Why Abolition?

Progressive Christians are often involved in calls for criminal justice or prison reform and are active in prison ministries. Why do we call for the church to go further than that, calling entirely for the abolition of prisons and our prison culture?

“Prison reform” often ends up meaning “more prisons,” despite the best intent of its proponents. After all, prisons were developed as a reform of the criminal justice system that was an improvement over capital punishment. Solitary confinement was developed as a penitential reform by well-meaning Christians in 19th-century Pennsylvania. We have to look further than reform to an entirely new way of thinking about liberation and justice.

Incarceration right now claims to have two purposes: to punish those who have committed crimes, and to rehabilitate them to return them to society. But the two impulses are at odds: the desire to punish leads to ever-worsening conditions of incarceration and the denial of resources like physical and mental health care and education to prisoners, although those are precisely the things that would help prisoners heal and prepare for their release into society. The contradiction is built in to the way prison works, so the system cannot be reformed and must be abolished.

The biblical call for justice is incompatible with punitive incarceration as it is currently practiced. The most important thing for rehabilitating those in prison and preparing them to return to society is fostering their ties with their community, and especially with their families. But prisons are designed to separate prisoners from their communities and families, cutting them off from the very relationships that will help them heal and make amends and learn to live differently. God is the one who seeks out every lost member of the flock to return them to the whole (Matthew 18:12-14). God desires a system of justice that occurs within relationship and results in healed and renewed relationships with the beloved community. Prisons are not that system!

Why Christians?

Prison abolition is a movement with a long history, but has mostly grown out of secular movements for racial justice and liberation. Christians (especially rich, white Christians) have rarely been public leaders in abolitionist work.

Mass incarceration is the continuation of systems of racial control going all the way back to slavery. Just as Christian abolitionists were involved in the fight against slavery, so Christian abolitionists should be involved in the fight against prisons now.

We believe that prison abolition is essential work of the church. Beyond every human-rights argument for prison abolition, we believe that Jesus’ call to set the prisoners free compels us to do the same. Jesus reached out to the marginalized and left no one outside the circle of God’s community, so Christians are called to abolish prisons, a force that separates people from community. Christ’s death and resurrection ended the need for retributive justice and made true restorative justice within loving community possible.