What We Do

Education:

What We Offer

Our educational materials will help you bridge the gap between immediate anti-racism and police/prison reform movement work and the longer struggle toward prison and police abolition and compassionate transformative forms of justice.

We teach the theological basis for prison abolition and the deep resonances between abolition work and the gospel calling of Christians. For Christians, the story of God redeeming and reconciling the world is foundational to our commitment to solidarity and liberation for those who are incarcerated.

We contextualize the day-to-day struggles for abolition in the story of God’s ongoing redemption of the entire creation. Ultimately, we can imagine prison abolition as participation in the saving work of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, and in the life of the world to come.

More details about programs are on our Education page.

What Comes Next

Our programs build the groundwork, to help your interest in or current work with abolitionist or prison-reform campaigns find a place at the center of your congregational identity. The goal is to take this new identity, understanding, and imagination and bring it to support the local organizers and Black-led campaigns occurring in your community. After our education programs, we can help connect you to related organizations and local campaigns. Here are a few places to start:

Abolition doesn’t just require the tearing down of unjust systems, but the building of new ways to practice justice in our communities. Our education programs will provide the “big picture” of various aspects of prison abolition and how they’re relevant to Christian discipleship, to help you find your role in support of the movement towards abolition. Ultimately, abolition is God’s work that we get to participate in. The goal of our programs is to help your community imagine what that participation looks like for you.

Here’s an infographic with suggestions of how to further explore the areas of our mission on your own, using materials from our site:

Pen Pals:

Writing letters to incarcerated people is one of the easiest, lowest-risk, and highest-impact ways to provide immediate support for prisoners, learn more about the system, and get involved. We have some capacity to provide matches through a pen pal program, or we can connect you to other organizations that coordinate pen pal programs.

All letters from incarcerated people come via a P.O. Box to protect your privacy. If you’re interested, please email Hannah at contact@christiansforabolition.org.

Policy:

Abolition is a long-term goal. But our commitment to the abolition of prisons and better forms of justice informs the way we approach immediate policy and prisoner-advocacy work.

From an abolitionist perspective, it’s important that our work to reform the current system not lead to retrenching it. From a Christian perspective, it’s essential that our advocacy always show forth the gospel truth that Christ has abolished the need for retribution and that God seeks out all who are lost, to heal in community.

Some of our specific policy and advocacy goals:

  • Abolish the death penalty: We join in longstanding Christian opposition to the death penalty, an act of violence against the image of God in every human being.
  • Abolish LWOP: Life without parole (LWOP) is another form of death sentence, sentencing people to die in prison. Our faith teaches us that everyone, no matter what they’ve done, can change–think of the apostle Paul and his dramatic conversion after persecuting the church. Parole is a way of recognizing that people change, and that even those who have done great harm should have the chance to return to society. Especially as we fight the death penalty, it’s important that we not give in to reforms that propose LWOP as an alternative to execution and therefore make it harder to advocate for greater access to parole for everyone sentenced to life. God desires that no one should be lost (2 Peter 3:9) so everyone should have the chance to be reincorporated into their community.
  • Abolish solitary confinement: Solitary confinement that lasts longer than 15 days is torture and does great psychological harm. People incarcerated in solitary confinement can be kept in their cells alone 23 or 24 hours a day, often only allowed recreation alone in an outdoor cage. Prisoners in solitary liken it to being buried alive. In the name of the One who burst from the grave, we call for the immediate end of long-term solitary confinement.
  • Abolish private prisons: Although the vast majority of prisoners in the US are held in public facilities, private prisons are a particular immorality because of the profit motive. No one should make money from the suffering of another; no one should profit from the caging of a human being. “You cannot serve both God and money” (Matthew 6:24). In this spirit we demand the end of private prisons.
  • Abolish immigration detention: Immigration detention is prison by another name. But it lacks even the excuse of punishment, as immigrants are being caged because they are immigrants, not as punishment for a crime. In fact, most immigrants in detention are seeking asylum as they flee violence and persecution in their countries of origin. God commands us to “love the foreigner, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 10:19). In response to this command of hospitality and in the context of brutality against immigrants, we join in the call to end the criminalization of immigration and the caging of immigrants.
  • Abolish money bail: Over half of all people held in local jails have not been convicted of any crime, but are in jail awaiting trial, often because they cannot afford bail. Not only are those held in jail caged, sometimes for years, without conviction, but being unable to make bail often leads to the loss of jobs and livelihood. And being held pre-trial makes it much harder to prove your innocence. In fact, more than 95% of criminal cases never go to trial but are resolved through plea bargains. If everyone went to trial, the system would be overwhelmed. Pre-trial confinement is a powerful tool prosecutors can use to encourage plea bargains, even from innocent defendants, when a guilty plea can get them out of jail sooner than waiting months or years for a trial. Effectively, money bail means there is one system of law for the rich and one for the poor. But the Bible tells us not to let our justice system be perverted by discriminating between the defendant who is rich or who is poor (Leviticus 19:15). No one should be locked up for poverty, so money bail must be abolished.
  • Abolish sex-offender registries: Sex offender registries effectively form an additional punishment for offenders who have already served their sentences. Harsh restrictions on residency can leave registered sex offenders homeless and ban them from large sections of the cities where they live. Such restrictions are ineffective, reducing community support that helps prevent those recently released from committing further crimes. Registries even expose offenders to vigilante violence. Registered sex offenders are modern-day lepers, banished from our communities. Just as Jesus touched and healed lepers, we must address sexual violence in a way that hold offenders accountable within communities rather than hiding them out of sight through our laws.

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