Roger Ray, D.Min.
When a great man like Nelson Mandela passes, it's also common to wonder if we'll ever see his kind again. But there's no doubt that the Nelson Mandelas and Martin Luther Kings and Václav Havels of the 21st century are striding among us. But you can't see it, because if he or she was shaking hands with world leaders and greeted by adoring throngs and serenaded by children's choirs, then they wouldn't be the next true Mandela or King or Havel.
No, the next Nelson Mandela of the world is rotting in a jail cell tonight, just like Mandela nearly withered for 27 years on Robben Island. Or he is on someone's terrorist watch list, or she is segregated and searched every time she travels through an international airport. Somewhere, government spies are reading the emails of the next Nelson Mandela. They are tracking his cell phone and listening to his calls, or monitoring her meetings with their undercover cops.
-Will Bunch, Huffington Post, December 9, 2013
For the past several years there has been a very unusual cross-country bike race in France that is for prison inmates. The "Penal Tour De France" is a program that leaves many Americans scratching their heads. We think of jail time strictly as punishment, like societal revenge for crimes committed. In France, however, they take a different perspective. They are trying to figure out how to use prison time to help inmates learn how to live productive lives within the French society.
We tend to beat down our inmates. We will not allow them to earn degrees or job certifications in prison. We used to, but in a "get tough on crime" mentality, we do not want to give a prisoner an opportunity not afforded to people who have not been convicted of a crime. One could argue that we should give these opportunities of education to everyone in financial need but that, evidently, would be deemed as dirty socialism rather than common sense.
If you agree with my insistence that the future of the church is dependent upon our ability to become morally relevant in society, it is quite possible that one of the primary arenas where we must turn our attention is towards the two million Americans who are currently in jail or prison. This hidden nation within our nation may need what we have to offer the most while being the least likely ever to have contact with us.
Admittedly, the prison system does not make it easy. In the early 1990's I tried repeatedly to set up college classes in the Federal Medical prison near my home. Initially I was told that it would take too much staff time to move prisoners into and out of a classroom; then regulations changed around the use of Federal Pell Grants that made it impossible to find tuition dollars.
Then I applied for clearance to teach basic self-help classes in the local county jail where some inmates live for more than two years without meaningful programming. The day of my first class there was an incident at the jail as I sat in a waiting area preparing to teach. Two new guards had urinated on inmates through a screen in the roof of the gymnasium and the prison officials decided that it would be best not to have outsiders working too closely with convicts. I have suspected that my role as an opinion writer for the local newspaper may have increased the warden's discomfort because they really needed to keep prisoner abuse out of the media.
Far from the experience of a bicycle race in rural France, prisoners in our penal system experience violence, rape, and deprivations of every sort and are often put into situations where they have to extort money from family members and friends to pay other inmates for protection from abuse.
Once out of incarceration the humiliations can multiply. With a criminal record it is very difficult to find employment and yet ex-cons are required to pay fees for their mandatory probation officer visits and follow up supervision. Some even have to pay back states or communities for the cost of their incarceration.
People on parole are making many of the annoying telemarketing calls we receive because these commission sales jobs are one of the few places where they can find work. As infuriating as these telephone interruptions can be to us, can you imagine what it is like on the other end of the line as people suffer angry verbal abuse all day long?
Not that it is easy to garner sympathy for sex offenders but may I remind you that nearly all sex offenders were once victims themselves. They are the most likely to be violently treated in prison and the most likely to be reviled, unemployed and homeless out of prison. Most homeless shelters will not give them even temporary shelter.
Permanently placed on a publically available sex offender list, they often cannot even live with willing family members or friends because of the reactions of neighbors. Though we cannot afford to be too lax about the threat posed by those who are likely to repeatedly offend, we also have to do something much better than what we are doing. If their offenses are not sufficient to merit killing them, then we must find some way to allow them to live!
Because reintegration into society has been made so very difficult, our recidivism rate is the worst in the world. This has been complicated by the fact that the one thing Americans have been really good at is finding a way to make a profit, even in the midst of tragedy. Building prisons and then operating them has become a huge profit center. So much so that some states have started privatizing their prisons so that every night an American is kept in jail is another transfer of money from citizens to corporations.
When for-profit prisons are paid by volume, what possible motivation do they have to try to help prisoners to reform and succeed outside of prison? In fact, recidivism fattens their profits and so they will do what they can to prevent education, job training, counseling and anything that might make a prisoner less likely to come back and bring more tax dollars with them.
Every nation has citizens who are entirely convinced that their own homeland is the greatest country in the world. Americans have not only had a loudly stated conviction that ours is the greatest nation on the globe but, for much of our history, we've had the immigration statistics to back that up.
However, our dramatically growing income disparity and class divisions threaten to destroy any plausible defense of that claim. I will discuss income disparity in the next chapter in greater detail. Beyond the issue of the increasingly impassable gulf between the upper and lower economic classes that now keeps the poor in America forever poor we have the former inmate, the growing subclass in our society for whom there is little opportunity for change and even less social sympathy.
We are no longer world leaders in many categories but in one way we are unrivaled at the top of the list, but shamefully, that is for having the largest percentage of our population living behind bars. Seven out of every thousand Americans are incarcerated.
China, long famous for their government's repression of their own citizens, has an incarceration rate that is less than 20% of ours. Vietnam has less than 10% as many citizens in jail.
How does this once great nation disown so many of its own sons and daughters? It is, in many ways, a failure of our schools, of our economy, our families and our judicial system. We must also say that is reflective of a failure of our churches. In the big picture, it is a failure of our society.
There are too many drugs, not enough decent jobs, too much violence and not nearly enough love. We have too much moral judgment and not enough compassion. We are too committed to revenge - style punishment and not enough interest in reform and recovery.
The United States is one of the only countries in the world that allows for a huge disparity in education spending based on school districts that allow the affluent areas to have well-funded schools and lock poor regions into ill-equipped, underfunded and understaffed schools. Anyone can see that it should be the other way around.... The children of the poor need more enrichment in education than their middle and upper class peers whose families can well afford the kind of travel and cultural experiences that give their kids a leg up in life.
We have created a broken school system and a for-profit prison system that work together to fast-track kids from poor neighborhoods from school to jail a tragedy complicated all the more by race. Even though blacks and whites use drugs at about the same rate, blacks are three times more likely to go to jail for their drug offenses than are whites.
Some of that is simple racism but a lot of it is an indication of just how corrupt our judicial system has become. We have prided ourselves on the strength of the belief that our constitutional government creates equality in our nation. Our courthouses are adorned with images of the blindfolded image of Justice that does not consider race, class or gender but our judicial system does not measure up to these high-minded ideals.
Howard Zinn said that our judicial system does not so much decide on who is right and who is wrong as it decides who can pay their lawyer the most. Far too little of our justice system is engaged in the pursuit of justice and much too much of it is an institution that serves the interests of income for lawyers and profit for corporations.
There is one judicial system for the wealthy, another for the poor, and, in my experience, a third one that legal professionals use for their own issues, giving lawyers a literal court system for their own fraternity and sorority. There could not be, in any third world country, more personal favors, disappeared tickets and inexplicably favorable rulings based on kinship and friendship than we have allowed to exist in our court system.
Somehow, over the past half century, the laudable "War on Poverty" evolved into the "War on Drugs." We were making progress in the war on poverty. We don't talk about it often enough but when President Johnson set out to substantively change the face of poverty in America it was working.
But as that movement became focused on drug abuse and all of our resources were devoted to arresting and imprisoning drug users the earlier progress was lost and we have now done something much more insidious.
Technological advances and the deportation of manufacturing jobs have left us with a surplus in our workforce. We are removing many of the extra laborers from the pool by imprisoning two million of them and leaving millions more with a criminal record that leaves them out of competition for decent jobs.
It is no exaggeration then to say that our nation is in need of a spiritual revival. Religious people must convincingly teach the message of compassion to our society that has far too often chosen profit over people.
We have continued to pour resources into the complete failure of the war on drugs that could be used to build up schools and fund public infrastructure projects that would pull us meaningfully into the 21st century.
Western European countries that have almost no church attendance compared to the United States also enjoy an incarceration rate that is less than a fourth of ours. That hurts. Why would the nation with the most churches also have the most prisons?
I cannot help thinking that traditional religion has played a role in teaching people to deny reality, disregard the aspects of our society that are seriously broken by focusing on perfection in an imagined heaven, and distracting us from the real work of loving one another.
The progressive church has a mission to tell the truth....to shine light into the dark places of our world. If we are a prophetic church, then we must stand up to things like income inequality, unequal public schools, joblessness and a senseless devotion to the energy sources, transportation technology and foreign policy of war that really went out of appropriate implementation sixty years ago.
We can employ more people by rebuilding our infrastructure, renewing our power grid, building alternative energy production facilities and mass transit. We can decide to fund our public schools, make it possible for the poor to attend college and make prisons places of healing and learning rather than places of rape, torture and training in how to be a better criminal.
We can decriminalize addiction and assume that anyone who says that they need a prescription for medical marijuana to cope with how crazy our country has been for the past generation probably deserves to have it and they certainly don't deserve to be in jail.
A society bent on revenge is a sick society. A society intent on healing, forgiveness, compassion and peace is a nation that can deserve to call itself the greatest nation in the world.
