Thought for the Week: The Peace Testimony

Bob Johnson reflects on the Peace Testimony

by Bob Johnson 26th May 2017

Sixty murderers told me they didn’t want to kill – and then didn’t. There are several explanations for this, but only one is true. The obvious one is that they fooled me, they pretended to be ‘good’, but weren’t. This is the explanation prison ministers prefer, and use it to run our prisons. Another is that they were so frightened of ‘punishment’ that they decided to behave ‘properly’. Conventional wisdom supposes that murderers calculate the balance between mayhem and merit with nice precision, and then chose mayhem. By contrast Quakerism advises us to ‘utterly deny’ all outward force and coercion – and those murderers taught me why.