Religion, crime & punishment.

HookThe cobbler who ended up running Britain's prisons

ModelGood and evil — intentions versus actions

English law and religious ethics draw the same first distinction: the act, and the intention behind it. Law needs both a guilty act and a guilty mind — it is the difference between murder and manslaughter. Jesus pushed the point further upstream in the Sermon on the Mount, teaching that the anger and contempt behind violence are already sin, not just the blow itself (paraphrased); a famous hadith teaches that actions are judged by their intentions. So a good intention does not sanitise an evil act — but an evil intention corrupts an apparently lawful one.

Are people born evil? Mainstream Christianity holds that humans are made in the image of God yet inherit a pull toward sin — Augustine's doctrine of original sin — which explains wrongdoing without excusing it. Islam teaches the opposite starting point: fitrah, the belief that every person is born pure and naturally inclined toward God, with evil entering as a free choice under the whispered temptation of Shaytan. The hinge that matters for the whole theme: both traditions condemn evil acts while refusing to write off the person — which is exactly the wedge that opens the door to reformation and forgiveness later.

ModelWhy people commit crime — and what believers do about each cause

AQA's list of causes: poverty, poor upbringing, mental illness, addiction, greed and hate, and opposition to an unjust law. The prison data shows how tangled they are: more than half of prisoners have a reading age at or below an eleven-year-old's, and addiction sits behind a large share of theft and burglary. A cause is not an excuse — but for religious thinkers it is an instruction, because a tradition that commands love of neighbour is obliged to attack the causes, not just deplore the crimes.

Hence the practical record. The Trussell Trust, founded by Christians in 1997, distributed over three million emergency food parcels in 2023–24 — poverty. Church and mosque youth work, street pastors on night-time high streets — upbringing and environment. Prison chaplaincies of every faith operate in every jail by law — the whole list at once. Opposition to an unjust law is the special case examiners love: Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King broke segregation laws openly and accepted arrest, arguing that a conscience answerable to God outranks an unjust statute. Distinguish that sharply from crime for gain — public, non-violent law-breaking that accepts its punishment in order to change the law is a different moral object from burglary.

ModelLawbreakers — and the three named crimes: hate crime, theft, murder

The spec names three types of crime, and each one tests a different teaching. Hate crime — targeting someone for who they are — attacks human equality itself; UK law treats identity-based hostility as aggravating, and the racist murder of Liverpool teenager Anthony Walker in 2005 became the era's defining case. Both traditions ground equality in creation: every human made in the image of God; the Prophet's final sermon insisting that no race is superior to another (paraphrased). Theft is forbidden outright in the Ten Commandments and the Qur'an — yet Aquinas argued that taking what is strictly necessary in extreme need is not truly theft, a nuance that links straight back to causes. Murder is gravest because life belongs to God — the sanctity of life doctrine both traditions share, and the pivot on which the death penalty debate will turn.

Attitudes to the lawbreaker are where candidates blur. The consistent teaching is to condemn the act without abandoning the person: Jesus taught that visiting the prisoner is visiting him (paraphrased from Matthew 25), and prison chaplains of both faiths act that out weekly. Holding 'this act deserves punishment' and 'this person retains dignity and the possibility of change' in the same sentence is not a contradiction — it is the theme's centre of gravity.

ModelRetribution, deterrence, reformation — the three-aims scan

Retribution: the offender should suffer in proportion to the harm. The eye-for-an-eye principle, in its original legal setting, was a cap on revenge — no more than an eye for an eye — not a command to take one. Islam's qisas permits like-for-like retribution for murder, but the same passages commend accepting compensation (diya) and forgiving as better; Shari'ah's fixed hadd penalties apply only to a narrow list of other offences, hedged with deliberately extreme standards of proof. Deterrence: punish so that the offender and everyone watching thinks twice — intuitive, but criminologists consistently find that the certainty of being caught deters far more than the severity of the sentence. Reformation: use the punishment to change the person through education, treatment and work — the aim most modern Christian thinking prizes, because a tradition built on redemption cannot treat anyone as finished, and the aim Islam mirrors in tawbah, repentance that God accepts. Protection and reparation trail behind as supplementary aims worth naming.

The examiner's game is rarely 'define the aims'. It is 'which aim does this policy serve, and at whose expense?' — so practise scanning any punishment through all three.

CasePrison — and three centuries of believers trying to reform it

First, the system under scrutiny. The prison population of England and Wales hit a record of roughly 88,500 in September 2024 — full enough that the government began releasing some prisoners early — a single place costs over £50,000 a year, and around six in ten prisons hold more people than they were designed for. Prison reform is one of the oldest continuous religious causes in Britain. John Howard's 1777 inspection of the nation's jails scandalised Parliament and later gave his name to the Howard League, the world's oldest penal reform charity (founded 1866). Elizabeth Fry, a Quaker, walked into Newgate in 1813 and organised schooling and paid work for women prisoners on the principle that dignity reforms — the reason her portrait sat on the £5 note until 2016. Their modern heirs include Prison Fellowship, whose Sycamore Tree course brings offenders face to face with the effects of their crimes.

One more item belongs here because AQA names it as a contrast topic: corporal punishment, deliberate physical pain as a penalty. Britain abolished judicial flogging in 1948 — the Isle of Man birched until 1976, until the European Court of Human Rights ruled the practice degrading — while Singapore still canes. Retentionists argue it is a cheap, sharp deterrent that avoids the damage of prison; opponents answer that state violence degrades the very dignity punishment is meant to defend. Know one religious argument on each side.

CaseForgiveness — what it is, and what it is not

In 2005 Gee Walker's eighteen-year-old son Anthony was murdered with an axe in a racist attack in Liverpool. At the end of the trial she publicly forgave his killers, explaining that her Christian faith left her no other option — and she was equally clear that forgiveness did not mean wanting them unpunished. The two operations run on different tracks: forgiveness released her from hatred; justice still required conviction and sentence. A year later, when a gunman killed five schoolgirls in the Amish settlement of Nickel Mines, the bereaved families comforted his widow and attended his burial — the most cited modern case of a community forgiving first.

The teachings behind it: Jesus told Peter to forgive not seven times but seventy-seven (paraphrased), and the Lord's Prayer asks God's forgiveness in the same breath as it promises our own. In Islam, God's most-repeated titles are the Compassionate and the Merciful; pardoning is commended as closer to righteousness, and in murder cases the victim's family holds the right to waive qisas and accept diya — mercy written into the law itself. Institutionalised, this becomes restorative justice: structured meetings where offenders face their victims and acknowledge the harm. Ministry of Justice-commissioned trials found such conferencing cut the frequency of reoffending by about 14%, with victim satisfaction around 85% — the rare policy where mercy and effectiveness point the same way.

DataThe death penalty — the numbers behind the argument

Britain's timeline: the last hangings took place on 13 August 1964; abolition for murder came in 1965 and was made permanent in 1969; the penalty disappeared for all remaining crimes in 1998. Two names did more than any argument to kill it: Timothy Evans, hanged in 1950 for murders his neighbour John Christie had committed, and Derek Bentley, hanged in 1953 at nineteen and cleared by the Court of Appeal in 1998. An irreversible punishment run by a fallible system — that is the abolitionist case in one sentence.

Worldwide, Amnesty International recorded 1,518 executions in 15 countries in 2024, the highest total since 2015, with Iran accounting for nearly two-thirds — and the count excludes China, which executes thousands but treats the figure as a state secret. The United States carried out 25, and its natural experiment matters for AO2: states without the death penalty have recorded consistently lower murder rates than states with it, which is why the deterrence argument now leans on intuition rather than data. The religious positions: retribution readings hold that the gravest crime forfeits life, and qisas textually permits execution for murder; against stand the sanctity of life, the impossibility of reformation after execution, Pope Francis's 2018 revision of the Catechism ruling the penalty out in all cases — and the fact that even the Qur'anic permission sits beside an explicit commendation of the family that forgives instead.

MechanismThe 12-marker — a reusable plan

Theme E's question set runs 1, 2, 4, 5 and 12 marks, and AQA's named contrast topics here are corporal punishment, the death penalty and forgiveness — the 4-mark 'contrasting beliefs' question will be drawn from that shortlist, and the 12-marker usually lands nearby. The 5-marker demands a named source: a paraphrased teaching with its reference — Jesus on visiting prisoners, the qisas-and-diya verses — beats a vague 'religion teaches forgiveness' every time. On the 12-marker, chained reasoning beats juxtaposition: weigh each argument as you deploy it, and let data do evaluative work. Reoffending rates and murder-rate comparisons are legitimate weights in a religious studies scale, because AO2 credits reasoned argument wherever it comes from.

VocabularyKey terms the mark scheme pays for

TrapsMisconceptions that cost marks

ExamWhat examiners want