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.