Faith, Inc. and Criminal Justice Reform

Last updated on: December 12, 2014 at 5:59 pm by Guest Contributor

Faith, Inc. and Criminal Justice Reform 2014-12-12T17:59:00-05:00 Guest Contributor

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Nothing about religion in the public sphere is uncomplicated. And those attendant complications permeate the juggernaut of so-called “bipartisan prison/criminal justice reform.”

Many liberal/progressive communities of faith, advocacy organizations, pundits, and politicians have been reluctant, if not reflexively averse, to engaging these issues in any but the most simplistic or reactive ways. The result is that the evangelical Christian Right, in concert with “unfettered free market/everything’s a commodity” corporate interests, now dominates the terrain of sentencing and corrections reform. The exception may be the movement to abolish the death penalty.

Here’s a brief primer on how this is playing out and what it means for us for the future.

Background: Religious Involvement in Prison Work and Reform

Religious and spiritual communities have always played significant roles in and even driven a great deal of criminal legal system reform in this country. Quakers and other religious reformers, for example, were instrumental in the creation of the penitentiary as a purportedly humane alternative to brutal forms of corporal punishment and the death penalty – a reform with horrifically and structurally violent consequences that continue to accrue today.

From the inception of the penitentiary, responding to ancient religious exhortations to visit and provide solace and care to those who are imprisoned, people of many different Christian denominations and faith traditions, across the political spectrum, have undertaken many different forms of outreach, service, and ministry to incarcerated people and their families.

These include, for example, the Quaker Alternatives to Violence Program, support for incarcerated Jewish people and their families through Aleph Institute’s Sparks of Light Prison Program and Jewish Prisoner Services International, and the Buddhist-created Prison Mindfulness Institute

Muslim prison work focuses on support, spiritual care, and access to services for people who are incarcerated, and support for incarcerated American Indian/Native American and other Indigenous peoples, including Native Alaskans, seeks to provide access to spiritual guidance, in-prison and re-entry resources, and participation in sacred ceremonies and cultural practices for incarcerated members of many different cultures, nations, bands, and tribes.

Almost all of these religious and spiritual communities and organizations support varying kinds of prison and criminal legal system reform. But all prison ministries are not equal in access to prisoners or to money, corporate power, and political influence, and even the concept of “religious freedom” can be used to trump the religious and civil rights and liberties of some groups.

And that matters, because throughout U.S. history, “prison and criminal justice reforms,” despite the humanitarian impulses of those who support them, have had a disturbing tendency to “widen the net” – that is, expand the number of people who come under some form of correctional control. They also tend to progressively blur the lines between church and state, between government and the production of private profit. And they have always made hash of the “free exercise” clause of the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Moreover, reforms almost invariably leave the criminalization of selected communities – especially communities of color, Muslims, and LGBTQ peoples – intact or even intensify it, primarily through highly selective ways in which even neutrally worded laws and policies are enforced. This true even when the reforms are meant to protect those vulnerable and marginalized communities.

Whenever religion is intensely politicized in service of domination and supremacy, those already suffering the heaviest brunt of structural violence are going to get hit even harder by the fist of triumphalism. That’s what’s happening today.

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