RETHINKING INCARCERATION
LETTING GO OF WHAT DESTROYS.
RENEWING OUR IMAGINATION OF GOD’S JUSTICE AND RESTORATION.
Who’s Left / Mariama Kaba / Flynn Nicholls
Maybe throughout this journey you’ve already been scratching your head, as a team, “Is this really the best we can do as a society with incarcerated men and women?”
Click through the comic-article below; let’s explore this month’s biggest question.
A STEP BACK
This is the second-to-last learning module in your One Parish One Prisoner journey. While you maintain relationship and support with your recently-released brother or sister (please invite them to join your reading this month, or at least the group meeting), we want to take a step back from the details of their specific situation now, and reflect on the big picture.
Remember at orientation, we talked about Jesus starting his “church” (ekklesia) as a movement which “the gates of Hades cannot stop”?
“And I also say to you Peter, upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it.”
You as a team have lived into that original purpose and direction with your releasing friend.
Together, your letters and calls and prayers have penetrated the many gates and walls of the “underworld/hades/hell” of prison to make contact with someone whom God loves. You’ve gotten close to this intimidating prison system and, through release planning, have seen how many barriers there are to a branded “sinner/criminal/felon” re-entering the land of the living.
You’ve seen that the gates of Hades are thick.
(This is the third and final installment of a series we’ve begun in earlier modules.)
Jesus challenged the structures, law and norms of his time. He announced a different world, a kingdom or government “of God”! He used dozens of stories and analogies to help us imagine a different way of orienting human relationships.
If Christians in America today are ever going to reimagine our criminal justice system, it’s going to happen when people like you, who’ve come to care for one person in the system, start asking better questions and prayerfully imagining a different way.
So this month we are giving you—we admit it—lots to read and think about.
But we believe it’s delicious, difficult, prophetic reading (and listening).
Set aside some time.
REMOVING OUR OWN “LAYERS”
Maybe some of what you read below will feel off-putting, unrealistic, or not square with your politics. That’s ok. We don’t grow by only hearing what we already believe.
This is part of identifying our own “layers.” It’s not just men and women resurrecting from the tombs who have grave clothes to unwrap, old mindsets to remove. We all grew up with cultural norms that blinded and protected us. There are laws and worldviews we never questioned until we had their destructive consequences pointed out to us.
In this way, we’re constantly inspired and challenged by these individuals rebuilding new lives after prison: their courage and humility to let go of their old belief systems—about, say, gangs, how to treat women, how to handle money, or conflict, or children, or even imagining a different future—and be open to learning entirely new ways of seeing the world.
Can we be inspired to do the same?
I. BASICS OF JUSTICE REFORM & BASICS OF RESTORATIVE JUSTICE
In this short video, Rev. Dominique Giliard introduces some of the topics in the readings below.
II. A CALL FOR THE CHURCH TO LEAD
Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice That Restores by Dominique DuBois Gilliard
Rev. Gilliard is a pastor and theologian whose heart longs to see Christ’s church not be the last ones on board for works of righteousness and justice—but rather, to lead the way.
For this challenging module, we hope to use Pastor Dominique’s theological vision and heart as our guide into the other readings that follow.
III. PRISONS DON’T WORK
Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair by Danielle Sered.
Mass incarceration simply doesn’t work, argues Danielle Sered in this essential treatise on better forms of accountability and safety. Our current “justice” system does not make our communities safer, nor does it bring healing to victims and survivors most hurt by violent crime. “If incarceration worked to stop violence, we would have eradicated it by now—because no nation has used incarceration more.”
Ms. Sered directs Common Justice in Brooklyn, one of the nation’s leading and successful models of “restorative justice”: alternative legal responses to crime that don’t prescribe punishment and warehousing as “justice,” but rather a series of responses a city can take to restore the harm caused by the crime.
What if our cities and governments made restoration—God’s vision throughout all scripture—the goal of our justice system?
“Restorative justice . . . allows us to envision a justice system that is not just smaller, but is truly transformed into a vehicle for accountability, safety and justice that everyone deserves.”
IV. ABOLITION?
Do you feel the prison system and reentry barriers are helping to heal your community? If you answer No, you might be a prison abolitionist already.
Once upon a time, Americans took the massive institution of slavery as a norm. A few maligned radicals thought it should come to an end.
“Sure, it’s not perfect,” much of the country probably would have pushed back, “but it’s unrealistic to think slavery could just go away entirely!”
Or, “What would happen to the entire economy?! Would those slaves even know how to manage themselves? It would be chaos!”
As with justice movements today, there were many groups who focused on “reforms” instead; just make the institution of slavery more humane, through incremental improvements.
But some people—often driven by their Christian faith and a fiery conviction that the God of the Bible, the God who delivered the people of Israel from Egypt, is consistently and passionately a God of liberation—called themselves “abolitionists.” They really believed society could/should function without the institution of slavery, period.
Embracing the challenging core of our Biblical faith is what we’d like to invite your team to consider at this point in your reentry journey.
The early Christian faith exploded—not as a reasonable, pragmatic outline of piety for Roman citizenship and small reforms within the empire. Rather, an arrested and publicly executed radical preacher among the poor and outcasts—distrusted and handed over to the police by his own religion’s leaders—came back from the dead! The Resurrection was an undoing of the entire prosecution and sentencing system’s work.
For hundreds of years, before Christianity became the status-quo religion among European leaders, the central image of Christian salvation was this:
Jesus’ Resurrection was imagined as a divine prison-break, a smashing of gates and locks that opened up a more universal abolition of Hades and Death itself—envisioned as prison-like realms. Early Christians envisioned Jesus not rising alone from Death, but welcoming all of humanity—as far back as Adam and Eve, whose hands he lifts out with Him—out of captivity.
“What does it mean for us, in the most incarcerated society on the planet, that the metaphor Jesus makes central to his ministry—that comes from Jesus’ own tradition—is FREEDOM FOR PRISONERS?””
This is our work too.
Throughout his movement leadership, Jesus insisted God was calling for “release for captives” (Luke 4). This has been dismissed as only “spiritual” liberation. It’s common to dismiss Jesus. That’s why he often literally, physically healed people while also forgiving their sins. He didn’t just “spiritually” cleanse lepers, but tangibly altered their excluded status. For Jesus, spiritual liberation and literal liberation went together. Both.
The outbreak of followers who believed Jesus actually broke out of the bonds of death went on to radically re-orient their lives, their finances, their understanding of who belongs to who. This is all recorded in the Acts of the Apostles.
A formerly violent enforcer of his religion, Saul, had a vision of God in the position of a punished criminal—and it changed him (Acts 9). He was blind, disoriented for a while. It’s common for people who’ve been in relationship with “criminals” to feel deeply disoriented for a period: they aren’t sure how to see God, American history, the law the way they used to anymore. Welcome to the gospel adventure.
(Cheesy depiction, yes. But you get the idea. It’s hard to find artistic renderings of these moments in the New Testament; they’re curiously underrepresented in church history. Wonder why.)
Saul became more than a reformer. He envisioned a much larger work of liberation/salvation (same word in Greek) in the world than his own religion was comfortable with. When he and others were arrested and in prison, what happened? God shook the prison and everyone was freed! (Acts 16)
Peter was in prison around the same time and what happened? The story says angels broke him out, right past the guards. (Acts 12)
It’s hard to read the Bible and not see a wildly abolitionist God at work, from start to finish.
So, are we anarchists tearing the prison walls down?
Not at all.
The people of Israel weren’t called to rise up and forcefully overthrow Egypt; they were called to trust God leading them into something unknown, and to not cling to the familiar system around them.
Even the walls of Jericho came down nonviolently—as God’s people were armed only with music and praise of their liberating God. Paul and Silas and the apostles in prison were in prayer when the structures around them started to shake.
Christians participating with other movement leaders in the “Underground Railroad”—networks of trusting relationships that welcomed vulnerable families and individuals out of captivity—undermined the culture supporting slavery as an acceptable norm in America.
Eventually the institution came to an end.
Well, actually it morphed: Jim Crow laws came soon after. Then our faith tradition said, “No”—in the form of the “radical” Civil Rights movement—and that institution came to an end.
Well, that really just morphed as well: Michelle Alexander has famously traced the rapid policy shift after the Civil Rights Acts to the new “tough on crime” policies and “war on drugs” laws that swept the nation and turned policing, prisons and felony records into “the new Jim Crow” today.
Michelle Alexander has called for “a new Underground Railroad today.” In a way, we built Underground Ministries and specifically One Parish One Prisoner to answer that call.
After 8 years of traveling and speaking about her work, Michelle Alexander decided not to return to her post in a law school, but rather altered her career: she dedicated her future to working within a seminary! She described this shift to focusing on the deeper spiritual traditions in our nation, deeper than the law, deeper than legal reform, in an interview this way:
“Legal academics want to study problems in a very narrow and often data-driven way, without really asking the deeper questions around, ‘Who are we in relationship to one another? What does justice mean?’
[I am] someone who now believes that much more revolutionary change is required, and it’s not simply a political revolution.
A moral and spiritual revolution is also required of us now.”
Ms. Alexander’s move from legal reformer to abolitionist went hand in hand with a move to the seminary.
“I’m now interested in abolition as a spiritual practice. The Letter to the Hebrews talks about ‘evidence of things not seen, but hoped for.’
That’s abolition.”
V. IMAGINATION
“It’s time for a jailbreak of the imagination in order to make the impossible possible.”
If not prisons, then what? How do we create safety, accountability, healing, and repair in our communities?
Mariame Kaba (from the comic at the start of this module) is one of the nation’s leading voices and practitioners of “abolitionist organizing and transforming justice.”
She is the first to insist that abolition is not an anarchist impulse to “tear down” a system. Rather, it’s a call to creatively build in our communities alternative, better responses of accountability, safety, and health—and not put our hopes in the system as it exists today.
We believe this is an approach that both conservative and liberal Christians can get behind: create local responses to what the big government machine of prison cannot do to save us nor heal us.
May her call to “imagine” be our call to greater faith as the church.
Your team has already begun this creative, imaginative work: building direct relationship with someone cut off from society, building friendships, doing reentry together, blending your worlds. One Parish One Prisoner is part of today’s Underground Railroad, and you are already a thriving part of this movement.
So next month is the last module. It asks, “Is This Just the Beginning?” What if this program, these modules, were just the starter kit, the training wheels for your parish and former prisoner to do creative work together?
It’s just the beginning of exploring what else is possible.
FOR DISCUSSION
Try to avoid heady, abstract debates in your meeting time together. Rather, connect the readings to your situation: How do these big ideas apply to your released friend?
Restorative Justice:
What were his/her actions that led to arrest and prison? Who was hurt by that crime? What might the victims have needed—more than your releasing friend sitting in an expensive adult warehousing center?
What community need/wound is revealed by the crime(s) your friend committed?
Abolition:
It’s about investing in a better way. What has helped your releasing friend begin to transform his/her life, get the healing and support needed, and start to be part of the solution in your community?
What more could the community and justice system do to make that more possible?
Church To Lead:
What might the church’s (not just your one congregation’s) role be, locally, in being part of God’s healing of these kinds of crime?
survey question
“We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”