Recommended Reading: Rethinking Incarceration by Dominique Dubois Gilliard

I’m always interested in new books at the confluence of Christian faith and opposition to incarceration. Dominique DuBois Gilliard’s book Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice that Restores is a great introduction to the subject for Christians new to the fight against mass incarceration.

Gilliard is a Black evangelical pastor, who locates his opposition to mass incarceration in the experiences he’s had with his own congregants, in an urban setting, as they deal with the effects of criminalization and incarceration. He writes: “I kept thinking, If anyone should be leading the charge, demonstrating what a morally and ethically rooted public consensus [that reflects the experiences of poor people of color] consists of, it should be—it must be—the church!” Yet, he notes, the church has remained largely silent in the wake of other major works laying out the problems of mass incarceration, including Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy.

Gilliard summarizes the history of mass incarceration (“the new Jim Crow”) in terms that will be familiar to readers of Alexander’s and Stevenson’s books, but which will be profoundly helpful to newcomers to the fight for prison reform and abolition. He then explores the church’s role: laying out ways the church has been complicit in the development of mass incarceration, through well-intentioned but problematic understandings of prison ministry and chaplaincy and the use of “penal substitutionary” atonement theology to justify “a retributive response to crime.” Finally, Gilliard turns to the biblical understanding of divine justice and righteousness”: justice that “brings about healing in the face of harm and reconciliation amid conflict” to restore communities to right relationships with one another and God. The result is a passionate Christian case for restorative justice.

Because of Gilliard’s evangelical background—the book is published by InterVarsity Press—his arguments are sometimes less revolutionary than I might have hoped. In particular, he carefully avoids calling for abolition or an end to criminal punishment, focusing instead on ending mass incarceration and its racially disparate impacts and diving deeper into the restorative justice of God. (Of course, these are steps towards the same goal!) His evangelicalism, however, makes Gilliard a patient and convincing interlocutor of the tendencies in conservative Christianity that encourage harsh punishment, submission to authority, and a “law and order” mindset. By engaging with these beliefs, Gilliard shows biblically-based critiques of them, and ultimate victory of grace and restoration over punishment.

Ultimately, Gilliard’s book is a strong call to repentance and action for the church to involve itself more deeply in the fight against prisons. He writes: “Matthew 25 and Hebrews 13:3 convey that prison ministry is not only for a segment of the body of Christ; we are all called to participate in it.” Whether in the form of prison ministry, prison reform, or—I would suggest—prison abolition, working for the good of prisoners and for better forms of justice is essential gospel work. Ultimately, Gilliard writes:

The Church is called to bear witness to the reality of God’s saving justice in Christ, both by proclaiming it verbally in the story of the gospel and by putting it into practice in the way it deals with offending and failure in its own midst. Knowing God’s justice to be a restoring and renewing justice, the Church is obliged to practice restorative justice in its own ranks and to summon society to move in the same direction.

Buy it here.