Author: Hannah

Editor’s note: We welcome Micah Herskind to the blog today, with a guest post about prison ministry from an abolitionist framework.

by Micah Herskind

“Remember those in prison, as if you were there yourself.” 

From the book of Hebrews, this reminder to remember has been largely forgotten by Christians—as have those in prison themselves. In fact, far from advocating for those in prison, American Christians have historically been vocal supporters of imprisonment, and even the death penalty.

There are certainly exceptions to the rule of Christian ambivalence toward those in prison. Prison chaplains have worked in prisons for centuries, acting as spiritual advisors, counselors, and listening ears. More recently, however, another group of Christians has taken an interest in those behind bars, comprising a growing cohort of evangelical Christians entering prisons through large not-for-profit prison ministry organizations.

Several of these organizations have achieved significant prominence, and none more than Prison Fellowship. As the largest prison ministry organization in the United States, Prison Fellowship works in hundreds of prisons across the country, offering various programs behind bars with a focus on Christian conversion. When those in my Christian communities learn that I’m engaged in work around prisons and criminalization, they nearly always send me an article about Prison Fellowship. “Isn’t this so great?!” they ask. Surely, I would be thrilled about two of my worlds — my faith and my work — coming together.

I’ve never responded with the enthusiasm they expected. Something has always rubbed me the wrong way about evangelical prison ministry. But it wasn’t until a recent trip to Prison Fellowship’s website, and the more extensive digging into Prison Fellowship’s history that this visit prompted, that I am able to identify the fundamental flaws in Prison Fellowship and similar organizations.

Backed by massive budgets and armed with a very specific theological understanding of criminality, these organizations have come to represent Big Prison Ministry: the network of evangelical prison ministries that view those in prison as both uniquely sinful and wholly responsible for their imprisonment, and capitalize on incarcerated people’s captivity to advance individual conversions at the cost of communal freedom.

Chuck Colson and the Founding of Prison Fellowship

Prison Fellowship was founded in 1976 by Chuck Colson, also known as President Nixon’s ‘dirty tricks’ man. Before his seven-month stint in prison for obstruction of justice in the midst of the Watergate scandal, Colson worked as a top aide to Richard Nixon, impressing the President with his political ruthlessness and win-by-any-means attitude — exemplified by Colson’s famous declaration that he’d “walk over [his] own mother” to ensure Nixon’s reelection. 

But after years of acting as Nixon’s “hatchet man,” and several months before he would land in prison, Colson had a come-to-Jesus moment. A friend lent him C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, prompting a conversion that led Colson to plead guilty to, rather than contest, his criminal charges when Watergate broke. Colson was “born again” — a phrase that would become the title of his best-selling autobiography upon his release from prison.

Colson’s conversion experience turned him into a missionary, and his prison experience would provide him a mission field. As the story goes, one day as Colson was writing a letter in prison, another incarcerated man named Archie approached and asked, “What are you going to do for guys like us when you get out?” Colson promised Archie that he would never forget the men; he would fulfill that promise upon his release by founding Prison Fellowship.

Colson’s theological and political convictions regarding the nature of crime would significantly shape Prison Fellowship’s mission and programming. For Colson, the actions that landed him in prison were the result of his personal lack of faith and his untransformed heart—and by extension, his internal moral deficit.

As Colson explained in a 2010 interview, “crime is not caused by environment or poverty or deprivation. It is caused by individuals making wrong moral choices.” Citing the work of James Q. Wilson, a political scientist who advocated deploying battalions of police officers into poor Black neighborhoods, Colson concluded that crime is “caused by a lack of moral training during the morally formative years…it’s a character issue and it’s a family issue.”

He continued, doubling down: “Crime is caused by people making wrong moral choices. The answer to crime therefore is the conversion of the wrongdoer to a more responsible lifestyle.” Redemption for those in prison could come only through Christian conversion, or leaving “a wrongful style of life behind and [realizing], if you want to follow Christ, you have to live a different way…That’s the answer to the crime problem.”

For Colson, crime is caused by a moral failing which requires moral fixing. And to be fair, he was probably right about this insofar as his own actions were concerned. But Colson didn’t limit this conclusion to his own behavior. Instead, he extended his analysis to everyone behind bars, concluding that people go to prison because they are bad, and that bad people can become good people by converting to Christianity. Through moral transformation and religious conversion, people could leave prison and go on to live a “crime free lifestyle.”

Many Christians reading this might be nodding their head right now. Many of us, and especially white and wealthy Christians, grew up with the messaging that people are in prison because they’re bad, and that it is only through personal moral transformation that people can no longer be “criminals.”

Plainly stated, this is a view that Christians must leave behind — not only because sequestering people in cages runs directly against Christian notions of forgiveness and grace, but also because it’s simply incorrect.

Indeed, the elephant in the room here is that Colson’s post-prison success had very little to do with personal transformation during his time in prison. As a politically-connected and wealthy white man, Colson came out of prison and back to a world of resources and power. Within a year of his release from prison, Colson published his autobiography, which sold millions of copies. Resources, connections, and power — these are the things that facilitate reentry, and in general are the things that keep people from going to prison or being arrested in the first place.

Colson didn’t succeed post-prison because he converted to Christianity. He succeeded because his access to power gave him little choice but to succeed.

For most who cycle through America’s punishment system, the story is drastically different. As is increasingly well-known, the U.S. punishment system warehouses 2.2 million people, most of whom are poor and/or Black, and controls many millions more through probation and parole. It is a system that pervades the lives of the poor, while remaining an abstract depository of bad people for the rich, whose closest encounter with prison is Law and Order: SVU.

Countless historians have unearthed the histories of how the anti-Black logics of slavery morphed and took new form in the criminal justice system. Black people are vastly overrepresented in the criminal legal system, and along with poor white people bear the brunt of policing and police violence in the United States. In the U.S, those who are born poor and Black are essentially born into pipelines toward the criminal justice system—a reality that runs in direct contrast to Colson’s crime-as-moral-failing theory.

Indeed, as a rule, people enter prison poor and leave poorer. In 2014, those who entered prison had an annual income that was 41 percent lower than non-incarcerated people of the same age — and upon their release from prison, formerly incarcerated people face an unemployment rate that is five times higher than the rate for the general population, due to a combination of policies and public attitudes that bar formerly incarcerated individuals from work. Similarly, those leaving prison are nearly ten times more likely to be homeless than the general public, with rates of homelessness especially high for Black women.

White, Ivy-league educated, and a familiar face in the halls of power, Colson faced none of these barriers. And yet, Colson managed to boil down his societal upper hand to personal redemption. While winning a game rigged in his favor, Colson proclaimed that the game’s losers were losers because of their inner failings, rather than the many external barriers to their success.

This is the philosophy that guides Big Prison Ministry.

Prison Fellowship’s Work

In her book God in Captivity: The Rise of Faith-Based Prison Ministries in the Age of Mass Incarceration, Tanya Erzen writes, “Faith-based prison ministries are often concerned with salvaging individual souls, rather than asking why they are there in the first place.”

Nearly every element of Prison Fellowship’s work proves Erzen’s argument. The organization’s signature program, the Prison Fellowship Academy, seeks to “build good citizens and brighter futures behind bars”: by “using biblically based materials, the Academy specifically targets criminal thinking and behavior, life skills, addictions, victim impact, and prosocial culture change.”

In other words, the Academy proceeds from a deficit model of those in prison: people are in prison because they think and behave criminally, because they lack life skills, and because they are addicted. Prison Fellowship wants to build good citizens — because, we’re meant to gather, those who go to prison are bad citizens.

Here, we see Colson’s convictions translated into Prison Fellowship’s work. Rather than considering the systemic drivers of incarceration, imprisonment becomes a matter of bad citizenship—despite the reality that 70 percent of the U.S. population has committed a jailable offense, and yet are not considered bad citizens. Indeed, just step foot on an Ivy League campus, where you’ll see students openly using drugs, protected by a college campus rather than made vulnerable in a heavily-policed neighborhood. We don’t look on these law-breakers as bad citizens—in fact, we elect them to office and promote them to the heads of Fortune 500 companies.

Instead of recognizing this, Prison Fellowship treats those in prison as uniquely-flawed bad citizens, placing the weight of our system’s failures squarely on the shoulders of individuals. Rather than people who lost a game they were never meant to win, those in prison become pariahs whose only hope is individual salvation, not societal transformation.

Prison Fellowship is not the only organization to prioritize inner change of hearts and minds over broader change of the systems that keep people down. Kairos hopes to “impact the hearts and minds of incarcerated [people]…to become loving and productive citizens of their communities.”  Crossroads Prison Ministries aims to “connect prisoners with mentors in Christ-centered relationships so that lives, prisons, and churches are restored through the Gospel.” Push the Rock looks to take “the Rock of Ages to the hearts” of men in prison.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with offering Christian resources and teaching to those in prison who are interested in exploring Christianity, and there’s nothing wrong with being motivated by one’s faith to offer various services in prison. But as those such as Erzen have documented, Big Prison Ministry has—quite literally—a captive audience, and knows it. For prison ministries like Prison Fellowship, the “services” and incentives to participate in programming, such as separate prison wings with better conditions and more activities, are bundled with the evangelization.

When prison ministries enter prisons offering various services and opportunities, why should displaying an interest in faith be a prerequisite for accessing improved conditions? Why condition one’s deservingness of a less violent time in prison on their willingness to adopt the Christian faith?

Just as importantly, what if, instead of only ministering to those who are captive, these organizations also challenged the dehumanizing basis of captivity itself?

To its credit, Big Prison Ministry has become more politically active in recent years. In particular, Prison Fellowship has pursued political advocacy around incarceration, as well as undertaken efforts to aid those who are released from prison. But to its detriment, these efforts are generally milquetoast, exhibiting the same individualizing flaws of Prison Fellowship’s Academy. For example, Prison Fellowship was a vocal supporter of the First Step Act, which has been hailed by many as significant criminal justice reform. However, as many critics have pointed out, the First Step Act is ultimately a step in the wrong direction, benefitting very few while doubling down on punishment for many more. Likewise, Prison Fellowship’s “Second Chance Month,” in collaboration with President Trump, is an effort that once more places the burden on individuals, offering second chances “for those who have worked to overcome bad decisions earlier in life” and for those “who are willing to work hard to turn their lives around.”

To understand why Prison Fellowship’s advocacy doesn’t seem to benefit the bulk of those in prison, we might look to the overwhelmingly white team doing the advocating, pictured below. How can we trust Prison Fellowship to work toward transformation when so little of its staff looks like the people they claim they are trying to help?

What sustains staff members like these? No discussion of Big Prison Ministry is complete without considering the money flowing through organizations such as Prison Fellowship. In 2018, Prison Fellowship raked in nearly $50 million in donations. The organization’s president, James Ackerman, made over $400,000; the next highest-paid employees made over $200,000 each.

Everyone deserves enough money to live well. But when so much money flows through an organization—and when those at the top benefit significantly from it—it’s worth asking the question: does Prison Fellowship hope to see fewer people behind bars, or simply to keep making Christians out of the many people who languish there?

Just as importantly, how else might $50 million be used to improve the lives of those in prison, and stop people from going to prison in the first place? Three thousand people participated in the Prison Fellowship Academy last year; what would redistributing that money to them and their families look like?

At the very least, Prison Fellowship’s dollars would be better spent pursuing a just system than participating in the manufactured immorality of the people it claims to serve. Instead of using its resources to tell people that they’re in cages because they’re bad, Prison Fellowship might consider deploying its millions toward unlocking the cages that hold people.

Fulfilling the Promise

In 1974, Chuck Colson promised Archie that he wouldn’t forget his incarcerated companions. And upon his release, he fulfilled that promise. But what matters in this story is not so much that Colson fulfilled his promise, but rather how he fulfilled it. Colson remembered those in prison by substituting his experience — that of a rich and powerful man whose imprisonment was the anomaly — for the much more common experiences of the millions who cycle through the punishment system every year.

Have Prison Fellowship and the organizations that make up Big Prison Ministry improved the lives of some incarcerated people? Undoubtedly. But questioning whether these organizations have improved some lives misses how the same resources devoted to different ends might have improved significantly more lives, and stopped people from becoming incarcerated in the first place.

Too often, the bar for whether a reform is good is whether the reform does anything. Many Christians seem to praise Prison Fellowship’s work simply because it exists under the banner of Christianity, without asking why it exists or what exactly it does. 

How else might Colson have fulfilled his promise to Archie? He could have studied deeply, learning about the roots of incarceration and reform’s failure to “fix” it. He could have taken seriously Jesus’ message of liberation for the poor and oppressed, and his admonition against the accumulation of wealth. He could have questioned the very premise of incarceration, of locking people away instead of addressing the roots of harm and centering forgiveness and healing.

At the very least, he could have taken a closer look at his own savior, Jesus—a prisoner who was ultimately executed by the state against which he spoke out. Perhaps this would have led him to oppose, rather than continue to be a vocal supporter of, the death penalty.

As Christians, we need to ask some basic questions. Is it good to put people in cages? And in a world full of cages, would Jesus have focused on telling people in cages that they needed to be better people, or on tearing down the cages themselves?

Christians envision the kingdom of God coming to Earth. But will the kingdom have cages? And if not, why aren’t more Christians actively working toward a world without prisons?

In the Book of Common Prayer, the first psalm appointed for daily prayer on the First Sunday of Advent is Psalm 146:

4          Happy are they who have the God of Jacob for their help! *

    whose hope is in the LORD their God;

5          Who made heaven and earth, the seas, and all that is in them; *

    who keeps his promise for ever;

6          Who gives justice to those who are oppressed, *

    and food to those who hunger.

7          The LORD sets the prisoners free; the LORD opens the eyes of the blind; *

    the LORD lifts up those who are bowed down;

8          The LORD loves the righteous; the LORD cares for the stranger; *

    he sustains the orphan and widow, but frustrates the way of the wicked.

9          The LORD shall reign for ever, *

    your God, O Zion, throughout all generations. Hallelujah!

The first thing we do, as we enter into the season of Advent, praying and waiting for the coming kingdom of God, is to pray God’s promise of liberation for prisoners.

The challenge for abolitionists during Advent is to see around us the world we are waiting for. After all, at the center of the Christian argument for prison abolition is the claim that freedom for prisoners is not only a promise for the world to come, but also for the world as it is now. Anglican theologian Fleming Rutledge talks about Advent as a time of “apocalyptic transvision,” when we see our world, into which Christ was born, and the world to come simultaneously. “Apocalypse” means revelation. Our apocalyptic imagination is our way of revealing God’s world to come in the midst of history. Where do we see the future without prisons that we await? How can our revolutionary imagination reveal it to us in the midst of our world of oppression and incarceration?

Micah Herskind recently shared thoughts from the “Making and Unmaking Mass Incarceration” conference. Over and over, he recounts, speakers shared the same point about the role of abolition in the present:

• Ruth Wilson Gilmore: “abolition is about building and what we build together”
• Ashon Crawley: “abolition is not an identity to claim, but about doing”
• Mariame Kaba: “Abolition is in the present…It’s not just a horizon we’ll arrive at some day. It’s constantly being made.”
• Elizabeth Hinton: “practicing abolition means creating communities of care”

What this means for us, as Christians, is that our Advent is not just about waiting for liberation “on the horizon” but about building as we wait. Perhaps, for abolitionist Christians, our apocalyptic transvision is not just about seeing the world to come alongside the world as it is, but about seeing the world to come already present in our world in the structures we are building together.

Psalm 146 places the liberation of prisoners (v. 7) at the center of God’s work: between God’s creation of heaven and earth (v. 4), and God’s promised reign forever (v. 9). As St. Paul writes: “Now is the acceptable time! Now is the day of salvation!” (2 Cor. 6:2). What our apocalyptic transvision reveals to us, in showing us the coming reign of God, is in fact, the truth of the world as it is now; the truth of the world—this world, our world—as a place of liberation where prisoners are set free, as we build abolition together.

Perhaps the most important thing for us to see, this Advent, is not the world to come but the world around us. No matter how much we wait and prepare in Advent, the dawn of redeeming grace at Christmas is always received as a surprise. Perhaps this surprise ties together the world we imagine and the world we know. How can we look at the world around us and see with surprise the seeds of liberation in it? How can we be surprised by the abolition we are building, by our own capacities for healing and liberation?

Abolition is not just a future promise. We see it, in this in-between Advent of waiting, in our families, in our neighborhoods, in our love for one another, in the welcome and reconciliation of our Christmas celebrations. Every part of our community-building and care for one another can be turned toward the liberation of all. Abolition, like the Christ Child, is “born in us today”.

All holiday blessings to you, and thanks for your support of Christians for the Abolition of Prisons in 2019.

Peace,

Hannah

P.S. If you’re looking for holiday gifts for the ones you love, don’t forget our T-shirts, tote bags, and mugs: https://teespring.com/christians-for-abolition

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:

Perhaps helpful to share that the people (Black, indigenous, other people of color who identified as women & gender nonconforming) who concretized a thing that some call community accountability didn't do so as THE alternative to the carceral state.

— #LibraSeasonIsInEffect (@prisonculture) October 2, 2019

one of the main reasons TJ/RJ/CA etc… aren't & can't be *alternatives* to the carceral state is because they have to be voluntary and non-coercive. Otherwise what would make them different from the current systems?

— #LibraSeasonIsInEffect (@prisonculture) October 2, 2019

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

You can now support our work (and show your support) by buying t-shirts and mugs: https://teespring.com/christians-for-abolition.

Shirts and mugs are priced close to cost, but the minimal profit on each will go to support hosting fees, etc.

(Thanks to Christopher Corbin for the logo design.)

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.

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.