Author: Hannah

The “Alternative” to the Prison-Industrial Complex

Discussions about abolition of prison and police on social media this month have led to continued calls for “alternatives.” What are we supposed to do instead of calling the police? What responses are there other than a carceral system for dealing with crime?

Influential abolitionist Mariame Kaba expressed well the challenge of answering that question, in a couple of recent Twitter threads:

She makes two essential points to keep in mind when we talk about “alternatives” to prison:

  • Various alternatives exist, including restorative justice, transformative justice, and community accountability. But no one program will provide a single overarching system to replace the system of prison and policing. Instead, the alternatives are different ways that different communities are finding ways, unofficially, to address harm in non-carceral ways.
  • All of these alternatives are always voluntary programs. A mandated system that replaces prisons will just recreate its problems.

It’s essential to understand that the premise of abolition is that each and every one of us can be empowered to help address harm in a small but significant way. Our job as abolitionists isn’t to create a new system to replace prisons and take away our responsibility to act, but instead to act in situations in which we find ourselves to prevent and address harm.

What we can do, along with advocating for the end of the prison-industrial complex, is continue to build up alternatives wherever and however they’re possible, understanding that our goal isn’t a united system but instead a patchwork of programs that meet specific community needs.

What are some of the options, and how can you learn more about them?

  • Restorative justice focuses on meeting the needs of the person harmed and the person responsible for the harm, with the goal of restoring relationships. The Catholic Mobilizing Network has excellent resources on RJ.
  • Transformative justice focuses on changing the conditions that made the harm occur, in situations where “restoration” isn’t a helpful goal because the underlying situation before the harm was unjust and there isn’t a healthy relationship to restore. TransformHarm.org is an invaluable resource with information on transformative justice as well as restorative justice.
  • Community accountability processes are similar to transformative justice, in that they are processes developed by specific communities to meet their specific needs to prevent and address harm. More information is available through Transform Harm.

The goal is to find resources that will help you and your community understand how to make small steps towards safety and healing outside of the carceral system, to take small, concrete, voluntary actions as alternatives to prisons and policing.

It is countercultural in our society to consider ourselves empowered to take action. We expect all action to need to be delegated to “officials” or “authorities.” But the goal of restorative justice, transformative justice, and community accountability processes is to help individuals draw on the strengths of their own communities to take responsibility for healing harm.

Community and Paul’s conversion

I was thinking about the role of the community in promoting restorative justice and other forms of alternative justice to our current retributive system, and recently read the story of Paul’s conversion in Acts 9.

What’s striking to me about Paul’s conversion is not just the dramatic moment itself or the act and call of God, but also the response of the Christian community that he has victimized to his change of heart, which made restorative justice possible.

First Ananias welcomes Saul (who will soon be Paul) (Acts 9:13-17). He is nervous, and has to be persuaded by God, because of the harm Saul has done. But Ananias’ act of hospitality allows Saul to receive the Holy Spirit, be baptized and welcomed into the church, and start a new way of life. Without Ananias, Saul’s transformation can’t be completed. Without Ananias’ help, Saul is still blinded by the harm he’s done. The community, in the form of Ananias, provides support for his healing.

Then, when Saul returns to Jerusalem, the community at first rejects him, again because of the harm he has done. It is only when Barnabas advocates for him (9:27) that he is able to be brought to the apostles and share his story of conversion, and live into his new life as an apostle. Just like Ananias, Barnabas reaches out on behalf of the community Saul victimized and harmed and is accompanies him on his journey of reconciliation to it.

Saul could not have become Paul without the work of Ananias and Barnabas, who reached past their fears to support him.

Recommended Reading: Until We Reckon by Danielle Sered

Until We Reckon

One of the most persistent questions that I get, as an advocate not just for prison reform or an end to mass incarceration, but for prison abolition, is: “What do we do about violence?” Even people who are deeply sympathetic to the need to change our dysfunctional prison system get stuck on the apparent need for incarceration to protect us from violence and danger.

Danielle Sered’s book, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair, is the most compelling response to that question I can think of. Sered is the director of Common Justice, a restorative justice diversion program in New York that deal primarily with violent crime. Common Justice’s work is to take people who have done great harm to others and—if the victim is willing and they are willing to take accountability for what they’ve done—divert their criminal case into a restorative justice process, which often lasts a year or more. At the conclusion of the Common Justice process, criminal charges are dropped and the perpetrators avoid incarceration.

Sered’s years of practical experience give this book the specificity it needs in proposing restorative justice as a solution to violence. She’s not just arguing against prisons because they’re inhumane: she’s also arguing that they don’t make survivors of violence safer, because they don’t help the perpetrators avoid further violence. Survivors are pragmatic, Sered says, and their primary desire is usually to make sure the person who hurt them won’t hurt anyone else. Common Justice better meets their needs than prison does, because Common Justice is more effective than prison at preventing future violence. Violence has “four key drivers,” Sered writes: “shame, isolation, exposure to violence, and a diminished ability to meet one’s economic needs.” Sending violent offenders to prison imposes up on them all four of these drivers and makes further violence more likely.

Sered’s work is piercing in its emphasis on accountability. Restorative justice, she says, is about accountability, not mercy. She writes: “Often, people who recognize the harms caused by punishment seek to replace it with mercy. While mercy must have a central place in justice, on its own it is not an adequate substitute for punishment.” Why? Because “mercy is not precisely about the people who have caused harm at all—it is about those of us in a position to determine what should happen to them.” 

Accountability, on the other hand, is the person who has done harm putting their own efforts in place to make it right. Sered writes: “When we cause harm, we misuse our power, and accounting for harm therefore required that we invert that misuse and put our power in service of repair.” Rather than disempowering those who have done harm, either by imposing punishment on them to make them powerless or offering mercy to them, Sered wants us to require those who have done harm to use their power rightly to make amends. This is a view of accountability in some ways more difficult than “doing time”—but also more transformative! There is nothing “soft” or “nice” about restorative processes based on accountability rather than punishment.

I found Sered’s book deeply inspiring and moving. Her description of accountability offers a paradigm shift in how we think about responding to violence. Her experience proves that there is a better way than prisons, even to address violence—if we’re brave enough to try it. Required reading for abolitionists. Buy it here.

Recommended Reading: Rethinking Incarceration by Dominique Dubois Gilliard

Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice That Restores by [Gilliard, Dominique DuBois]

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.

Announcing the Christians for Abolition Pen Pal program

Often, people reach out to us wanting to know what immediate action or steps they can take towards prison abolition.

One of the most effective ways to get involved in the work of abolishing prisons is to write letters to incarcerated people. Letters are important in a number of ways:

  • For many prisoners, letters are their only connection to the outside world. Letters can remind them that they are not forgotten. Prison is isolating, and letters can break through that isolation.
  • Letters can be a source of safety for prisoners. Letters let guards know that someone on the outside is keeping track of this prisoner, that someone cares about their well-being.
  • For those on the outside, letters are the easiest way to start learning more about the prison system. Prisons are opaque and difficult to access by design. Transparency into what goes on inside of them mobilizes activism against them. For many of us, prisons are strange and far away. Writing letters to, and receiving letters from, prisoners brings them closer. Proximity is the basis of our activism.
  • Letters are an easy way to involve others: many people, even those not interested in activism, are curious about what goes on inside prisons. Writing letters is a low-risk and low-effort way to encourage new people to get involved and make a difference.

Letter-writing is a great first step towards activism. It helps us build our own relationships with those who are incarcerated; it helps us become more informed about what it’s really like to be in prison; it builds meaningful community between prisoners and us on the outside.

But finding a pen pal and getting started can be intimidating. We’re here to help.

Christians for Abolition is in contact with various prisoners looking for a Christian pen pal. We can help connect you—a pen pal on the outside—with an incarcerated person to whom you can write. Communication from the incarcerated person all goes via our P.O. Box, to protect your privacy. You write as frequently as is convenient for you. The goal is to maintain a long-term correspondence—but even sending infrequent letters is helpful. Even brief cards at holidays are meaningful to people in prison.

If you’re interested in getting started, please contact Hannah at contact@christiansforabolition.org. I will match you with a potential pen pal.

Writing letters to those in prison can be life-changing, for you and for them. Please reach out today!

New Resource: An Introduction to the Theology of Prison Abolition

New on our Resources page is An Introduction to the Theology of Prison Abolition, a 17-page pdf document consisting of annotated slides from a church adult-education class I taught.

This document introduces the basic ideas of abolition and theological arguments for it in an accessible and visual form. This would be an ideal “first session” for an adult-education series on prison abolition, to be followed by our 4-week Bible study curriculum.

Karl Barth’s Good Friday sermon

From our chaplain:

Karl Barth, in his 1957 Good Friday sermon, preached: “They crucified him with the criminals. Do you know what this implies? ..this was the first Christian fellowship, the first certain, indissoluble and indestructible Christian community…No one before and no one afterwards has witnessed so directly and so closely God’s act of reconciliation, God’s glory and the redemption of the world, as these two thieves.”

“The Criminals With Him,” in Deliverance to the Captives, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1978, pages 77,81.

Printable website content!

Now available on our Resources page: a printable PDF containing all the content of our website, including most of the other Resources available, suitable for sharing with those incarcerated or others who prefer printed content to website content.

Academics: if you’re interested in building a curriculum for a course on the theology of prison abolition, our Resources page, or the printable content plus this list of online resources, would provide a good starting point!