Many North American churches are lighting Advent candles. But prisoners are setting themselves on fire. How many more will resort to these drastic measures before Christ-followers begin to see the light? I say, “Free’em all!”
After presenting a paper at the first biennial, “Forward Conference: Religions Envisioning Change,” hosted by the National Museum of African American History & Culture, I attended a panel discussion on prison abolition. It was titled “Free ‘Em All: Islam, Black Faith and the Case for Abolition” and the panelists strengthened my conviction.
“We don’t want warmer and fuzzier prison systems. We don’t want police who dance with us,” Dr. Marc Lamont Hill stated as a matter of fact while impressing upon his audience the need for a radical imagination.
I nodded my head in agreement as I have long been against the prison industrial complex and the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans, who are overrepresented in the prison system because they live in communities that are often hyper-surveilled and overpoliced. According to The Sentencing Project, “One in five Black men born in 2001 is likely to experience imprisonment within their lifetime, a decline from one in three for those born in 1981.”
For me, that’s one too many. I say, “Free’em all!”
“At least six inmates at Red Onion State Prison in western Virginia have allegedly burned themselves in protest of what they call abuse and ‘intolerable’ living conditions, according to Kevin ‘Rashid’ Johnson, an inmate at Red Onion, who broke the story in October via Prison Radio, a news outlet that focuses on prisoners’ stories,” Kaitlyn Schwanemann reported for NBC News.
Schwaneman went on to report, “Johnson said that two cellmates set themselves ablaze in September, citing ‘racism and abuses.’ Johnson added, ‘the hard and inhumane conditions at Red Onion were so intolerable that he and others were setting themselves on fire in desperate attempts to be transferred away from the prison.’
This makes Hill’s question to us even more necessary and fitting. “Is the restorative process to you (that is, the person who was harmed) or to the state?” he asked.
He’s right. What exactly are the goals of the penitentiary for the victim? Also, we should check its records and criminal history.
“The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers,” Angela Y. Davis posits in “Are Prisons Obsolete?” The professor and activist continued, “This is the ideological work that the prison performs—it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.”
Davis is also known for this keen observation: “Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.”
Michelle Alexander is clear in “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” She concluded, “The nature of the criminal justice system has changed. It is no longer primarily concerned with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed.”
Alexander wrote later, “In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So, we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind.”
For those who wonder what we would do without prisons, consider Mariame Kaba’s response in “We Do This ’til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice”: “When you say, ‘What would we do without prisons?’ what you are really saying is: ‘What would we do without civil death, exploitation, and state-sanctioned violence?’”
It’s a good question. It moves us closer to the problem with a death-dealing society. But the answer will require a radical imagination.
Bryan Stevenson shared the lessons he learned in “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Mercy.” He wrote, “Proximity has taught me some basic and humbling truths, including this vital lesson: Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. My work with the poor and the incarcerated has persuaded me that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.”
He continued, “Finally, I’ve come to believe that the true measure of our commitment to justice, the character of our society, our commitment to the rule of law, fairness, and equality cannot be measured by how we treat the rich, the powerful, the privileged, and the respected among us. The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.”
That sounds like a Christmas message to me, for the prisoners who shouldn’t have to self-immolate to be seen as human beings and for those who might be beginning to see the light. Amen?
