Former state prosecutor finds religion
The Capital Times, a Wisconsin paper, has this interesting article about a former prosecutor-turned-pastor who is now speaking out about excessive incarceration and calling truth-in-sentencing “evil.” Here’s a snippets from the article:
It had been gnawing away at him for years, especially after the Wisconsin Legislature passed the “truth in sentencing” law in 2000. “I became concerned about the legal system’s obsession with fairness, which is very different from justice,” Jerry Hancock, a former attorney in the Dane County District Attorney’s Office, noted during an interview at a west side coffee shop this week. “I mean, people can get a fair trial. But the results may be unjust.”
Fairness, he adds, “is very important. But a system that ends up with more than half the inmates being African-American and Hispanic is not just. And I wanted to deal with those issues from a whole different perspective.” So in 2001, Hancock, who had spent three decades in the criminal justice system, pointed his life in a new direction. With the encouragement of his wife Linda, he started taking classes at Chicago Theological Seminary so that he could become a minister and provide spiritual guidance for prisoners and their families, as well as for victims of violent crime.
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