Indiana Wesleyan University’s John Wesley Honors College awarded Dr. Andrew Skotnicki the 2019 Aldersgate Prize last fall for his book, Conversion and the Rehabilitation of the Penal System: A Theological Rereading of Criminal Justice(Oxford University Press, 2019). Unfortunately, with the advent of the pandemic and closure of the campus community this past spring, the John Wesley Honors College was unable to host and bestow the award on the author at its annual Celebration of Scholarship. The IWU community will finally have the opportunity to hear from Dr. Skotnicki this week—at least remotely—as part of the IWU Faculty Scholarship Symposium (https://www.indwes.edu/about/offices/provost/faculty-scholarship-symposium). This virtual symposium will be Wednesday, October 28 at 12:15 pm with a recognition of Dr. Skotnicki’s reception of the Aldersgate Prize and an address from the author on his theological rereading of the criminal justice system, followed by a brief time of Q&A.
Motivated by the ethos of its Christian liberal learning community, the John Wesley Honors College awards the Aldersgate Prize annually to celebrate the outstanding achievement of an author whose scholarship challenges reductionistic trends in academia by yielding a broadly integrative analysis of life’s complexities and by shedding fresh light on ultimate questions that can enrich Christian conceptions of human flourishing. After reviewing over eighty nominations for the 2019 prize, the Aldersgate Prize selection committee unanimously selected Conversion and the Rehabilitation of the Penal System as co-recipient of the award.
Conversion and the Rehabilitation of the Penal System is a paradigm-shifting interrogation of the ideological and structural dysfunctions that plague the modern criminal justice system. Noting especially the lack of any transcendent moral horizon to anchor contemporary analyses of the “crime problem” or to nurture visions of correction that do not entail systemic violence, Skotnicki demonstrates that prevailing theories of retribution, deterrence, and rehabilitation are not able to underwrite any meaningful and life-giving conceptions of the nature and purpose of criminal punishment. Instead, Skotnicki insists that we must turn to a moral paradigm of “conversion” to reorient thinking about the penal system and provide a governing logic that could inspire a patient, integrative, relational, and transformative engagement of the asocial alienation at the root of harm done to others. By re-envisioning the penal system as a place that invites intellectual, moral, and spiritual conversion, as opposed to administering retribution and deterrence, Skotnicki offers a pro-social ideological framework within which personal care, dignity, self-transcendence, and communion is prioritized over violence, isolation, and external conformity. Ultimately, the Aldersgate Prize Selection Committee was particularly impressed with how Conversion and the Rehabilitation of the Penal System does not simply critique the failings of the prison system, but challenges readers to re-humanize “criminal offenders” by seeing their well-being and need for conversion as part of our common human project to transcend self-interest and pursue lives of communal goodness.
Dr. Andrew Skotnicki is Professor of Theology at Manhattan College in New York City, where he pursues teaching and research interests in Criminological Ethics. He is also the founder and director of E3MC program (Engaging, Educating, Empowering Means Change), a partnership between Manhattan College and the New York City Department of Corrections.
The selection committee for the 2019 Aldersgate Prize included the faculty of the John Wesley Honors College (http://www.indwes.edu/Academics/JWHC/JWHC-Community/), as well as Stacy Hammons (Provost, IWU), Willem Van De Merwe (Blanchard Chair in Physics, IWU, Emeritus), Stephen Pierce (Assistant Professor of History, IWU), Rebecca Barnard (Assistant Professor of Music Therapy, IWU), Catherine Brekus (Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America, Harvard University), Christina Bieber Lake (Clyde S. Kilby Professor of English, Wheaton College), Peter Harrison (Professor and Director of Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Queensland), and Dr. Vittorio Montemaggi (Lecturer in Religion and the Arts at King’s College London).