Micah 3:5–12
The prophet Micah explicitly connects the injustice by which the rich and well-connected receive different justice than the poor as infidelity to God in today’s reading:
“Hear this, you rulers of the house of Jacob and chiefs of the house of Israel, who abhor justice and pervert all equity, who build Zion with blood and Jerusalem with wrong. Its rulers give judgment for a bribe, its priests teach for a price, its prophets give oracles for money; yet they lean upon the LORD and say, “Surely the LORD is with us! No harm shall come upon us.”
Micah promises divine judgment against Israel, its destruction allowed by God, because of this inequity: the giving of judgment for a bribe. (As well, of course, as the restriction of religious knowledge to those who can pay!)
We see this inequity in our modern justice system as well. As attorney and activist Bryan Stevenson has famously said, “We have a justice system that treats you better if you are rich and guilty than if you are poor and innocent.” Examples of the inequality in our justice system abound. Money bail is a particularly heinous example of the economic inequity in our system — poor defendants languishing in prison while rich ones do not — and one that is explicitly addressed elsewhere in scripture as an obligation.
Like the rulers of Israel who heard the words of Micah, we cannot claim not to know the inequity of the system. Abolition calls us to seek the end of systems of prisons and policing for many reasons: because of their racist basis and effects; because of the inherent inhumanity of incarceration and the affront to human dignity of punishment, exclusion, control, and state violence; because they are ineffective responses to harm. But we must always remember that inequity toward the poor is also always at the heart of systems of policing and prisons. “Good news for the poor” may be “bad news” for these systems, just like the harsh news proclaimed by Micah.
Hannah Bowman is the founder and director of Christians for Abolition.