10 Questions on a Book

Break Every Yoke Break Every Yoke Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons JOSHUA DUBLER AND VINCENT W. LLOYD Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dubler, Joshua, author. Title: Break every yoke : religion, justice, and the abolition of prisons / Joshua Dubler and Vincent W. Lloyd. Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2019. Identifiers: LCCN 2019019521 | ISBN 9780190949150 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190949167 (updf) | ISBN 9780190949174 (epub) | ISBN 9780190949181 (online) Subjects: LCSH: Prisons—Moral and ethical aspects—United States. | Criminology—Moral and ethical aspects—United States. | Social justice—United States. Classification: LCC HV9466 .D73 2019 | DDC 261 .8/3360973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019019521 For Jeffrey Stout Contents Introduction 1. Why Not Prison Abolition? 2. The Political Theology of Mass Incarceration 3. The Limits of Reformist Religion 4. Prison Religion and Prison Justice 5. The Spirit of Abolition Concluding Meditations Debts and Resources Index Introduction The United States is not just a nation with an enormous number of prisons. In body and soul, it is—for the moment, anyhow—a prison nation. Millions face each day from the inside of a cage, millions more live under explicit state surveillance and control, and whole communities live in terror.1 America’s fever for punishment does not begin or end with the bodies of those who are, have been, and will be incarcerated. Rather, a network of ideas, feelings, and practices around the institution of the prison pervades American culture. As careful observers can diagnose, the knot of pathologies nestled in America’s prisons are also endemic to the world outside the walls. Not all are equally impacted, but not one of us goes untouched. We have become a nation of jailers, of cops, of criminals and victims, of cheerleaders for vengeance, and of well-meaning but ineffectual standers-by. As a polity and as a culture, we embrace the necessity of social exclusion, and when we pursue justice, we almost invariably do so via violent means. The institutional configurations known to the general public as “mass incarceration”—and what, casting a wider net, prison abolitionists call the “prison industrial complex”—locks this culture down and, in turn, locks it in.2 The social consequences are devastating. By means of our systems of incarceration, policing, parole, and probation—and the carceral logics these institutions normalize—we punish our poor, prey upon the most vulnerable among us, perpetuate racial inequalities, enforce rigid gender norms, and contribute to the destruction of the earth—among a host of other effects, both direct and diffuse. Once, if asked to pinpoint the quintessentially American cultural entity, one might have reasonably pointed to the farm, the town, the church, or the marketplace. Asked nowadays to encapsulate what America is about, one could do far worse than hold up the prison as exemplum. The prison is a particularly American problem, and America is particularly—peculiarly—religious. Coastal elites and the media these elites own and administer generally portray a country governed by fundamentally secular ideals, but many people are rightly skeptical of this conceit. In a variety of ways, Americans are a religious people. We say this not to speak for (and certainly not to valorize) those whom Fox News has been known to call the “real Americans.” We are instead making an anthropological claim about the world—or indeed, the many worlds—that Americans imagine and actualize. By means of stories, ideas, and images (and via the institutions, media, and practices through which these stories, ideas, and images are transmitted) we come not only to imagine the world, but to actively occupy the world. In ways both obvious and less obvious, for the majority of Americans, religion is central to this process. Even in ostensibly secular spaces, secularization in the United States is, at best, wildly incomplete. American culture is steeped in religious languages, practices, and themes: redemption, hope, self-transformation, love of your neighbor, hate of your other neighbor, beloved community, holy crusade. These and other religious tropes are woven into the national cultural fabric, and they furnish the tools by which we cobble together selves and collectivities. Like America’s culture of punishment, which seeps out of prisons and courthouses into the culture at large, American religion cannot be contained merely by bolting the cathedral doors. Even those of us who would never be caught dead in church are not immune to American religion’s languages and moods, dreams and dispositions. To be a subject of this great and grotesque nation is to be filled, to some degree, by the spirit of religion. We say this not to debunk but to exhort. The spirit of religion infuses the ruling American order, but it also infuses—especially infuses—the collective projects of those who struggle to dismantle this order. In public and private, and in mass-mediated spaces, ruling elites carefully manage and repress religion—just as they manage and repress race, gender, sexuality, disability, immigration, and labor. Diked and rerouted, these sites of potential mass disruption are smoothly integrated into the reproduction of power structures and the flows of capital. But management is a tricky business, and the long arc of the universe bends in the direction of messier outcomes. We understand that religion has often been used to mollify, but religion may also ignite. We write with the hope of coaxing elements of the religious repressed back to the surface. We want to call forth and explicitly ponder the religious stories, symbols, feelings, and practices that have shaped—and pushed back against—the present civic order, a civic order in which carcerality is a predominant feature. In so doing, we hope to lend support for smashing those elements that engender mass harm and to open up space for alternatives that foster mass healing. To understand the United States as a prison nation—and to cure the maladies that afflict us—it is imperative that we understand it as a religious prison nation, and more specifically, as a Christian prison nation. To designate the United States as such is not to endorse Christian triumphalism, nor is it to absolve non-Christians of responsibility. Rather, it is only to name properly the tradition that most informs Americans’ interlocking senses of order, justice, virtue, and redemption. According to the ruling logics that inform American common sense, the state is authorized to inflict violence for the sake of the public good; violations of the law enact wounds to the collective that can only be healed through the deliberate infliction of suffering; and for those who violate the law, this suffering is potentially redemptive. In the American context, these ideas have particular Christian histories, and the practices that attend them are secularized Christian practices. Put somewhat crudely: the systematic criminalization of certain American lives is a product of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and patriarchy, but it also takes place in the long shadow cast by Christ on the cross.3 What role did religion play in underwriting the explosive growth of prisons over the last five decades? What role does religion play in sustaining mass incarceration today? And most crucially, what potential role might religious ideas, practices, and communities play in destroying the mammoth carceral state and its attendant carceral culture, and in helping to foster in its place a culture of mutual care? These are the questions that animate the inquiry to follow.4 A Religious Prison Nation The graph is familiar and baffling: a more or less flat line representing the US prison population into the early 1970s, followed by an almost vertical leap afterward.5 The contrast borders on the cartoonish. Something happened, but what? Among scholars, activists, and the general public, three stories currently circulate for what happened. Let us call these stories the “race account,” the “politics account,” and the “economics account.” According to the first, the United States has always found ways to ensure a racial caste system in which Black people are disenfranchised and impoverished, their labor brutally extracted. When slavery ended, white terror installed a regime of segregation.6 When the Jim Crow order was destroyed, a new way of controlling, marginalizing, and exploiting Black Americans came into being. As a one-two punch, the War on Drugs and consequent mass incarceration have supplied the necessary means. Unlike its predecessors, mass incarceration is nominally colorblind, but due to the racist ways that the drug war has been policed and prosecuted, it has served to perpetuate, and even intensify, America’s racialized caste system. The expressly racist justifications are gone, but under what legal scholar Michelle Alexander has dubbed the “New Jim Crow,” the net result of controlling Black bodies and subjugating Black communities remains more or less the same.7 According to the second story, mass incarceration has been a bipartisan political project. In this account, the forces of white supremacy team up with midcentury liberalism’s bullishness about the power of state institutions to engineer equality of outcome. Under the Great Society, punishment outcomes were rationalized and standardized, and when the optimism curdled, prisons became an expedient solution to an ever wider set of social and political problems. Discipline and demonize, stoke up moral panics about crime, broaden the set of behaviors that are criminalized, toughen penalties, and limit people’s power to contest their sentences: Richard Nixon developed this game, Ronald Reagan refined it, and after Michael Dukakis’s shellacking in the 1988 presidential election, Bill Clinton went all in. The ratchet only turned one way.8 What resulted was a political landscape in which no politician on the national stage was willing to waste an ounce of symbolic capital on the rights of incarcerated people or criminal defendants. Practice this brand of politics for a generation or two, and mass incarceration is what you get. Once locked in place, moreover, the narrow range of political remedies for dismantling mass incarceration lack the sweep and the teeth to do anything more than chip away at the edges of the problem.9 The third explanation for the rise of mass incarceration is economic. Before the prison explosion, the United States was experiencing the most robust economic growth in the country’s history. Manufacturing, which had ramped up for the Second World War, continued to offer secure jobs. Income inequality was relatively low. For a variety of social sectors, prosperity reigned. But it did not last. The weakening of organized labor, the globalization of industrial manufacturing, and military downsizing in the waning days of the Cold War pushed up the unemployment rate and engendered warranted feelings of insecurity. A growing underclass, disproportionately living in urban centers and disproportionately Black and brown, found itself cut out of the labor market. Income and wealth inequality began to climb. Frustrated by their precariousness and demonstrably prone to uprising, this surplus population posed a problem for the smooth functioning of American business. If class consciousness developed fully, the urban underclass might try to seize the means of production. The solution to this threat—and the solution to surpluses of state capacity, land, and population—was to build a mass public infrastructure for containing this underclass. This was the prison building boom of the 1980s. By this read, mass incarceration is a cunning adaptation to postindustrialization, a machine for containing the urban underclass for whom viable work is no longer available, while simultaneously fostering economic opportunities for others, and for rural white men in particular, many of whom were able to secure good union jobs in the adjacent sectors of prison building and prisoner management. In time, that which was emergent became entrenched. This system exploits incarcerated workers, and it rewards correctional officers’ unions, prison contractors, and privateprison shareholders. And these are merely the surface players. In enumerable ways, the private and public sectors have come to depend on incarcerated bodies. Though they destroy more communities than they sustain, mass criminalization and mass incarceration are thoroughly embedded in the American political economy.10 In no respect does this book represent a repudiation of these accounts. We are indebted to these frameworks, and in the pages to follow we make ample use of them. But we worry about the ceiling that these three narratives can place over possible political change. For good reason, the race account and the politics account can lend themselves to cynicism, and all three accounts have a way of engendering a sense of powerlessness. In the event that those who think with these frameworks evade defeatism and pursue political mobilization, the carceral state has shown itself to be excruciatingly adept at incorporating critique and converting vulnerabilities into new justifications for growth. Focusing on racial disparities has been used to toughen penalties across the board, calls for improved prison conditions have led to new prison building, and criticisms about the police invariably lead to more resources for law enforcement. Standard-issue politics has repeatedly failed, and incarceration is one arena in which loosening the faucets of state spending will only exacerbate the problem.11 A turn to religion offers unique potential. It is our hope that by weaving religion into the racial, economic, and political accounts of mass incarceration, we will lend support to those advocating for more fundamental institutional and cultural transformations. In foregrounding religion we are not offering a diagnosis of what American hyperincarceration is really about, with the hope that demystification will lead to redemption. More modestly, rather, we propose to actively and openly engage with that which—for worse and for better—is inextricable from American life: religious traditions, practices, affects, and communities. We do not fetishize religion as in any way uniquely good or uniquely powerful. However, because of who we are as a country, religious stories, practices, and sentiments have the capacity to help us imagine and enact the sort of radical social transformation the situation demands. But to move forward we must first look backward. What might a religious explanation for mass incarceration look like? Here’s a preliminary gloss: Mass incarceration was born in the same historical moment as the megachurch and the big box store. Pathbreaking scholarship connects the rise of evangelical piety to the rise of Walmart and all it symbolizes, but the links between these developments and the rise of mass incarceration have yet to be fully explored.12 In these newly supersized institutions of commerce, worship, and punishment, visions for the public good were shrunken down and distorted. Meanwhile, the role of the state was reconceptualized. During the New Deal and the period that followed, the state built social institutions intended to promote collective flourishing, but in the present era the state has been demoted to an auxiliary role.13 With John Maynard Keynes shunted to the side and Milton Friedman afforded center stage, the state’s job became to ensure a narrower set of freedoms for a narrower set of people. Tasked with fostering and protecting “free markets,” the state buttressed the narrowing of economic opportunity with a heightened commitment to “security.” The welfare state retracted, and the carceral state expanded. In the Reaganite taboo against “big government,” the prison was granted a curious exception. The resulting world is the world in which we live: individualist, consumerist, identitarian, responsibilized, vigilantly concerned about “freedom” and “the economy” in the abstract, but all too agnostic about how social and material goods are distributed; where the wealthy live in securitized zones and act with relative impunity, while the poor are preyed upon by the police and confined to prisons in grotesque numbers and for obscene periods of time.14 At the first stirrings of mass incarceration a half century ago, American religious culture was also undergoing a dramatic transformation. Membership in liberal Protestant denominations began to nosedive, while evangelical and agnostic affiliations shot up. Along with this reconfiguration came a shift in public discourse. Henceforth, liberal Protestantism no longer formed the assumed backbone of American political culture. Prior to this point, a certain kind of religiosity pervaded American civic culture. God was thought to work through American history, and to participate in the collective work of God—to pursue divine justice—meant laboring concertedly to make worldly law and society more just. It wasn’t simply Martin Luther King Jr. who famously expounded this political theology. For the first half of the twentieth century, this political theology was expressed by mainstream politicians of all stripes. Beginning in the 1960s, American religion changed. With the waning of liberal Protestantism and the waxing of evangelicalism and secularism, religion ceased to a substantial degree to be public, collective, and socially minded. At both the individual and the communal level, American religion turned inward. Increasingly, religion was something private, personal, and spiritual —a matter principally between oneself and one’s maker, or, in the case of secular spirituality, between oneself and oneself. As imagined and as practiced, religion came to designate an individual’s belief—in a personal God with a plan for your life, or in a self bound primarily by the duties of experience and self-actualization. Not all succumbed to pietism or solipsism, but fewer and fewer felt compelled by a robust kind of collectivism.15 With personal conviction brought to the fore, divine justice was cut off from American politics. Religion’s primary place (and many on the left would come to question whether religion has a place at all) was in the individual’s heart. If, on the evangelical right, neoliberal economics and neoconservative foreign policy became constitutive of an alleged divine plan (with pastors rallying the laity to vote accordingly), for those on the secular left, God absconded and community power withered. The evacuation of religion from the left did not “cause” mass incarceration, but it substantially weakened the capacities of the left to push back against its emergence and eventual predominance. In stark contrast to the civil rights era, during the era of mass incarceration, progressive politics came to be pursued on a purely secularist plane. Rather than pursuing ideals, liberals chose to tackle problems. In a political milieu which demands that social programs intended to assist poor and working people be means tested, and their costs offset with comparable cuts to government spending, the unapologetic declaration of universal ideas about justice was put aside like a childish thing. What religious ideals have remained have been hollowed out into thin branding slogans like Bill Clinton’s “New Covenant” and Obama’s “Hope.” On the left, policy reigns. Moralists have been banished from the table, and wonks and administrators are the only ones left. To focus on ideals and stress moral principles was made into the purview of cranks and fools. In such an impoverished landscape of ideas, the ideal of “justice” was ceded almost in full to the “criminal justice system.” This system is now everything. Justice has come to mean little more than the proper functioning of the law. Albeit neutral in theory, in practice this law shields those with property and gashes those without. The possibility for sweeping critique has been surrendered. With prophets relegated to silence, officers and administrators of legal state violence come to resemble gods on earth. For some, these gods are thought to be benevolent; for others, they are plainly demonic. Collectively deprived of the concepts necessary for imagining otherwise, however, few would question their sovereignty. As a handmaiden to neoliberal economics and apologist for state violence, American religious culture has been partially responsible for sustaining the carceral state, but attending to religion may help us summon the power necessary for toppling this order. By foregrounding religion in the analysis of (and mobilization against) America’s prison culture, we might tap new resources and, in the process, make new alliances. As we hope to show, religion has been intimately involved in enabling and sustaining the American carceral state, but religious languages, practices, and communities have also challenged the carceral state. Going forward, these forces can be harnessed to end mass incarceration or even abolish the prison in its entirety. On the one hand, this is simply a matter of getting bodies into the streets, but it is also more substantive than that. For our proposed intervention to work, it is not enough to relegate religious communities to one coalition partner in a pragmatic, secular movement for prison reform. Rather, we believe it is incumbent for the movement against prisons itself to “get religion.” The movement against prisons needs to understand religion and it needs to harness religion’s spirit. For the monumental challenge we face, a secular, pragmatic frame isn’t enough. To win, we must go deeper than surface symptoms, and we must go larger than policy. To win, we must wage a war that roots itself in and pushes for a fully transformative vision of what justice is and must become. Religious traditions enjoy no monopoly in this regard, but they have troves to offer the struggle. Religious dissent animates some of our most powerful national myths and provides a potent toolkit for reimagining justice. Only by getting religion can the movement against prisons sufficiently empower itself to break the prison’s stranglehold on “justice” in America, making it possible for us to imagine and build an alternative justice—a real justice—worthy of that name. Religiously fueled abolitionists transformed the national conversation about slavery in the nineteenth century and ignited the civil rights movement in the twentieth. So, too, today, an abolitionism doused in religion may be uniquely able to revolutionize the public conversation about prisons, and energize the mass movement necessary for eviscerating the prison industrial complex and the broader punitive culture that sustains it. Abolition, Not Reform For some reading these words, connecting religion to the ascendency and maintenance of mass incarceration will be the easy sell. But this is only half of our agenda. The other half entails thinking religion into the political project of abolishing prisons. Abolition, not reform. The prison, and the society that depends on the prison, is violent and cruel. Prisons break people. They ravage communities. They are brutal and unjust, and they should be abolished. For reasons we will lay out in chapter 1, both on its merits and as a matter of strategy, prison abolition is the solution that mass incarceration rightfully demands. Our prison system is a moral abomination and it should be erased from the face of the earth. This is the negative case. Meanwhile, as an affirmative political project, abolition (as opposed to reform) is far-sighted and potentially transformative. Though necessarily fuzzy on the details, abolition provides a horizon for struggle without which transformative change is impossible.16 As an idea, abolition is individually and collectively activating, a principle around which a winning movement can organize. As a set of practices, abolitionism has the power to remake the world. As we see it, the principal problem with prison abolition rests on one thing and one thing only: its manifest impossibility. But impossibility is only a starting point, and here the abolitionists of old have everything to teach us. Two hundred years ago, it was merely a fact of life that some people were owned by other people. On the strength of the greatest mass movement in US history, a radical principle was inscribed by men and women into the nature of things: slavery is a moral abomination. Not merely chattel slavery as it then existed in the United States, but slavery as such. This simple and uncontestable moral fact is a monumental historical achievement, and absent the courage and genius of generations of clear-seeing and brave people pulling together in the same direction, nature would to this day remain mute on the subject. Is locking a human being in a cage a moral abomination on a par with a human being owning another human being?17 We believe that it is, and we also believe that the world of our children’s children that doesn’t embrace this fact as natural and obvious is odds on a dystopia. The moral reasoning that condemns the unfreedom of enslavement but condones the unfreedom of human caging is plainly perverse. If justice demands that all slaves need be free, then justice also demands that all prisoners be free. We recognize that this is a radical position, but it is also, we believe, the just position. That people are caged by the state rather than by individuals, and that they are caged—nominally—for things they have done, should not distract from the basic proposition that placing a human being in a cage is wrong. If at this point you disagree, that is okay; but please don’t discard us yet. Even if all you wish to do is “end mass incarceration,” prison abolition is still a necessity. As we explain in chapter 1, only by calling for truly transformative change can the narrower goal of ending mass incarceration be won. Making the impossible possible calls for an exercise in radical imagination, and it is precisely in this regard that religious faith, or something closely related to religious faith, becomes essential. To remain trapped in secularist conversations about policy is to doom ourselves to defeat. We must argue at the level of unyielding moral principle. Without religious dreams, we will not even be able to envision what a truer, more just justice will look like. As Angela Davis has persuasively argued, abolition is much more than the singular act of eliminating prisons.18 Simply opening up the gates and setting everyone free is not nearly enough. We must also reconfigure our political system, economy, society, and culture to ensure safety, health, and well-being for all of our communities. A reform agenda may well improve individual lives, but social change this transformative requires abolitionist dreaming and abolitionist organizing. It requires that we decry abominations and declare the sacred values upon which true justice may be instantiated. In so doing we play to one of our country’s great strengths. Just as America has a prison culture—which in recent decades has grown ever more powerful—America also has an abolition culture. Just as American prison culture is imbued with religion, American abolition culture is also imbued with religion. Abolitionism’s revivalist spirit catalyzes social movements. It speaks the languages of divine coercion and absolute principle, and by doing so it challenges and reshapes the taken-for-granted ways of the world. It addresses concrete injustices, but its vision exceeds (and, when called for, even scorns) the pragmatic. In the end, this revivalist spirit has the capacity to drive institutions for social democracy into existence. Abolitionism is the fiery spirit of John Brown and Nat Turner, of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, of shirtwaist strikers and Stonewall rioters, of Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. To win, it must also become the prevailing spirit of the movement against prisons. Today’s prison abolitionists are already moved by this spirit, but without getting religion—and igniting whole religious communities with abolitionist fire—prison abolitionism will never acquire its necessary force. Only a mass abolition-steeped fury will be able to tumble the walls down. American history is rich with resources for thinking about divine justice and for interrogating worldly practices that run afoul of God’s law. These religious resources have been essential to American democracy, and they remain salient today even as they are drowned out by loud professions of personal faith or personal disbelief. Even communities seemingly animated by evangelical or secularist commitments are formed by deep, old, rich currents of American religion with strong collectivist potential. It is these currents, these lower frequencies of American religious life to which we must attune ourselves today. The justice we want, the justice we need, is larger than ourselves. It is a justice that takes the state to task, asserts that every one of us is entitled to safety and sustenance, and insists without qualification that no human life is disposable. We must own this version of justice, testify to it, and enact it here on earth. These are the frequencies of abolitionism: as it fought slavery, as it fought segregation, as it fights patriarchy, homophobia, and transphobia, and today as it fights not only mass incarceration but incarceration as such.19 Complications, Openings, Itinerary For some, we realize, our proposed turn to religion might prove a tough sell. Secularism is so entrenched in our discourse that it distorts our collective memory and makes many recoil at the prospect of religious ideas, practices, and actors actively shaping history. Religion, as many on the left see it, is a toxic entity, something to be combatted. For such progressive secularist readers, the notion that in order to effectively combat incarceration we might have to actively engage with religious ideas is perhaps off-putting. Interfaith activism is one thing—bringing progressive Christians, Jews, Muslims, and “others” to a table defined by shared secular values is not particularly threatening—but tapping into expressly religious histories and beliefs would seem to many a bridge too far. But one builds a mass movement with the culture one has. Without religious ideas, practices, and communities, neither nineteenth-century abolition nor twentiethcentury civil rights could have gotten off the ground, and until it learns how to make the most of American religion, neither can prison abolition. We hope this level of abstraction is not too alienating. Given the brutal materiality of the millions of Americans directly affected by the criminal justice system, clearer lines of causation would seem appropriate and necessary. Might a focus on America’s religious culture distract from what many find to be the fundamental problem with prisons: that they violate human dignity? The pages to follow do not offer graphic descriptions of the size or smell of prison cells, of the humiliation of strip searches, of rape, of tortured children, or of women shackled during childbirth. Shining a light on these disgraceful particulars is vital work, and is an invaluable tool for movement building, but we leave this work for others to do.20 Our contention is that a different kind of analysis might help foster the conditions for wholesale transformation. The myriad indignities associated with prisons are impossible to remedy if our very sense of justice has been corroded beyond recognition. By attending to religion, we hope to bring into relief just how desiccated American “justice” has become, and to point to religious resources as vital tools for imagining a version of justice worthy of its name. Many stories may be told about religion’s entanglement with mass incarceration, and in the chapters to follow we tell only a few. We hope that the conceptual and historical territory we chart will inspire others to dig deeper, to ask new questions and develop new frameworks that braid together the religious and the carceral, so as to further unleash the spirit of abolition. Among others, important stories must be told about religion, prisons, gender, and sexuality;21 about American religion, nativism, and the demonization of immigrants;22 and about the American prison state in the context of global Christianities and carceralities.23 Thinking religion into the history of mass incarceration and thinking religion in prison abolition has required us to chart two separate historical arcs. In the first and last chapters, our timeline is the entire sweep of incarceration in America: from the early republic, through the Progressive Era, to the present. Most crucial here is the antebellum period, a period of religious awakening and the ambivalent moment at which an old institution —slavery—was being rendered expendable, and a radically new institution —the prison—was being made essential. Scholars of incarceration have long attended to the prison’s religious origins, but the explosion of scholarly interest in the prison over the past two decades has rarely considered connections between religion and prisons. In part, this is because much recent historical scholarship has focused on the South, where the connections between prison growth, antiBlack racism, and slave labor rightly dominate the historical narrative.24 It is our aspiration to bring this story together with the religious history of the prison told by those whose focus is the North. We do not approach this material as historians proper. We engage this material rather as scholars of culture, scholars of religion, and genealogists. As the term is employed by Nietzsche and Foucault, genealogy is the analytic procedure by which the taken-for-granted facets of one’s culture can be shown for the contested, historically contingent stuff that they, in fact, are. As genealogists, we believe very much in history’s incendiary value. Just as history is frequently used to justify existing institutional configurations, history can, in a critical mode, serve to call our existing institutions into question.25 Neither mass incarceration nor incarceration as such, which is to say incarceration as the default response to certain sorts of deviance, was in any way foreordained. Neither condition will persevere forever. Embracing the perspective that, historically speaking, our present moment resides someplace in the middle of the story is an empowering orientation, and also an essential one if we are to successfully do what must be done. The historical material of the book’s middle chapters is presented in a finer-grained manner. The story here tracks the emergence, beginning in the 1960s and gathering speed thereafter, of a particular swirl of religious and secular speech, practices, and feelings. Chief among these are new ways of talking about and administering justice. Whereas in the era that preceded our own, justice was an expressly theological concept, in the present era, justice means the “criminal justice system.” Similarly, law, which used to strain toward a higher justice, has come to narrowly mean “law and order.” As an organizing framework, law and order acts to protect the property of the wealthy and powerful and to sanctify the state violence that is systematically deployed against certain vulnerable populations deemed as problems. Prior to the emergence of this framework, the prison population in the United States was more or less in line with its global economic peers. After it, the US prison population grew exponentially, and the country now has an incarceration rate more than four times as high as the next highest nation in its peer group.26 Prior to this emergence, liberal religion dominated the American public square and mingled freely with the practices of politics; after it, evangelicalism and secularism dominated the public square. Our foundational hypothesis is that this shift in religious and political discourses about justice is not unrelated to the rise of mass incarceration. Pursuant to this hypothesis, chapter 2 focuses on high-profile political rhetoric and tracks the ways that during the era of mass incarceration the notion of justice was subsumed under the notion of law. Absent the horizon of a divine law against which state law might be contrasted and critically assessed, the criminal justice system became the only available means for effecting justice. In search of a cultural diagnosis and resources for resistance, chapter 3 focuses on religious communities: how they participated in, pushed back against, and accommodated themselves to mass incarceration. Chapter 4 focuses on religious language and practices among the incarcerated and shows how, over the duration of mass incarceration, law was used as a tool to manage radical, abolition-minded prisoners’ religion out of existence—and how, at present, this barrier is beginning to crack. In sum, these chapters track the disappearance of one notion of justice and the emergence of another. Prior to the 1970s, Americans from top to bottom, from the White House to San Quentin Prison, employed the language of justice to mark higher—often divine—ideals. The shift to justice as law-following, a shift marked by Barry Goldwater in the political domain, Eldridge Cleaver’s conversion behind bars, and the rise of Charles Colson’s Prison Fellowship ministry, corresponded to economic, political, and racial shifts in the nation. During the era of mass incarceration’s ascendency, combative conceptualizations of justice that pushed beyond mere law-following were repressed. In our prisons and out, the law was used to separate politics out from religion. By the end of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first, Presidents Clinton and Bush fully embraced a law-and-order political paradigm, and celebrity death-penalty victim Stanley Tookie Williams painted himself as a law enforcer. The landscape, however, is not quite so uniform. During the period we investigate, the evangelical Jimmy Carter hinted at higher ideals of justice, religious advocates of restorative justice grasped at prison abolition, and incarcerated religious men and women creatively pursued the good and the just in spite of their conditions of captivity. More recently, a new generation of protesters and organizers has transgressed the sacred-secular divide. New practices generated by the incarcerated and the free gesture toward new configurations of justice-seeking religion that strive for a world in which everyone is free. Using different sets of sources, the three historical chapters track the rise of a dominant carceral logic. Simultaneously, each chapter tries to identify anomalies and fragments that might help us shift to something new and better. These anomalies converge in our final chapter. For most Americans living today, it is impossible to envision higher justice as it was widely envisioned in the period prior to mass incarceration’s emergence, just as, for the overwhelming majority of Americans, it is now impossible to envision a world without prisons. Putting the specific features of our current world into historical relief necessarily shows that what we take for granted today has not always been so. By drawing out the historical contingency of our common-sense assumptions about justice and religion we open ourselves to new possibilities.27 We open ourselves to witnessing, and enacting, a new emergence, a transformation that may be impossible for us to fully see or comprehend, but which we may intuit in anomalies and eruptions here and there. These crazy ideas, these radical improvisations, these moments of possibility, which do not quite fit in the ordering of our contemporary world, are embers of unrealized futures past.28 In this book we seek to gently rake these embers together and fan them gingerly to a flame, with the hope that, one day soon, they will catch fire and consume the world. One day, not too long from now, we will collectively think and do justice differently. One day, not too long from now, there will be no more prisons. We assert these things to be true with the knowledge that these emergent truths are by no means foreordained, and that, therefore, it is our sacred civic duty to help make them true. We do not aim at exhaustiveness. Our project, rather, is to construct a framework, show how it is plausible, and show how it might open new possibilities for those grappling with the moral and social catastrophe that is American mass incarceration and the larger prison industrial complex. As we gesture toward new possibilities, we are acutely aware of the necessary limits on our vision and our imagination. The justice we are hoping to nurture is not yet a live option; it is impossible and, to a substantial degree, unthinkable. Though we look backward for inspiration, we write without nostalgia. By revisiting the ideas and practices of an earlier moment, we are not hoping to resurrect a lost world—most certainly not the liberal Protestantism or Eisenhower politics of the 1950s. Instead, we scour the past for usable pieces for a better justice and to understand the world that is ours, in which “criminal-justice reform” can receive bipartisan endorsement but utterly fail to address the fundamental injustices of imprisonment itself. Like all writers, we hope that our words will travel far and wide, but we write for a few audiences in particular. We write first of all for scholars and students of justice and injustice in America. The second decade of the twenty-first century has seen a welcome surge of attention among humanists and social scientists to mass incarceration. In focus and in orientation, this scholarship has been decidedly secularist. We are not disciplinary imperialists, and we do not believe that every scholar must focus on religion, but we do think that all scholars of mass incarceration should be sensitive to its religious dimensions, just as they are already sensitive to its racial, political, economic, and gendered dimensions. Simultaneously, by foregrounding religion, we also hope to offer religious studies scholars a pathway into the vital conversations about America’s broken justice system.29 In departments of religion and in divinity schools, theologians have been doing excellent work in marshaling the resources of the Christian tradition to reframe the gigantic US prison population as a moral and religious challenge.30 We seek to advance this conversation by showing how mass incarceration is not just one among many social problems out there for religious communities to address. Instead, religious ideas and practices have played a particular role in the development of this problem, and they are particularly well positioned to help end it. Moreover, we invite those who think with religious ideas to reflect on the ways that religiously motivated reform projects, such as opposition to the death penalty or the promotion of restorative justice, at times turn away from riskier and more exacting, but also more comprehensive, movements toward justice. We invite thinkers from non-Christian faith traditions to investigate their own traditions’ relationships to the swirl of ideas, feelings, and practices that accompany mass incarceration, and to investigate how what we argue about American Christianity might or might not apply to their traditions. Last, but in no way least, we write for activists and organizers, those with explicit faith commitments and those without them.31 In places of worship across the denominations and across the country, social-justice committees are reading books by Bryan Stevenson, Michelle Alexander, and others. How can they respond? They should, we argue, welcome the radicals in from the cold, and join the growing movement to abolish prisons. Meanwhile, many on the American left have been opposing incarceration for decades, and some of the most vibrant organizing efforts today draw explicitly on Marxist, feminist, and Black radical traditions. Largely, these are today’s abolitionists. Because of the association of Christianity with homophobia, patriarchy, militarism, and conservative politics more broadly, much of the abolitionist left has little patience—and little aptitude—for religion. We try to show why this should change. As we see it, secular prison abolitionists need not compromise their values to work in coalition with religious communities. These coalitions have long been vital, and we have everything to gain from deepening and expanding them. Looking Backward, Looking Forward Eventually, if we push hard enough, mountains may be moved. For two centuries abolitionists represented a radical fringe of American discourse, but around 1830, their ideas began to gain traction and followers. Black and white, enslaved and free, these abolitionists used a blend of religious, social, and political institutions to shift public opinion. A generation’s worth of organizing later, the end of slavery had moved from practical impossibility to pressing moral necessity. It is this unfinished project to abolish slavery that must be our model and guide. In this respect, the Jim Crow metaphor, which in recent years has gained a powerful foothold in the public conversation around prisons, represents but a partial awakening. Our firm belief is that today’s reformers who speak of the New Jim Crow, or, more recently, of the Thirteenth Amendment as the loophole that preserved slavery under another name, are tomorrow’s abolitionists. The spirit of abolition is both a spirit of righteous protest and a concrete, grassroots organizing practice. As such, it stands astride the secular-sacred divide, pushing us to envision the impossible, and to have faith in our power to make the impossible a reality. A religious attitude is here an essential component of the abolitionist cause. For the abolitionist, justice cannot be reduced to worldly terms (not the terms of this world, anyway). The norms and laws of worldly justice are no match for the abolitionist’s justice, and the abolitionist’s faith marks a commitment to shatter these norms and laws. What precisely lies “beyond” need not as yet be fully filled in—indeed, so as to allow for the broadest possible coalition, justice is advanced most effectively when it is not—but the existence of something “beyond” must be affirmed. Abolitionism builds on the shared intuition that there is more to justice than even the best policy proposals can achieve. Abolitionist faith is experienced and developed, collectively, through struggle and organizing in the world, with friends and neighbors and coreligionists and strangers, to advance that vision of justice. This necessarily involves difficult decisions, experimental failures, uncomfortable coalitions, and sometimes pyrrhic victories. As a collective endeavor, it also involves participation in community that cultivates the virtues needed for struggle. These include, among others, the virtues of faith, hope, and love. The abolition spirit can be found in religious institutions and in secular political groups, but it invariably transgresses such institutional boundaries. It gathers those dissatisfied with the menu of options on offer, those who feel the violence of unjust systems and know that incremental amelioration—though also necessary—is not nearly enough. Properly honoring human sacredness obligates us to destroy the idols propped up by the wealthy and powerful and to assemble in their place a world where all people are safe and all people are free. The abolition spirit haunts the American spirit, the former rejecting the latter’s unearned confidence and toxic triumphalism while at the same time embracing its suspicion of authority, its orientation toward the future, and its resolve to reshape the world. Religious communities also have within them—within their histories and values, their sacred texts and worship practices, their messianic dreams—the abolition spirit, and it haunts them, too, challenging any easy alignment between the world as we find it and the world as it ought to be. We cannot predict what shape the abolition spirit will take next, but we know that this spirit is once again upon us, and that we have everything to gain by embracing it. In forms that refuse classification as either purely secular or as conventionally religious, we can see the abolition spirit in the mass protests that have risen up in our streets and in our prisons, in the widespread re-embrace of grassroots organizing as our last best democratic hope, and in the seeming re-emergence of sacred values as declared in the public square.32 We write with the hope of shedding light on this resurgent spirit. We write with the hope of fanning its flames.33 Notes 1. 2. For a breakdown of the 2.3 million people incarcerated in American jails and prisons, and of the almost seven million under the criminal justice system’s control, see Peter Wagner and Wendy Sawyer, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2019,” press release, Prison Policy Initiative (March 14, 2018), https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2019.html. We largely concede Loïc Wacquant’s argument that “hyperincarceration” might be a more accurate term than “mass incarceration,” for how it properly indicates the ways that the American prison population is radically uneven in its distribution. We appreciate the argument made by abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba and others that for the attention it pays to the millions on probation and parole, and who live under government surveillance and control in 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. targeted neighborhoods, “mass criminalization” is the appropriate term. Nonetheless, in the present volume we have by and large stuck with “mass incarceration.” We have done so because the religious and secular facets of America’s carceral culture that supply our subject matter are mass phenomena, and the attention we pay is largely to prisons and to the incarcerated. In addition, with an eye toward strategy, we deploy the language of “mass incarceration” because that is the organizing category around which the energies of the public discourse are currently focused. See Loïc Wacquant, “Class, Race & Hyperincarceration in Revanchist America,” Daedalus 139, no. 3 (2010), 74–90. For a Christian theological development of this point, see James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2011). In what follows, we deploy the category of “religion” elastically and pragmatically. In refusing to pin down religion, it is not our intention to be slippery. Consistent with the spirit of this enterprise, it is our intention rather to open up as much analytic space as possible with the hope that some of the resulting connections will prove useful to the struggle. In some places, “religion” will allude to doctrines, in some it will allude to practices, and in others it will allude to communities. By the same token, “religion” will sometimes index discrete “religious” traditions and will sometimes allude to the spirit or mood of practices more commonly thought of as secular. See, for example, the first graph in this useful set of infographics: https://www.vox.com/2015/7/13/8913297/mass-incarceration-maps-charts. See Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Doubleday, 2008). For the role prisons played in this process, see Mary Ellen Curtin, Black Prisoners and Their World: Alabama, 1865– 1900 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000); and Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010). Troubled by the ways that this movement narrative erases Black agency, recent scholars have made important interventions and offered new nuances and wrinkles to this story. See Michael Javen Fortner, Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017); and Vesla Weaver, “Frontlash: Race and the Development of Punitive Crime Policy,” Studies in American Political Development 21, no. 2 (2007), 230–265. On the “ratchet effect,” see Robert A. Ferguson, Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 32–64. See Marie Gottschalk, Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); and Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). See Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Brett Story, Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019); Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Security (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); and Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e), 2018). See as well Brett Story, dir., The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016). For teaching purposes, Jackie Wang’s consideration of the 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. criminalization of the poor through fines and fees alongside the student-debt regime and the financialization of municipal debt is especially productive. Striking a cautionary note to would-be reformers, abolitionist luminaries Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis each routinely note how the carceral state has long been adept at converting critique into grounds for further expansion. In particularizing this critique, Marie Gottschalk notes how preoccupation with “the three Rs—reentry, justice reinvestment, and recidivism,” does little to shrink the ranks of the incarcerated. See Gottschalk, Caught, 3. Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). . We readily concede the limitations of the New Deal, paradigmatically with its exclusion of domestic and agricultural workers from the Social Security Act, but we refuse to define the New Deal only by its shortcomings. For a defense along the same lines see Cedric Johnson, “What Black Life Actually Looks Like,” Jacobin (April 29, 2019), https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/04/racism-black-lives-matter-inequality. . For accessible conceptualizations and histories of neoliberalism, see William Davies, “The New Neoliberalism,” New Left Review 101 (2016), 121–134; Bernard Harcourt, The Illuison of Free Markets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2008). On “responsibilization” as a mode of neoliberal domination, see Jennifer Carlson, “States, Subjects and Sovereign Power: Lessons from Global Gun Cultures,” Theoretical Criminology 18, no. 3 (2014), 335–353. . On the waning of liberal Protestantism and the ascendancy of conservative Protestantism in the public square, see Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012); David A. Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); and Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). Jodi Dean develops this concept of “horizon” in The Communist Horizon (New York: Verso, 2012), 1–22. For its application to abolitionist organizing, see “Towards the Horizon of Abolition: A Conversation with Mariame Kaba,” The Next System Project (November 9, 2017), https://thenextsystem.org/learn/stories/towards-horizon-abolition-conversationmariame-kaba. On “human caging,” particularly as a settler-colonialist technology, see Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003); Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005). It might be asked why we embrace abolition but not reconstruction, particularly given the embrace of the latter by the powerful organizing in North Carolina around Moral Mondays —see, for example, William J. Barber II, The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice Movement (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016). We certainly agree that the deep social transformation and institution-building connoted by reconstruction is essential, and we commend those engaged in such work. Our argument is that abolition, as a rhetoric and a strategy, is also necessary, and that especially with the help of religious resources, there is a good chance for abolition to move even further into the mainstream. Similar to our reasoning vis-a-vis our use of the category of religion, the notion of prison abolition we are working with here is also intended to be elastic and pragmatic. As will be addressed in chapters 1 and 5, while the difference between prison reform and prison abolition 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. is substantive and meaningful, the two organizing orientations share much common ground. We hope that prison reformists reading these words feel welcomed rather than chastened by the abolitionist call. Simultaneously, with our abolitionist fellow travelers, we don’t want abolitionism to be made so accommodating as to be evacuated of its substance and power. In what follows we have tried to honor these two competing imperatives. See, for example, Mohammadou Slahi, Guantanamo Diary (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2015); Jill McCorkel, Breaking Women: Gender, Race, and the New Politics of Imprisonment (New York: New York University Press, 2013); and Keramet Reiter, 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016). See Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitock, Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011); Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith, eds., Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015). Overlapping with the issue of immigrant detention is the issue of private prisons. Ending private prisons is a potent rallying cry—and one that we endorse—but private prisons play a relatively small role in the larger American prison ecology. As others have argued, the narrow demand to end private prisons should not obscure the much larger moral challenge presented by the prison industrial complex in its totality. See Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “The Worrying State of the Anti-Prison Movement,” Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict, and World Order (February 23, 2015), http://www.socialjusticejournal.org/the-worrying-state-of-the-antiprison-movement/. The international component of American religion’s encounter with incarceration is another topic we do not adequately address here. American capital and culture flow easily across borders, and the American prison is no different. Troubling echoes of the American prison boom are being heard the world over, especially in the most vulnerable corners of the world. Important stories may be told about the way American economic policies and American security policies are exported in tandem, not infrequently along with American modes of piety. See, for example, Kevin Lewis O’Neill, Secure the Soul: Christian Piety and Gang Prevention in Guatemala (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015); Chris Garces, “The Cross Politics of Ecuador’s Penal State,” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 3 (August 2010), 459–496; and Andrew Johnson, If I Give My Soul: Faith behind Bars in Rio de Janeiro (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). See note 6. On genealogy, see Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo (New York: Vintage, 1989), 15–166; Nietzsche, On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1980); and Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977). See also Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). For resources on international incarceration rates, see Marc Mauer, “Incarceration Rates in International Perspective,” The Sentencing Project (June 28, 2017), https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/incarceration-rates-international-perspective/. We follow Michel Foucault in a commitment to historical inquiry that seeks to identify patterns in the ideas circulating at a given historical moment: circulating through institutions, social practices, media, speeches of the elite, ordinary individuals’ common sense, and everything else that makes up the substance of culture in a particular place, at a particular time. These patterns form the conditions of possibility: they determine how one accesses the world, what can (and, at the same time, what cannot) be imagined, be seen, be said, and be felt. These conditions vary dramatically from time to time and from place to place, and 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. reflection on them serves as a reminder that our own world could, and will, be radically different. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970). Walter Benjamin writes, “Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it ‘the way it really was.’ It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger. . . . The danger threatens both the content of the tradition and those who inherit it. For both, it is one and the same thing: the danger of becoming a tool of the ruling class. . . . The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.” Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), 391. In so doing, we draw inspiration from our friends and colleagues who have broken parallel ground with respect to the creative and pathbreaking (but also at times regressive and heartbreaking) ways that Christian communities responded to the AIDS crisis and participated in the movement for gay rights. See Anthony Petro, After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); and Heather White, Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). See Amy Levad, Redeeming a Prison Society: A Liturgical and Sacramental Response to Mass Incarceration (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2014); James Samuel Logan, Good Punishment? Christian Moral Practice and U.S. Imprisonment (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2008); Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2001); Kathryn Getek Soltis, “The Christian Virtue of Justice and the U.S. Prison,” Journal of Catholic Social Thought 8, no. 1 (Winter 2011), 37–56; Lee Griffith, The Fall of the Prison: Biblical Perspectives on Prison Abolition (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1999). For a defense of the term “organizers” instead of “activists,” see Astra Taylor, “Against Activism,” The Baffler 30 (2016), http://thebaffler.com/salvos/against-activism. See also Andrew Sable, Ruling Passions: Political Offices and Democratic Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). On democratic hope and grassroots organizing, see Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); and Jeffrey Stout, Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). For the category of “abolition spirit,” we are very much indebted to Mark L. Taylor, who suggested the category at our 2016 manuscript workshop. 1 Why Not Prison Abolition? Juan G. Morales belonged to the 1970s crush of incarcerated men and women who turned to the courts for the protection of their rights and to ease the harshness of prison life. Morales was incarcerated in the state of Wisconsin, and his jailers were not allowing him to exchange letters with his lover. In 1972 he sued in federal court to restore his right to correspondence. His case came before Judge James E. Doyle, the father of a future governor. Doyle sided with Morales, and the language he employed says much about how the prison system was viewed at that time: “I am persuaded that the institution of prison probably must end. In many respects it is as intolerable within the United States as was the institution of slavery, equally brutalizing to all involved, equally toxic to the social system, equally subversive of the brotherhood of man, even more costly by some standards, and probably less rational.”1 The question Doyle believed he needed to address was how, given the imminent demise of the prison as a mode of punishment, judges were to treat this moribund institution. By today’s standards, for a jurist to speak so bluntly of the prison’s intolerability and brutality is as surprising as Doyle’s sense of the prison’s imminent disappearance is, in light of what was coming, ironic. Yet Doyle’s sentiments reflect a relatively widespread belief in the early 1970s among policymakers and academics: the end of the prison could be close at hand. In the years following the 1967 Kerner Report on the causes of urban uprisings, a raft of popular and scholarly literature challenged the very existence of prisons.2 As is true of today, from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, there were many prison-related publication events. Unlike today, when critical attention is generally directed against the problem of mass incarceration—how and why it happened and how we might begin to end it —the critical attention of the previous era was trained on the scourge of imprisonment as such. Karl Menninger’s The Crime of Punishment (1968), Nigel Walker’s Sentencing in Rational Society (1969), Richard Harris’s The Fear of Crime (1969), former US attorney general Ramsey Clark’s Crime in America (1970), and Jessica Mitford’s Kind and Usual Punishment (1973) are but a few of the works on this subject.3 To a wide and receptive public, these opponents of incarceration argued that prisons simply do not work. Prisons attempted to rehabilitate, but high recidivism rates proved they were failing. Prisons were also cruel and unjust, according to these opponents— not merely as they were currently administered, but essentially and unalterably. Prisons were presented not only as fundamentally harmful to the captives, but as demonstrated by the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, as machines that manufactured evil in the captors.4 Jessica Mitford, an English aristocrat and journalist, went further, and offered a more structural critique: prisons are “essentially a reflection of the values, and a codification for the self-interest, and a method of control, of the dominant class in any given society.”5 Public attention was focused on the prison system, stoked by highly visible prison rebellions in New York City in 1970 and in Attica in 1971, and there was a sense among many that transformational change was inevitable. The system was an abject failure. It was now just a question of sorting out the practicalities.6 Forecasting the coming decarceration, in 1971 historian David Rothman optimistically asserted, “We have been gradually escaping from institutional responses and one can foresee the period when incarceration will be used still more rarely than it is today.”7 Two years later, in his widely circulated exposé The New Red Barn: A Critical Look at the Modern American Prison, reformer William G. Nagel prescribed as the only appropriate policy response a moratorium on all prison construction.8 This proposal was broadly considered plausible and seemed to reflect an emergent common sense. In April 1972 a moratorium was endorsed by the board of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, a centrist criminal justice think tank, as well as by the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals a year later. Operating under the Department of Justice, this commission added a call for the closure of all juvenile prisons. Explicating the emerging consensus about American prisons, the commission wrote, “There is overwhelming evidence that these institutions create crime rather than prevent it.”9 With such broad public concern, elites wanted to gain firsthand knowledge of the experience of incarceration. To get an impression of the conditions, lawyers, judges, and politicians would spent a day or two in prison. Emanuel Margolis, a prominent Connecticut civil rights lawyer, emerged from his own experience of being encaged fully shaken. The son of a rabbi, Margolis concluded from his brief prison experience that in incarceration “the total being is involved and affected—his dignity, even his soul.”10 Though acknowledging that his prison stay was short and relatively benign, Margolis nonetheless reported having gotten a taste of the indelible damage prisons inflict: “I began to feel, simply, like an un-person. . . . Having been assigned a number, I felt like one.”11 Prison reform, Margolis therefore concluded, was insufficient; the goal must instead be to eliminate prisons altogether. To understand what everyone was talking about, Congressman Stewart McKinney, a Republican from Connecticut, decided to spend thirty-six hours in a prison. The congressman “emerged from prison an emotionally strained man,” the Associated Press reported. McKinney concluded that the current prison system is “a big waste of money and human life.” Upon his “release,” he told reporters, “I can’t see consigning any human being to this kind of existence.”12 Prison abolition was also on the feminist agenda. “How Many Lives?” asked an essay in a 1971 issue of the feminist newsletter off our backs, referring to lives snatched by the prison system. Written in the immediate wake of the massacre at Attica, the essay offers a list of possible reforms, including ending pretrial detention and the promotion of viable alternatives to incarceration. Carceral policies, the authors diagnose, are a product of the fears conditioned by patriarchy, capitalism, and racism. “The ethics of this society have been distorted by this fear, and are then imposed on nonwhite people, poor people, young people and women to make survival and experimentation crimes.”13 In concluding, the authors of “How Many Lives?” underscored on intersectional grounds the need for prison reforms to be pursued in haste and with an eye toward an abolitionist horizon: “Whatever approaches are used, the goal should be prison abolition. To have no alternative at all would be better than to continue the present reality. And we can’t wait for the ending of racism and sexism and poverty in this country before we begin tearing down the walls.”14 If those more accustomed to being on the receiving end of state violence didn’t necessarily share the elites’ blithe optimism, self-described revolutionaries were all the more determined to bring the prison to its necessary end. On June 9, 1972, five days after she was acquitted of all the charges for which she had languished for sixteen months in jail prior to trial, Angela Davis exhorted some 1,500 supporters in Los Angeles’ Embassy Auditorium: A very long struggle awaits us. And we know that it would be very romantic and idealistic to entertain immediate goals of tearing down all the walls of all the jails and prisons throughout this country. We should take on the task of freeing as many of our sisters and brothers as possible. And at the same time we must demand the ultimate abolition of the prison system along with the revolutionary transformation of this society.15 With voices from below and above declaring the prison to be a failure and a disgrace, concrete steps were taken to put it out of existence. In 1974 the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act was signed into law, creating an office within the Department of Justice charged with minimizing the juvenile prison population.16 That same year, radical Norwegian criminologist Thomas Mathiesen’s The Politics of Abolition was translated into English. The book recorded the struggles and triumphs of the Norwegian prison abolition movement, and it showcased the organizers’ success in eliminating both youth incarceration and forced prison labor.17 Following these leads, state legislatures took up the project of ending imprisonment for juveniles. Under the leadership of Jerome Miller—a reformer who left his training for the priesthood to become a social worker and administrator—the state of Massachusetts led the way with its closure of all youth-incarceration facilities.18 Juvenile facilities weren’t the only prisons placed on the chopping block. The vice-chairman of Pennsylvania’s state-sponsored Justice Commission surveyed 103 “of the newest correctional institutions in America” and discovered that “the institutions were new and shiny, but for all their finery they still seemed to harden everyone in them.”19 He endorsed a moratorium on prison construction. We begin this chapter with the abolitionist moment of the early 1970s to make a simple point. Not too long ago, prior to the madness that we have come to call “mass incarceration,” a wide array of Americans looked upon the institution of the prison as a grave mistake, a barbarous relic that had outlasted its time. That sooner or later we would cease entirely to put human beings in cages was anything but a radical proposition. Fifty years on, for most of us, conjuring such a clear and simple moral vision requires a great deal more effort. The Folly of Prison Reform in the Era of Mass Incarceration Fifty years before Angela Davis’s call for abolition in Los Angeles, Orlando Lewis, then general secretary of the pioneering Prison Association of New York, reflected on the estranging awe he felt upon glimpsing Sing Sing prison by train: [T]he gray, bastille-like prison . . . loom[s] like a monolith beside the railroad track. Its many small windows, that look like loop-holes; its cheerless granite walls, worn by the elements during an entire century; its extraordinary architectural construction, and its notorious history as a place of punishment, all lead the mind of the traveler to ponder upon the prison as a necessary institution in our American life.20 How and when did the prison become a necessary institution in—and arguably the defining institution of—American public life? Still comparatively close to the prison’s beginnings, Lewis was able to observe that the prison’s necessity had been hard won. As a Progressive reformer—after his stint at the New York Prison Association, Lewis went on to become general secretary of the American Prison Association—his preoccupation was with finishing the job right.21 “Sing Sing is passing,” he wrote. “Built in 1825, by 1925 it will undoubtedly have been superseded by the most modern, most humane and most scientific institutions for the treatment of delinquents yet projected upon the North American continent.”22 Lewis was at best half right. The twentieth century would bring a raft of new prisons, but these facilities would supplement and not replace those that that already existed, and though decidedly modern, they would be designed less to treat than to control. Nearly a hundred years after Lewis’s reflections,New Yorkers still train past Sing Sing, but few would entertain the possibility of its passing. Prisons have become necessary to a degree that Lewis couldn’t possibly have foreseen. The numbers speak clearly. By the 1923 census, the United States had 109,619 people in prison and jail, a figure that represented less than a tenth of 1% of the population. Today, we have 2.3 million, with a rate more than seven times that of Lewis’s day. Thus, a nation with just 5% of the world’s population incarcerates nearly a quarter of the world’s prisoners.23 There is little historical precedent for what we are collectively up to. Devastating in absolute terms, the crosstabs are yet more discouraging. Because our laws and carceral procedures are enforced with gross unevenness, mass incarceration punishes poor people, and Black and brown people, the hardest. And while we know incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people who emphatically maintain that if not for prison they would surely be dead, few would claim beneficence as being what prisons are primarily for. As the number of prisons boomed, the administrative ambitions of these institutions grew ever more modest. Whereas in the era that preceded our own, prisons were said to be places for rehabilitation, few on either side of the bars would make that claim today. At its most philosophically ambitious these days, human caging is said to deter future crime, but this too is a waning doctrine. To inflict retributive suffering and to warehouse the variously “dangerous” and unwanted—in the era of mass incarceration, this is what prisons are said to be for. For those willing to think remotely critically about these claims, the composite picture is unambiguous: prisons are where people who have already been neglected and brutalized are placed for further neglect and brutalization. This, it seems, is merely how things must be. The good news is that the moral and social catastrophe called “mass incarceration” is now an open secret. Beginning around 2015, politicians from across the spectrum—from Bernie Sanders on the left, to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Eric Holder in the center, to Chuck Grassley and Mike Lee on the right—declared their intention to do something about it. Even the Koch brothers were in.24 With such a broad coalition in place, if we can just muddle through the Trump era (a sizable “if”), then mass incarceration’s days are surely numbered, right? Not remotely. And this is the bad news: from the sort of proposals on offer, prison reform proponents seem to have absolutely no appreciation of just how massive the problem is. What would it take to truly “end mass incarceration”? As a thought experiment, let us consider three radical policy proposals—proposals specifically tailored to mass incarceration’s political, racial, and economic dimensions. First, to scale down the War on Drugs, we might release every person in state and federal custody who is incarcerated solely on the basis of a nonviolent drug offense. Second, to stop incarcerating people simply because they’re poor, we might release every pretrial defendant who is sitting in jail solely because he or she has been unable to make bail. Third, to end the New Jim Crow, we might release the 36.2% of state and federal prisoners who are Black.25 Between state and federal prisons and county jails, this means releasing 367,000 nonviolent drug offenders, half a million pretrial defendants, and the remaining 75% of the 549,100 Black men and women in state and federal prison that we haven’t already accounted for under provisions one and two. By committing to these three measures, the United States could reduce its prison population by over 50%, to a tick over one million people. Were it legislatively feasible, and were it enacted in every state and at the federal level, an outcome of this scale would be an outsize achievement politically, and a monumental good. What it would not do, however, is end mass incarceration. Even at half its current size, the US incarceration rate would remain three times that of France, four times that of Germany, and similar degrees in excess of where it was for the first three-quarters of the twentieth century.26 Here is what an actual piece of state or federal legislation touted as “ending mass incarceration” would be likely to do: reduce mandatory minimums for nonviolent drug offenses; decriminalize marijuana; limit cash bail; provide block grants for local law enforcement for trainings and tech; and otherwise offer a slew of other modest provisions to reshape (rather than shrink) the carceral state.27 Some systemic injustices would be rectified, others may well be exacerbated.28 Tens of thousands of people would be helped, and victory would be declared. What will not take place in any real sense is the end of mass incarceration. Given how far down this insane path we have ventured, no reform agenda is capable of that.29 Why Not Prison Abolition? Why not prison abolition? What would seem to be a policy question is in actuality a historical question: When, by what means, and to whose ends did the prison become socially indispensable, and, consequently, its abolition supposedly impossible? How does an oddball idea—locking human beings in cages for inordinate periods of time to “reform” them— come to take on the sheen of immutability? These are questions of genealogy. What, Nietzsche asked, makes self-sacrifice “good?” How is it, asked Foucault, that we all come to see ourselves as having an innate “sexuality?”30 By untangling these knots, genealogy allows us to think not only about what people do, and to think about why people do the things that they do, but also, and most consequentially, to think about what in sum all this doing collectively does.31 In the pages that follow, we return to the religious beginnings of modern incarceration and attend to the Quakers and Calvinists that made punishment edifying, but genealogy’s primary object is less them than it is us. In this spirit, the question we wish to pose is as follows: What, according to your friends and neighbors, makes prison abolition not merely impossible, but, for many, unthinkable? As we see it, the impossibility of prison abolition is secured via two primary means: It is secured via the coupling of crime to incarceration procedurally, and via the coupling of incarceration to justice conceptually. In the first, incarceration is presupposed as the primary strategy for securing public safety. The linchpin for this is incarceration’s purported target: the “bad man.” It is simply a matter of fact, most of us believe, that as a society we require protection from bad men (and increasingly, it would appear, bad women).32 A more holistic and humanistic conceptualization of crime and delinquency as a function of broken environments, and therefore a matter of collective rather than individual responsibility, returns now and again as a leitmotif, but it hasn’t had, for the duration of mass incarceration anyway, any measurable presence in policy conversations. In the public square and in court proceedings, lip service is paid to the role of adverse circumstances as an incubator to criminal conduct, but we fight crime at home like we fight terrorism abroad: peaceful ends are pursued with violent means. Achieving public safety first and foremost requires the incapacitation or outright elimination of bad men. This approach is wrongheaded, we believe, even in the best of times. When the welfare state retracts and the carceral state emerges, making prisons the primary tool for battling a wide range of social ills, such conventional wisdom is catastrophic. We think of the prison as a place for “murderers” and “rapists”—which is to say, people that we brutally essentialize as being nothing more than the personifications of these crimes —but the number of incorrigibly demonic people in our prisons surely is vanishingly small. Prisons aren’t primarily about managing incorrigibly bad men. They are about managing the poor and the sick, the neglected and the unruly. Prisons are said to protect us from evil people, but whom they truly “protect us” from are poor people, people addicted to drugs, homeless people, shell-shocked war veterans, and, when they get a little bit older, the poisoned children of Flint, Michigan. Thornier still than disentangling prisons from “security” is challenging retributivism’s near monopoly on how we’ve come to think, talk about, and feel justice and injustice. As a privileged case in point, consider Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. It is not by accident that the soulwrenching instance of injustice at the heart of Coates’s essay is the nonindictment of police officer Darren Wilson for the 2014 killing of Michael Brown. Coates intones, “The men who had left his body in the street like some awesome declaration of their inviolable power would never be punished. It was not my expectation that anyone would ever be punished. But you were young and still believed.” “You” here is Coates’s fifteen-year old son who, newer to being Black in America, announces his departure and retreats to his room to cry. “I came in five minutes after,” Coates writes. “I didn’t hug you, and I didn’t comfort you, because I thought it would be wrong to comfort you. I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay.”33 Coates isn’t wrong to see in the killing of Michael Brown and the nonpunishment of his killer the unbroken legacy of white supremacy, but in his disappointment we read something else as well, something indicative of an age in which prison abolition is a manifest impossibility. Not all too long ago, Martin Luther King Jr. and those who stood alongside him appealed to an as yet unrealized higher law, and they strove to realize this divine justice here on earth. Two generations into mass incarceration, the greatest justice that most of us can imagine is a justice where avaricious bankers and virulent racists are treated with the merciless severity generally reserved for Black and brown youth. To honor justice and discourage such horrors from happening in the future, there certainly may be value in sending cops who murder to prison. But as an icon for injustice, the despair-inducing nonincarceration of Darren Wilson testifies not only to our country’s unpassed history of systematic racialized terror, but also to what it is to live in a culture where the notion of justice has been shrunken down to the size of a jail cell. The 2016 brouhaha over the inadequate sentencing of Stanford freshman Brock Turner evinces the same logic. Because he was deemed by the court to be guilty of rape, and because the victim’s powerful impact statement went viral, Turner’s six-month sentence was widely treated by progressives as a grave injustice. Testimonies of righteous outrage flared across social media, engendering more outrage. Progressive feminists demonized Turner and clamored for the judge’s removal. Spurred by the public outrage, California’s state assembly unanimously passed a bill raising mandatory minimum sentences for people convicted of rape where the victim is unconscious or too drunk to grant consent.34 The campaign against Brock Turner and the broader legislative fallout is what abolitionist feminists call “carceral feminism.”35 Whether or not the state’s repressive wings have an affirmative role to play in promoting women’s safety is a complicated question, and not one we have the capacity to adjudicate here. We reference the outcry against Brock Turner’s short jail sentence to draw into relief a set of carceral assumptions that are now second nature, even on the left. Among these we would include the assumptions that crime is to be conceptualized as a product of individual moral failing (rather than as a matter of public health), that the only just response to crime is a lengthy prison sentence, that such sentences necessarily have a deterrent effect, and that such sentences are vital for victims’ healing. Why must the healing of victims be tethered to the punishment of perpetrators? Because the necessity of incarceration for justice has been so deeply ingrained, this question has been rendered more or less unaskable (and those that do ask are generally legible only as reactionaries). Almost entirely absent from the discourse, too, is the acknowledgment of the relative newness of the civic procedures upon which these assumptions depend. To take but one example, the first “victim impact statement” was presented in 1976, in California, and only in 1991, in a gathering swirl of laws and procedures that punished those charged and convicted of crimes, did the Supreme Court determine such statements to be admissible in court.36 As moving as the viral statement of Brock Turner’s victim might have been, in fact and in spirit, as a legal genre that mobilizes the spectacle of suffering for the purpose of harsher punishment, the victim’s impact statement is a quintessential exemplum of the policies and culture of American mass incarceration. In these ways, the impossibility of prison abolition pays profound tribute to mass incarceration, which even in its manifest failure has been utterly triumphant. Progressives rail against disparities of treatment, and they demand—for justice’s sake—that rapists and racists be subjected to the sorts of brutality that the state levies on people of color, as though the principal problem with prisons is that their wantonness for human life isn’t evenly enough distributed. Something bad happens? Someone must pay. Meanwhile, at the policy level, tepid reformism is the standing rubric for “ending mass incarceration” because, having been collectively acculturated over forty years, nips and tucks are generally all that most can imagine. This failure of imagination is to our collective discredit, but also at our direct expense. To languish in this failure of imagination is to sustain an America in which the mass caging of humans is a predominant feature. How can we whittle away at abolition’s impossibility? As an exercise, we would ask you to consider prison abolition alongside two other positions: death penalty abolition and an anti-militarism that stands ready to say “no” to whatever the next imperialist venture might be. Just as you might imagine a crime so heinous as to warrant death but balk at giving your governor the right to make that determination, or just as you might imagine the possibility of a truly necessary war but mistrust (in light of the track record) our commander-in-chief to make that call justly, so too might you regard imprisonment as such. Tools for domination are used to dominate. Opposing domination demands that we reject these tools. Does the public good require some small number of people to have their movements restricted for reasons of public safety? For argument’s sake, let us concede that perhaps it does. But is our prison system to be trusted as a proper means to go about doing that? As with the death penalty and whatever the next war on offer happens to be, as an ordinary American citizen in the age of mass incarceration, the best move available politically is to stand up—together—and to categorically declare “No.” Whether, like us, you regard locking a person in a cage as a moral abomination categorically, or whether you regard imprisonment as perhaps socially necessary but recognize the racism and classism that haunt our systems of imprisonment from top to bottom, by collectively assuming an abolitionist stance against human caging we open up space for moral imagination and practical experimentation, and we gain leverage for securing marginal political victories. Consider the three policy proposals we offered earlier—releasing all nonviolent drug offenders, ending cash bail, and the mass release of incarcerated Black people—and the degree to which such proposals seem to you impossible. Now consider the emergence of a robust movement that demands abolishing prisons outright. How impossible might those measures seem were prison abolition a recognizable position in the public conversation? Framed in this manner, prison abolition is anything but a pie-in-the-sky proposition. It is the leveraging of principle and moral clarity in service of practical politics. As the pragmatic rejection of pragmatism, abolitionism is the orientation we require if we are to actually win the struggle at hand. However, prison abolition is no mere strategic posture. It means what it says: every jail and prison in your town and state will eventually be closed. We are not necessarily committed to doing this tomorrow. As the afterlives of American slavery perhaps suggest, there may well be credible reasons to take a gradualist approach to ending mass incarceration. However, we are unwilling to concede them out of hand. Would throwing open the gates and setting two million plus people free immediately be a manifestly insane course of action? Undoubtedly it would be. Still, we ask, would such a mad prescription be measurably more mad than simply pushing the brutal and wasteful status quo along for another day? We pose this question nonrhetorically. But what a salutary development it would be if a question of this magnitude—the question of immediate radical decarceration versus gradual radical decarceration—were the one that those pushing to “end mass incarceration” forced our elected representatives to answer. A Peculiar Secularity The history of human caging in the United States is saturated with the spirit of white supremacy, capitalism, and settler colonialism, but it is also infused with the spirit of American religion. As we know from his prison records, Austin Reed was born in Rochester, New York, in 1823. By age ten, this “bright looking little negro” was already in jail, convicted of arson and housed in New York City’s House of Refuge, the nation’s first youth detention center.37 Freed at sixteen, Reed was convicted again a year later, this time for larceny, and returned to state custody, upstate this time, in Auburn Prison. Some months into his imprisonment, Reed is caught talking to another incarcerated man. As punishment, he is subjected to forty lashes with a cato-nine-tails, then squeezed into a small box barely big enough to fit his body. There he is left for the rest of the day. After dark, half-naked and covered with cold clods of blood, Reed is returned to his cell. Huddling in the corner of his cell, weeping, his face in his hands, he is interrupted “by a kind and sweet voice that struck upon my ears like a band of music proceeding from the white milk throne of heaven.”38 It is the venerable chaplain. The chaplain extends his arm through the iron grate and takes Reed’s “black paw into his milk white hand.” The old man exchanges greetings with the young prisoner, barely a man but long since, if ever, a child. “You look very pensive and sad this evening,” the chaplain observes. “Yes sir,” Reed replies. “I’ve been drinking from the cup of sorrow, and now tonight I’ll have to taste the bitter bread of pain.” The two men talk religion, and then the chaplain asks after Reed’s parents. Calling to mind his father, now passed, and his mother, only a handful of towns down the Erie Canal but years away, Reed is again undone by tears. The chaplain’s presence brings solace and bestows a grace—and indeed, a freedom—that Reed charitably reflects back upon its source. “As the chaplain stood in front of my iron grated door,” Reed writes, “he seemed to me like a new born angel, sent from the portals of the sky to come and unlock the prisoner’s door, unbind his chains and let the prisoner free.”39 Evoking the language of the Prophet Isaiah, Reed declares, “How beautiful are the feet of those that bring glad tidings.” For those caged in their gloomy cells, the chaplain’s arrival indeed brings glad tidings. Even absent the brutalities of the cat, to lock a person in a cage is a form of torture. In forced solitude with one’s thoughts, denied the stimulation of movement, all but the most disciplined mind will turn viciously inward.40 Traumata return, shame and regret rattle, and despair rolls in. Against such crippling solitude, the chaplain’s ministry is a ministry of presence, a presence that consoles and uplifts. For Reed, the chaplain’s arrival delivers nothing less than freedom—freedom of seemingly two different varieties, one religious and one secular. In the first, the chaplain offers the radical freedom endowed through Christ’s blood on the cross. But just as important, if not more so, the chaplain extends to men otherwise denied it the quotidian freedom of human touch and human recognition. To feel oneself seen, for once and correctly, as a child of God and as a man among men: these are the glad tidings delivered by the gentle pad of the chaplain’s feet. Reed’s testimonial would seem to be a strong brief in defense of religion as a place of opposition within the carceral state….

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