When Judge Walter Williams, a slender, soft-spoken man, puts on his black robes to preside over the municipal court in Chattanooga, Tenn, he suddenly turns into a figure out of the Old Testament: a fierce jurist whose voice booms as he exhorts wrongdoers to straighten themselves out. One 18 year old offender was paddled by the judge in his chambers; he has turned his life around. Williams grew up in a housing project and worked his way through college and lawschool. Many judges view the bench as a place for dispassionate discourse; Williams instead unabashedly sees himself as a red- hot advocate for self-help and personal responsibility. Salvation is always possible. He orders defendants to get their high school degrees.

Williams specializes in requiring public acts of contrition and restitution. “Wrongs can’t be fully righted without those things,” he says. A youth who broke into Chattanooga’s Rock Island Baptist Church was sentenced to shine the pews. “I told him if he wanted to get in the church that bad, we’d certainly make it available to him,” recalls Williams. “You get retribution, and you get deterrence, because others see what happens when you break the law,” Williams points out. “You only get real deterrence when people know there’s a price to be paid.”