Where Judaism Meets Criminology

Why belief still matters when we talk about change

People sometimes ask, gently or otherwise, who I am — and why I speak about Judaism and justice in the same breath.

I understand the question. On one side stand academics, data, and desistance theory; on the other, Torah, covenant, and faith. But the longer I’ve lived between those worlds, the more I see that they are really asking the same thing: what makes people change?

My doctoral research in criminal-justice reform reinterpreted Travis Hirschi’s Social Bond Theory through what I called the Three Dimensions of Belief. Hirschi argued that attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief are the ties that keep us anchored to society. I suggested that belief itself has three layers:

1️⃣ belief in the self — the capacity to change;
2️⃣ belief in faith — the moral or spiritual framework that gives change meaning; and
3️⃣ a community’s belief in you — society’s willingness to see redemption as real.

Those dimensions are not confined to criminology; they are Jewish to the core. Teshuvah — repentance or return — begins with self-recognition, depends on the faith that underpins it, and is completed when the community re-embraces the returning person. Tikkun — repair — is the social expression of that faith. Every one of Hirschi’s bonds has a parallel in Torah: attachment is brit (covenant), commitment is mitzvah (responsibility), involvement is community, and belief is faith itself, made visible when others believe in you.

Criminology, in its modern form, is cautious about moral language. It measures behaviour, correlates data, predicts risk. Yet what actually keeps a person from re-offending cannot always be graphed. It lies in the decision to live differently — a decision that requires belief long before it yields evidence. Judaism, by contrast, has never been afraid of moral vocabulary. It insists that human beings are capable of teshuvah because the world itself was created with that possibility in mind.

When I first began working in rehabilitation, I noticed how the two systems — the secular and the sacred — kept missing each other. Probation spoke of “compliance”; Torah spoke of “return.” Psychology asked about cognitive restructuring; Judaism asked about the heart. Both were trying to describe transformation, but they lacked a shared grammar. My work now tries to provide one.

If criminology explains how people change, Judaism explains why they must. The first supplies evidence; the second restores empathy. Together they move us from punishment to purpose. I have seen this in programmes that bring moral reflection into the rehabilitative process — projects where men and women rebuild not just habits but identity. They remind me that faith is not the opposite of reason; it is its missing context.

This bridge between worlds is also where I live personally. Like many who have navigated the justice system, I know how it feels to be labelled. The sociologist Erving Goffman called stigma a “spoiled identity.” Jewish law, centuries earlier, offered a cure: confession, restitution, and reintegration. Both acknowledge that a person’s past must be confronted, but neither believes it defines the future.

For a long time, I hesitated to speak publicly about my own past. I feared that every word would be weighed against a label, every insight dismissed as self-defence. But silence, too, is a kind of prison. What finally gave me courage was realising that Judaism has always told stories of those who fall and return — not to glorify their fall, but to remind us that no one is beyond the work of repair. My story is one modern version of that ancient truth, and I offer it in the hope that we might see rehabilitation itself as a sacred conversation — one our communities are still learning how to hold.

People sometimes imagine that to write about both criminology and Judaism is to mix two incompatible languages. I disagree. The Talmud itself is a sustained argument about behaviour, responsibility, and consequence — precisely the terrain of criminology. Its rabbis were early social scientists, observing patterns of human conduct and building moral theory from them. When they wrote that “a person is led on the path they wish to go,” they were describing agency and environment long before the term existed.

Faith traditions also preserve something modern systems have nearly forgotten: the idea that change is relational. No one reforms in isolation. Desistance research shows that positive relationships — with mentors, families, communities — are the strongest predictors of lasting change. Judaism calls this chevruta: learning, struggling, and growing in partnership. We are saved, if at all, together.

So when people ask who I am and why I speak from this junction of worlds, my answer is simple. Because a justice system without mercy forgets what it is for. And a faith that refuses to engage with real life risks becoming theatre. I stand between them because real repair needs both evidence and empathy.

Association with my work is not risky; it is necessary. Every community needs translators — people who can carry ideas across the fault-lines of expertise and experience. That is what I try to do: to show that the same light which guides repentance can illuminate rehabilitation; that belief itself is a criminological variable worth measuring.

In Hilchot Teshuvah 2:2, Maimonides wrote: “What is repentance? When the sinner abandons the sin, removes it from his thoughts, and resolves never to do it again.” It is the earliest behavioural manual we have. The difference is that in Jewish thought, success is measured not by recidivism but by reconnection — the moment a person re-enters covenant with self, society, and God.

If Judaism believes the world can be repaired, and criminology believes people can change, then both are acts of faith. My work lives in that space between them — where theory becomes theology, and redemption is still an empirical question.