I Was In Prison, But . . . --- Sightings

Matthew 25 -- "I was in prison, but you did not visit me" gives rise to Martin Marty's Monday meditation. He writes about prisoners, a group of people whose souls are damaged. He notes that 25% of the world's incarcerated persons live in America -- though we only have 6% of the world's population. We spend more on prisons each year than we do on schools. Our purpose is retributive not restorative. Is this, he asks, not a bad thing?

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Sightings 6/8/09

I Was In Prison, But...

-- Martin E. Marty

Sightings files bulge with clippings and printouts having to do with religion and prisons. Every year I “do” one of the sixty synod assemblies of our cosa nostra, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. This year it was the Southwest California synod. Months ago they told me I was to keynote the meeting on the theme, “I Was In Prison, But…” They knew of my interest in and I knew of my non-expertise on the subject, so I scrambled to read up as if to catch up. I am writing a book on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prison letters, and hang out with colleague Clark Gilpin who is writing on prison letters written centuries ago. Such histories provide background, but we need foreground now. I am not sure that Elizabethan and Nazi prisons were more soul-damaging than those portrayed and described to me by California Christians. No, this is not a suggestion of societal “equivalency,” only that damage to the soul of prisoners anywhere is equivalent to soul-damage anywhere.

The end of that paragraph may suggest that I am somewhat sentimental and soft about all the people in prison. Spend a few minutes with chaplains, pastors, lay volunteers, and workers for justice, as I did with the people on the scene at the Synod Assembly, and you will hear stories of people who do evil, evil things. But what you do hear from them is testimony that most prison life in America is “retributive” and not “restorative” for the literally millions in prison, many of them there so we can hide them or hide from them, and where we turn them over to fellow-prisoners and their gangs to teach kids (juvenile offenders) how to train for a life of violent crime.

The May 19th Christian Century has a review by Tobias Winright of James Samuel Logan’s Good Punishment? Christian Moral Practice and U. S. Imprisonment, which Winright and other reviewers evidently regard as the best of the current batch, the batch being books by Christians and other witnesses on the prison scene. Winright: “Why is it, for example, that the U.S., which has 6 percent of the world’s population, incarcerates 25 percent of the worlds’ prisoners? We currently have some 3.2 million persons in…prisons. We spend more money building and maintaining prisons than public schools—to the tune of $50 billion a year… No other democratic nation today imprisons people on such a scale or for as long as the U.S. Yet what are we accomplishing?” Logan’s testimony: We accomplish little positive.

The literature, religious or not, on the failings of the system and the guilty participation in its expansion on the part of eyes-averting citizens is vast, and this is not the place to try to review it. Churches are not entirely asleep. The Internet will bring you—as it did, in recent months, desperate-to-learn me—rich evidences of ingenuity and zeal by congregations, synods, denominations, and agencies. Some months ago I made a pit stop at Friend-to-Friend, a program of Lutheran Metropolitan Ministry in Cleveland, and heard good news of similar programs from Lutherans at the Assembly in California—a state whose statistics and stories make it a candidate for “worst.”

The Assembly theme reminded me and colleagues there of the need to take a different look at justice and mercy than does society at large. Working for justice and visiting the prisoners are central to their devotion to the Jesus of the gospels, who said that in visiting prisoners they were visiting him. He’s quite lonely. The tens of thousands of congregations, whose programs address this, dispel some of that terror of loneliness.

Martin E. Marty's biography, current projects, upcoming events, publications, and contact information can be found at www.illuminos.com.

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In this month’s Religion and Culture Web Forum essay, anthropologist and legal scholar Mateo Taussig-Rubbo examines “how the destruction of property and life seems to [generate] a new form of value,” a value frequently identified as that of the “sacred.” Focusing on the wreckage from and sites of the September 11 attacks, Taussig-Rubbo considers issues of property law and conceptions of sacrifice in an attempt to understand how this concept of sacrality comes to be, and what meanings it holds within American culture. Invited responses will follow from Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Kathryn Lofton, Jeremy Biles, and Kristen Tobey.
http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/webforum/

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Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.