Month: October 2018

Well worth reading today’s newsletter from The Appeal, which has a spotlight on various stories of community within prisons: The community and care that people in prison offer one another.

Even though prisons are designed to destroy community and solidarity, prisoners still create community wherever they are. Our job as abolitionists—and especially as Christian abolitionists committed to the creation of the beloved community of God—is to see how we can enter into their communities, and how we can re-envision justice as something that happens within our own communities. What if the community, relationships, and solidarity built within prison walls were happening outside them instead?

Karl Barth once said that “the first certain Christian community” consisted of Jesus and the criminals crucified alongside him. When we share in the community of prisoners, we share in the community of Jesus.

Our Resources page is now updated with a Christian Abolitionist Reading List, a collection of articles and essays as well as helpful websites with further information about prison abolition, the secular and Christian arguments for abolition, prison policy and conditions, and restorative justice.

Also check out the Abolition Bibliography available, a listing of books about prison abolition and restorative justice.

If you’re seeking more information about prison abolition, and especially about the connections between prison abolition and theology, bibliographies can be a helpful starting place.

New on our Resources page is an abolition bibliography of texts about prison abolition, restorative justice, prison conditions/policies/reform/organizing efforts, and theology. Included in this bibliography is Lee Griffith’s The Fall of the Prison: Biblical Perspectives on Prison Abolition, perhaps the best book providing a Christian theological argument for abolition. Excerpts from The Fall of the Prison are available online.

Another helpful reading list is this Prison Abolition Syllabus from AAIHS.

See also this great collection of essays from Critical Resistance: Abolition Now! Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex.