The Wages of Sin….Are Prison – by Elizabeth M. Bounds

The word “crisis” is overused in our hype-oriented world.  But crisis is an understatement when describing the state of incarceration in the United States.  The title of the 2008 report by the Pew Center for the States, “1 in 100,” offers a quick summary.  One out of every 100 US citizen is incarcerated in a jail or prison.  I cite this statistic frequently. Most Euro-Americans are shocked, but many African- and Hispanic-Americans are not surprised.  These different reactions make sense when you break down Pew’s general statistic by race and ethnicity:  in 2007 1 in 15 African-American men over 18 and 1 in 36 Hispanic-American men were incarcerated in contrast to 1 in 106 white men.[1] We recognize what affects our immediate circle of friends and family.  The racial difference revealed here makes concrete what Cynthia highlights, the ways the heritage and ongoing presence of racism has produced both the numbers and the invisibility of the incarcerated. Punishment practice focuses on the “other,” the person or group considered to threaten the order and good of the society.

Our social good does require some forms of punishment.   As the US Catholic Bishops say, “The community has a right to establish and enforce laws to protect people and to advance the common good.”  However, the Bishops go on to caution,  “We believe punishment must have clear purposes: protecting society and rehabilitating those who violate the law.”[2] The US prison system has always claimed to be carrying out the first purpose.  But those considered threats to the safety of the community have generally been members of groups with little power and few resources. Nineteenth-century prisons in the North were filled with whoever were the most recent immigrant groups, just as Hispanics are disproportionately present now.   Race is not the only criterion.  About 41% of those incarcerated have never completed high school –in contrast to 18% of the general population over 18.[3] Over ½ the inmates of US prisons and jails have mental health problems [4]. And most of them are poor.

The US prison system has only sporadically claimed the second purpose the bishops name, rehabilitation. Although there have been campaigns for rehabilitative prison programs, ongoing implementation has been blocked by legislative concerns for costs and “order,” along with resistance from entrenched prison bureaucracies.  Legal scholar James Q. Whitman has noted that the American criminal justice system developed to be “long on degradation and short on mercy.”[5] Whether criminals are seen as depraved or deprived, they are somehow not as human or moral or worthy as the rest of us.

But even given this longterm history of incarceration, the recent surge in incarceration has been unprecedented.   In 2002 six times as many US persons were in prison in contrast to 1972, meaning that we lock up our citizens 5 to 8 times more frequently than do Canada and Western Europe.[6] This surge correlates with the growth of the “Southern Strategy,” developed by the Republican Party in the years after the Civil Rights Act.   A political rhetoric of law and order was used to draw upon the common racist heritage and the particular economic and social vulnerabilities experienced by many white working and lower-middle class persons.[7] One way of describing our current attitudes towards crime and punishment is to say that notions of crime, race, and punishment rooted in the heritage of the South have been taken up into a broader conversation, carried out in the media and in state legislatures.

So what should Christians do? Those who oppose mass incarceration often draw upon the strands of Christian tradition that insist upon responsibilities to those marginalized (“when I was in prison……”).   But we need also to recognize the ongoing existence of other Christian strands bearing a paradoxical relation of salvation and judgment.  These strands, rooted in orthodox Protestantism, were nurtured in American evangelical Protestantism especially in the South.  Southern historian Donald Matthews remarks that “the Christianity of the white South was a religion of sin, punishment, and sacrifice. It was a religion of violence.”[8] Painting with very broad strokes, I would say that two important strands of Protestant theology that have shaped our understanding of punishment are 1. notions of the exclusivity of salvation and 2. the understanding of Jesus’s act of atonement on the cross.

The democracy inherent in Christian ideas was understood from the earliest days of the Christian movement.  We are all children of God and worthy of salvation.  But those who see themselves within the circle of the saved often try to establish boundaries separating themselves from impure others.  For antebellum white Southern Christians, the boundaries between whites and blacks were fundamental to a God-ordained salvific order that restrained the power of sin.  We can hear echoes of these beliefs in the success of law and order politics.

Christian belief states that all are sinners whose salvation requires repentance.  Christian traditions have had long trajectories of conversation about the relation of sin and grace, originally drawn upon for communal governance.  Naming the first US prisons “penitentiaries” is one example of this deep connection.  And even though modern Western legal systems moved away from any explicit equation of equating crime with sin, biblical language and imagery keeps these connections alive, not least through the centrality of the image of a violent death on a criminal’s cross.  Calvin, the theological father of much American Protestantism, made clear that if the Law is broken, punishment is deserved.  God’s ultimate purposes may be restorative and reconciliatory justice, but that eschatological end is made possible through retributive violence and suffering.

Although liberal or modernist Protestantism and more recent forms of evangelical Protestantism stress love over these forms of retributive justice, the sense of the righteousness of punishment is still present—at least when treating “others.”  Relatively benign forms can be seen in the ways Prison Fellowship, the largest prison ministry organization in the world, frames its support of prisoners as the loving redemption of sinners.  More virulent forms can be seen in signs at pro-capital punishment demonstrations, such as  “Thou shalt not kill….and live.”

Another popular sign at these demonstrations is  “The wages of sin are death.” I actually can agree with this—our social sins have created a death-dealing system of incarceration which must be changed.

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[1] The Pew Center on the States, One in One Hundred:  Behind Bars in America 2008, Pew Charitable Trusts, 2008. Available at: http://www.pewcenteronthestates.org/report_detail.aspx?id=35904

[2] United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Responsibility, Rehabilitation, and Restoration:  A Catholic Perspective on Crime and Criminal Justice, USCCB, 2000.  Available at: http://www.usccb.org/sdwp/criminal.shtml

[3] Caroline Harlow, Educational and Correctional Populations, Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report, January 2003.

[4] Doris James and Lauren Glaze, Mental Health Problems of Prison and Jail Inmates, Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report, September 2006.

[5] James Q. Whitman, Harsh Justice, New York:  Oxford University Press, 2003, 207.

[6] Marc Mauer, Comparative International Rates of Incarceration, Speech to US Civil Rights Commission, 6/20/03.

[7] Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow, New York:  New Press, 2010, 43-46.

[8] Donald G. Mathews, “The Southern Rite of Human Sacrifice,” Journal of Southern Religion 3: 2000. Available at: http://jsr.fsu.edu/.