Though I’d be remiss if I did not also say that the life of the ‘good thief,’ as I have sometimes imagined it to be, in first-century Judea, under Roman occupation, puts me in mind of all those people, down through the centuries, who, driven by privation, and not by malice, find themselves involved in circumstances that would be adjudicated as ‘crimes’ by the machinery of the systems under which they are oppressed. Which is to say by the letter of the law, though not necessarily by the spirit of the law (had there existed in these contexts anything so beneficent to speak of).