"People are in prison not to be purnished, but as purnishment"

Pierre Allard
(Pastor)
I belong to the Quebec Baptist convention Community. I am the current president of a Canadian Charity Organisation called Just Equipping, meaning equipping in Justice.   I have worked for 34 years with prisoners in Canada. My own brother was murdered and then I tried to discover the reason. That helped me to embrace both the victim and the offender. I began to build a relationship with myself, a victim, and the prisoner and discovered that this could restore justice. So I stongly embraced the Prison Apostolate.

I have seen that if we do this we will bring enough healing to our broken communities. I think that traditionally if we look back to the ways African resolved conflicts at the tribal level, we see that very much of it was restorative justice and that is what we want Pastoral agents to understand.  We are asking prisons chaplains to become acquainted with restorative justice because we feel that if they have that vision, they are going to be impacting the prisons and the community where the prisoners are returning to. And if we do not take care of the prisoners who have been incarcerated, then they are going to come back to the community worst than they were before.

I must say that when we visited the prison in Douala, it was heart breaking. I do not really know. If you have a prison that was built for about 400- 600 persons and you now have about 4000 people, then the human condition become very deteriorating. People do not have space to reflect and think about what they have done in order to change their behaviour.

I hope that the government of Cameroon and the authorities, both civil and religious, should see that something is done immediately to rescue the situation of that prison. I do not know if  it is the same case all over Cameroon. A lot of people we saw there are hungry.
Restorative Justice helps us to understand that people are in prison not to be punished but as punishment. I pray that there will be many courageous people  who would stand up and say  we can do better. There is nothing better than a community of faith which decides to impact a community of crime."

Comments

[BIGIRIMANA Samuel]

I LOVE Rev PIERRE ALLARD and his ideas.
my god bless his work.