Mark 12:28–34
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Practically all Christians can recite to you the Greatest Commandment, but often we let it remain an aphorism: “Love God, love others.” Or there’s the insistence on self-care inherent in the second half: “You can’t love others if you don’t love yourself.” Or, perhaps, we focus on the “who is my neighbor question” that plays a role in Luke’s telling of this passage. All of those reflections have truth to them, all tell a part of what the Greatest Commandment demands of us, and all are generally good things to believe and reflect upon. However, when I read Mark’s version of this story this week, I saw what wasn’t there.
The gospels do not assume a fundamental practice of our prison industrial complex: the practice of un-neighboring. Criminal justice systems in the United States and around the world depend on the process of removing people from their community, dislocating them to a penal context, and making return to their former community as difficult as possible. The system attempts to un-neighbor them, to make them no one’s neighbor. The system attempts to destroy familial and communal bonds that maintain the integrity and thriving of our communities by un-neighboring people the system classified as criminals. That’s what prisons are for.
That could not be further from a Christlike example or the just society the Scriptures envision. Jesus and his contemporaries knew something about un-neighboring. Ancient empires used deportation as a tactic to break apart conquered communities. The best and brightest were sent to imperial centers not just to benefit the ruling class, but to disintegrate their homelands. We know Romans used prisons, as well, and Jesus begins his ministry in Luke’s Gospel by saying it is part of God’s mission to free captives from said prisons. And yet, Christians often support this process of un-neighboring, of stripping someone of their community, family, and friends as a form of punishment for what they have done.
Even in a world where the criminal justice system wasn’t racist, ableist, and otherwise prejudiced, why would this process of un-neighboring be entertained by Christians in any context? It cuts against the core of Christian teaching that says to love our neighbors as ourselves. The only way to make this kind of system palatable for Christians is to make it so people convicted of crimes aren’t their neighbors anymore. Perhaps that’s why we have such remote and inaccessible prisons–they want to make sure the incarcerated are no one’s neighbor, because otherwise God might call people to care for them.
Many Christians accept this system by default. It’s a matter of inheritance. Many fail to question it at all. But if we even aspire to the Greatest Commandment’s demands on our lives, the abolition of prisons is an absolute necessity.
Wesley Spears-Newsome (he/him/his) is a writer and Baptist pastor in North Carolina.