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We’ve got a post up at the Episcopal Cafe blog today: Why Christians Should Be Abolitionists—Again. It’s a very brief introduction to our abolitionist theology. Check it out!

We should all be paying attention to the national prison strike going on right now, with actions reported in multiple states.

While it’s hard to get information out of prisons to find out what actions prisoners are taking, they have shared the demands of the national strike. And there is further information about the prisoners’ demands available in draft legislation from the Free Alabama Movement, as well as information about the last prisoners’ strike, in 2016, in summary from the Incarcerated Workers’ Organizing Committee.

It’s important to emphasize that these strikes are nonviolent actions taken at great personal risk by prisoners demanding basic needs: humane conditions of confinement, a fair wage for labor undertaken in prison, an end to very long sentences that are effectively a sentence of “death by incarceration.”

Immigrants in detention are also getting involved, even risking losing access to their children, according to recent reports.

For us abolitionists on the outside, this strike is also an important opportunity to think about who we consider to have authority in talking about prisons, where we get our information, and how far we’re comfortable going. For those of us who come from a “prison reform” or “prison ministry” model (especially if we’re rich and white), the language of strikes and anarchism can be uncomfortable. But prison abolition is a movement that’s always been led by those who are or have been incarcerated. Our job as allies is to listen to their voices, looking first to those who are most marginalized, even if what they have to say makes us uncomfortable. After all, as Christian abolitionists, we follow Jesus who “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:7). Those who are least privileged according to the world should be our leaders (“for God chose the lowly and despised things of the world to shame the great” (1 Corinthians 1:27)). To change our minds to follow the guidance of incarcerated and formerly-incarcerated people and respect their priority as leaders of the movement is an important practice of abolition.

Check out our new adult-education curriculum, Introduction to Abolitionist Theologies, available now!

If you’re interested in using this curriculum and have questions about it, please feel free to contact me for further information.

The Nation has posted an excellent summary of the prison abolitionist movement.

This article turns from the theological to the practical and answers many of the common questions about the practicality of abolition. In particular, it summarizes the classical strategies for moving towards abolition: moratorium on building new prisons, decarceration by letting people out of prisons, and excarceration by changing policies to keep so many people from being incarcerated in the first place.

I want to add some suggestions of practical policies of mass excarceration and mass decarceration that we should work towards.

Strategies for excarceration:

-Legalize drug use and possession. There’s growing evidence that much drug use is not actual addiction or abuse, and even in cases of addiction, incarceration is almost never the best solution. Emphasize and pay for voluntary drug treatment for addicts instead.

-Divert cases, especially nonviolent property crimes and crimes by juvenile offenders, into restorative justice programs like Common Justice in NYC. In these programs, if the victim wants to participate, the crime is diverted out of the criminal justice system into a restorative justice process which focuses more on dialogue between the victim and the offender and figuring out how to make things as right as possible in the situation (rather than punishing).

-Massively increasing funding to public defender programs. Poor black defendants are more likely to be indigent, and therefore to get substandard legal representation. Public defenders are overworked and underpaid; supporting that system will help get fairer trials and keep people out of prison.

Strategies for decarceration:

-Shorten prison terms. The US has a highly punitive culture and longer prison terms than almost anywhere else in the developed world. To really make a dent in the prison population, we have to lower sentences imposed. That means abolishing mandatory minimum sentences, but also changing statutes and sentencing guidelines to disallow longer sentences, and in particular life sentences, except in the most egregious cases.

-Abolish money bail. Bail at this point just serves to keep poor people in jail awaiting trial while richer people can get out. It does great harm to communities, especially communities of color, and it pressures innocent people to plead guilty even if they’re not just to get out of jail. More here.

-Grant more parole and compassionate release. Parole is politically unpopular, so parole boards tend to be stingy. But encouraging/requiring more parole will help cut prison populations. Also, there is strong evidence that people over 50 almost never return to violent crime, so mass compassionate release of older inmates would help reduce prison populations.

-Grant more pardons and commutations. Generous usage of the pardon power at the federal and state level is one effective way to get people out of prison. Commute the sentences of all nonviolent drug offenders to time served, for example, and let them all out. It’s worth noting, though, that just focusing on nonviolent offenders doesn’t do enough to really cut down the prison population — so we would have to start looking at using pardons and commutations to let out even violent offenders who show evidence of rehabilitation. While pardons and commutations are the purview of elected executives, we can work for collective community pressure. One major reason pardons are used to little is the fear of reprisal from “tough on crime” voters. The more support we can give to elected officials to get people out of prison, the more we can help bring about decarceration.

These policies are not sufficient! They are not abolishing the unjust system. But they are practical possibilities to start moving the right direction: towards massive decarceration and excarceration.

Many mainline Christian denominations make use of the Revised Common Lectionary which offers scriptural readings for each Sunday. For the upcoming Sunday, August 5, the lectionary reading from Ephesians 4:8-10 is a text redolent with the imagery of abolition:

Therefore it is said,

“When he ascended on high he made captivity itself a captive;
he gave gifts to his people.”

(When it says, “He ascended,” what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower parts of the earth? He who descended is the same one who ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things.)

This somewhat mysterious passage makes more sense when read in an abolitionist light:

• Jesus ‘making captivity itself a captive’: author Lee Griffith places this passage in light of Jesus’ victory over the powers and principalities of this world – understood to include not only sin and death but also prisons, writing: “Biblically understood, prisons are based on the spirit of death. Biblically understood, liberty is based on ‘the Spirit of the Lord” (Luke 4:18). When Jesus’ proclamation of liberty is viewed in the light of the resurrection, it can be said that Christ led captivity captive or that he captured captivity” (The Fall of the Prison 109). Just as Roman generals held parades dragging the captives of their conquest behind them, Griffith writes, so Jesus carries captivity itself in his train, a sign that he has utterly conquered and defeated it. But he has done so not by giving in to the spirit of violence or conquest but through the cross (The Fall of the Prison 110). That is, Jesus has conquered through the mystery of his death which destroyed death and his identification with criminals which destroys the notion of “criminals” as outcast or separate from the rest of us.
• The emphasis on Jesus’ descent into the lower parts of the earth: This text has one of the few references to the concept which later became known as the descent into Hell or the Harrowing of Hell (another reference is 1 Peter 3:18-22 which refers to Jesus preaching to the spirits in prison). The descent into Hell also makes its appearance in the Apostles’ Creed and in many icons of the resurrection, which show Christ taking Adam and Eve by the hand and leading them out, breaking the gates of Hell behind him. In this image, we see again the central theological significance of abolitionist imagery: the resurrection of Christ is not just his physical reanimation, but literally the freeing of those imprisoned! Naming this central symbol as a prison-abolitionist one has two consequences: first, to strengthen the practical work of abolition by recognizing its theological and eschatological significance, so that every policy change we can carve out to set some people free forms part of the ongoing work of Jesus’ resurrection towards God’s final victory on earth; second, to deepen our understanding of the mystery of Christ’s resurrection by giving it concrete significance in the freeing of prisoners on earth. This is the meaning of Jesus’ resurrection: that all those in prison have already been set free, and our job is to make the world recognize and live out that liberation that God has already accomplished in fact. And the descent into hell offers a further hope as well: the hope of the salvation and restoration of all. After all, if Christ can descend “into the lower parts” to “preach to the spirits in prison” and set them free, how can we continue to insist that any will be eternally separated from God’s mercy? God is the god who sets prisoners free: we believe this to be true in prisons as they exist today and in eternity. So our work for the abolition of prison here and now is also a profession of our belief in, ultimately, a universal salvation.

P.S. If you’re inspired by this text on August 5 and want to take concrete action thereafter as a sign of Christ’s victory over prisons and death here, the ACLU is organizing a California Lobby Day for important criminal justice reform bills in Sacramento – including SB10, a step toward abolition of cash bail – and you can join them.

Join the California Coalition for Women Prisoners in advocating for an end to Life Without Parole:

If you can’t go in person, send your support by emailing or calling Gov. Jerry Brown to encourage him to commute the sentences of everyone serving Life Without Parole in California.

Check out What We Do to see how ending LWOP fits into our Christian mission for abolition.

Welcome to Christians for the Abolition of Prisons, a new organization aimed at bringing prison abolition into the consciousness of the mainline church! We’re glad you’re here. On our site, you’ll find basics about why we believe prisons must be abolished rather than reformed, why prison abolition is essential work of the church, what theologies inform our abolitionism, and what policy solutions we advocate for within an abolitionist framework.

In days to come, this space will be updated with additional educational resources, as well as with specific advocacy campaigns we encourage you to take part in.

Thank you for joining us in the great work of liberation!