on a concept of redemption. Underpinning our approach is an acknowledgement that as human beings we are open to our environments and criminologists who are a part of the system(s) that we study. Thus, we bring who we are to understanding the issues involved. However, we do not reduce our work to the sum total of those cultural, theological and spiritual traditions, thus these reflections form a part of our professional and personal (including confessional) journeys of discovery in the light of the texts, traditions and ideas discussed.

This is not easy work and takes us well beyond normal academic disciplines and silos. The work is deeply personal but then reflects ‘the thing in itself ‘ of justice, namely, that crime, and what we should do about it, is deeply personal.