A nation of prisioners

I'm a Christian.

For over 20 years I served in local churches as the senior minister--in other words, I stood before my congregations almost every week, opened the Bible and tried to have something say.

[Just an aside: I realized early on that there is a big difference between "having to say something" and "having something to say"!]

This weekly discipline meant that I spent many hours reading the Bible.

In all that time---over two decades--I don't remember ever speaking directly to the issue of prisons and prisoners. Oh, I'm sure I mentioned "the prisoners" in passing because Jesus and the Hebrew Bible had a good deal to say about those subjects. I think I didn't speak directly for at least two reasons. First, I didn't have anyone in prison who was close to me. Second, the suppose that I bought the notion that anyone who was in prison got what they deserved. Both very lame reasons not to speak.

Recently, I spoke to a large Dallas church. My text: Luke 4:14-30. In that reading we find these words taken from a much earlier writing in Isaiah 61:

The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom to the prisoners. . . .

"Freedom to the prisoners," hmmm.

As I wrestled around with my preparation, it struck me that someone needs to challenge the way we "do prisons" in this nation. So, I spoke to alternatives to incarceration, especially for non-violent offenses related to drugs that are so common where I live. Many, if not most, sent to prison for drug offenses need something much different than prison time, that is if rehabilitation is truly the goal.

Prison is not the best place to "get well." And, when a person has served the time, they can seldom escape the crime when it comes to housing or employment.

Prison perfects the fine art of setting a person up to fail and to fail terribly.

Now, on the day after my sermonic excursion into the world of prisoners, one of my former parishioners sends me an essay by Glenn Loury ("A Nation of Jailers," in CATO Unbound, March 11, 2009).

Chew on these facts from Loury's analysis:

"At more than 700 per 100,000 residents, the U.S. incarceration rate was far greater than our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia, which each have a rate of about 500 per 100,000.) Other industrial societies, some of them with big crime problems of their own, were less punitive than we by an order of magnitude: the United States incarcerated at 6.2 times the rate of Canada, 7.8 times the rate of France, and 12.3 times the rate of Japan.

"The demographic profile of the inmate population has also been much discussed. In this, too, the U.S. is an international outlier. African Americans and Hispanics, who taken together are about one fourth of the population, account for about two thirds of state prison inmates. Roughly one third of state prisoners were locked up for committing violent offenses, with the remainder being property and drug offenders. Nine in ten are male, and most are impoverished. Inmates in state institutions average fewer than eleven years of schooling."

I witness on a daily basis what imprisonment does to our community, to our families and to our young men. My faith tells me that I need to become more concerned and involved at the policy level. There are better approaches than the "lock 'em up and throw away the key" strategy suggested several years ago by one leading candidate for Governor of Texas.

Read Loury's important essay here.

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