However, I know firsthand how much the people in our prisons are children of the very same God as everyone else. I know God wants them to receive compassion, forgiveness and life, even though they may not deserve it. How do I know? Because that�s the say you�ve treated me.
(Forward Day by Day, May/June/July 2002, Wednesday, June 19)

�You shall love your neighbor as yourself.� (Mark 12:31a)

In he Sermon on the Mount (see Unit II), Jesus told us to love our enemies. Now he tells us to love our neighbor. While most of feel that we have a pretty good idea who our enemies are (though sometimes we are mistaken, both about who is and about who is not), we�re often not sure who qualifies as our neighbor. But for Jesus, it�s everybody.

We have many devices in our society to separate us from our neighbors, usually because we want them to be our enemies. Prisons are one example; their walls and razor wire fences exist as much to keep us out as to keep them in. But our Lord calls us in Matthew 25 to be there, and in Luke 4 to join him in his work to liberate them from behind those walls and fences.

But what about the victims? We have spoken much about prisoners, but little about the victims of their crimes. Yet it is misleading to pretend that the world is neatly divided into two groups of people -- the victims and the victimizers. Most of are, or have been, or will be, both victim and offender. Surely the experience of being the victim of a serious crime (and almost all crimes feel serious to the victims) is a horrendous experience which no one deserves to have to go through. It often does tremendous damage to people physically, economically, and emotionally. It is often damaging to their relationships -- with each other and with others. And the experience of going through the criminal justice system often further victimizes crime victims, in a variety of ways.

The fact that victimization is so traumatic, so damaging, and so misunderstood, is precisely one reason that we have so much crime in this society. Because most, if not all, of those we call street criminals have also been victims -- often of horrific crimes and other actions which should be considered crimes. (The white collar, corporate criminals have often experienced other forms of victimization, like the assumption of privilege, addiction to power, etc.) Not that they are all, or even mostly �innocent.� But they have been damaged severely, and this is a large part of their criminal patterns.

In this session, we will hear some testimonies about -- and from -- those we call criminals. Be listening for how to tell the difference between the criminals and the victims, if you can.

The real roots of crime are associated with a constellation of suffering so hideous that, as a society, we cannot bear to look it in the face. Yet we can never hope to understand street crime unless we summon the courage to look at the ugly realities behind it. . . . Street criminals typically come from the bottom of the economic ladder -- from among the ignorant, the ill-educated, the unemployed, and the unemployable. . . . Our prison population is disproportionately black and young. The offenders that give city dwellers nightmares come from an underclass of brutal social and economic deprivation. . . . It is no great mystery why some of these people turn to crime. They are born into families struggling to survive, if they have families at all. They are raised in deteriorating, overcrowded housing. They lack adequate nutrition and health care. They are subjected to prejudice and educated in unresponsive schools. They are denied the sense of order, purpose, and self-esteem that makes law-abiding citizens. With nothing to preserve and nothing to lose, they turn to crime for economic survival, a sense of excitement and accomplishment, and an outlet for frustration, desperation, and rage.
(Judge David L. Bazelon, �Crime: Toward a Constructive Debate,� American Bar Association Journal, vol. 67 [April, 1981], P. 440)

Now, a sampling of facts and figures which highlight one of the most insidious features of our retributive criminal justice system, its racism:

On any given day, one-third of African American males in their twenties are under criminal justice supervision -- in prison or jail, on probation, or on parole.

Today�s U.S. prison population is 51% African American. The U.S. population is 13% black. While black people make up only 15% of the regular illegal drug users in the U.S., (close to their 13% of the population), they make up 35% of those arrested for illegal drug possession, 55% of drug convictions, and 74% of those incarcerated for drug possession. At every stage in the criminal justice process, there is pronounced racial disparity. The cumulative effect is devastating.

Due to denial of voting rights to convicted felons in most states, presently 13% of the adult black men in the U.S. cannot vote. In Alabama and Florida, nearly a third of black men are permanently disenfranchised.

In 1993, at the height of the apartheid regime in South Africa, the incarceration rate for black men was 851 per 100,000. In 2000, the U.S. incarceration rate for black men was 7,119 per 100,000.

While two-thirds of the women offenders on probation in the U.S. are white, two-thirds of the women locked up in jail or prison are people of color, mostly African American.

Over 10 million children have experienced the incarceration of a parent. Black children are nine times as likely to have a parent in prison as white children. Such children are 5 times as likely as others to wind up in prison.

Although children of color are only one-third of our youth population nationwide, they constitute two-thirds of those locked up in state and local facilities. Black youthful offenders without previous records are six times as likely to be locked up as are white youthful offenders with no previous records. African American youth are responsible for less than half of all juvenile felony cases, but they account for two-thirds of the cases which are transferred from the juvenile to the adult court system. Thus, they are far more likely to do their time in adult prison, and for longer sentences, than are white children.

Federal sentencing guidelines require a 5-year minimum mandatory prison sentence for a person caught with a small amount of crack cocaine, a form of the drug favored by poor, inner-city young men and women of color. A powder cocaine user, more likely to be a white, affluent suburbanite, must possess 100 times that amount of powder cocaine to be subject to the 5-year prison sentence. In addition, police regularly target inner-city areas for drug enforcement, and seldom target more affluent sections of town.

In study after study, in many states, defendants charged with murdering white persons were between 4 and 6 times as likely to get the death sentence as were persons charged with killing black persons, all other things being equal.

Statistically, the most likely victim of crime in our society is a young, urban, poor, black male.
The disproportionate number of African Americans and other people of color in prison is due to a variety of factors -- e.g., unfair laws, selective law enforcement, selective prosecution (90% of U.S. prosecutors are white), mostly white juries, etc. --but much of the disparity must be attributed to the combination of the following facts:

1) People commit the kinds of crimes for which they have the tools and to which they have access.
2) Poor people typically lack the tools and the access for committing white collar, corporate, and political crimes. 3) People of color are disproportionately poor in our society, especially blacks.
4) Street crimes and blue collar crimes -- those typically committed by poor and working-class persons, are punished far more severely, with prison time or death sentences -- than are white collar and corporate crimes.

And this is true despite the fact that such �crimes in the suites� are responsible for far more deaths, injuries, diseases, property loss, and property damage each year than are street crimes.

Here are a couple of first-hand testimonies from those who are in prison, or who have been:

When I was sent to prison, I was just barely 18 years of age, about 90 pounds. I did nine years from March 1983 to November 1991. In that 9 years I was raped several times. I never told on anyone for it, but did ask the officer for protective custody. But I was just sent to another part of the prison. Then raped again. Sent to another part of the prison. Etc. This went on for 9 years. I didn�t want to tell on the inmates who raped me because I didn�t want to be killed. . . . I came back to prison in 1993. In 1994 I was raped again. I attempted suicide. . . .The doctors here in the prison say� quote� major depression multiple neurotic symptoms, marked by excessive fear, unrelenting worry and debilitating anxiety. Antisocial suicidal ideation, self-degradation, paranoia and hopelessness are characteristic, �unquote.� -- R. H., Utah, 9/10/96

The guards just turn their backs. Their mentality is the tougher, colder, and more cruel and inhuman a place is, the less chance a person will return. This is not true. The more negative experiences a person goes through, the more he turns into a violent, cruel, mean, heartless individual, I know this to be a fact. -- R. L., New York, 10/21/96
From the collection, Meditations, testimony of Dorothy Day, co-founder of The Catholic Worker movement:

All through those weary first days in jail when I was in solitary confinement, the only thoughts that brought comfort to my soul were those lines in the Psalms that expressed the terror and misery of [hu] mankind suddenly stricken and abandoned. Solitude and hunger and weariness of spirit -- these sharpened my perceptions so that I suffered not only my own sorrow but the sorrows of those about me. I was no longer myself. I was [hu] mankind. I was no longer a young girl, part of a radical movement seeking justice for those oppressed. I was the oppressed. I was that drug addict, screaming and tossing in her cell, beating her head against the wall. I was that shoplifter who for rebellion was sentenced to solitary. I was that woman who had killed her.

The blackness of hell was all about me. The sorrows of the world encompassed me. I was like one gone down into the pit. Hope had forsaken me. I was that mother whose child had been raped and slain. I was the mother who had borne the monster who had done it. I was even that monster, feeling in my own heart every abomination.
- from Union Square and Rome

Day is presently being considered for canonization despite her oft-quoted statement that �I do not want to be dismissed that easily.� One of her compatriots in the struggle for economic, social, and criminal justice, U.S. Socialist leader Eugene Victor Debs, will likely never be nominated for sainthood, at least not from any ecclesiastical institution. But like Day, having spent considerable time in jails and prisons for exercising his constitutional civil rights, he developed an uncanny sense of empathy and solidarity with all those who are locked in cages.

Testimony from Eugene V. Debs, Walls and Bars -- �My Prison Creed�:

While there is a lower class, I am in it;
While there is a criminal element, I am of it;
While there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

A CHALLENGE TO PEOPLE OF FAITH

We have come to working to reduce imprisonment because of our concerns about the application of imprisonment; imprisonment is reserved almost exclusively to those who are deemed �expendable people�; it is applied to the poor, minorities, the least powerful.

We object to imprisonment for what it symbolizes: imprisonment as a symbol, a living, cancerous symbol, based on punishment as a good: that it is not only necessary, but there is a positive value in making people suffer, that it is right to have a system designed to deliver pain for us.

The penal system is a system designed and supported to deliver pain. And it is our system.

So we need you. We need you to help change the terms of the debate, from the repressive and pessimistic context in which we are now forced to operate. We need your help so that the moral turf is not left to the protagonists for law and order and severe penal sanctions. The way we are treating people is wrong, and must be stopped. Please help in recapturing the moral turf to assert the values and means you believe should underlie and permeate our responses to conflict, to what we call crime, and to crimes we don�t call crimes. Please find ways to be heard and to help change the context of the debate. (Remarks by Professor M. Kay Harris at the National Conference on Breaking the Cycle of Violence and Vengeance, Indianapolis, November 1983)

A PRAYER FOR PRISONS AND CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTIONS:

Lord Jesus, for our sake you were condemned as a criminal: Visit our jails and prisons with your pity and judgment. Remember all prisoners, and bring the guilty to repentance and amendment of life according to your will, and give them hope for the future. When any are held unjustly, bring them release; forgive us, and teach us to improve our justice. Remember those who work In these institutions; keep them humane and compassionate; and save them from becoming brutal and callous. And since what we do for those in prison, O Lord, we do for you, constrain us to improve their lot. All this we ask for your mercy�s sake. Amen. (BOCP, p. 826)

A PRAYER FOR THE VICTIMS OF ADDICTION

O blessed Lord, you ministered to all who came to you: Look with compassion toward all who through addiction have lost their health and freedom. Restore to them your assurance of your unfailing mercy; remove from them the fears that beset them; strengthen them in the work of their recovery; and to those who care for them, give patient understanding and persevering love. Amen. (BOCP, p.831)

TESTIMONY

This time, since it�s a kind of prayer, too, we�ll let the recovering drug addict who is spending his life in an Oklahoma prison have the last word, speaking from the heart:

Our prisons are full of men and women who have been told they were bad for as long as they can remember. . . . All their life, someone, maybe everyone, told them they�d never amount to anything, they were worthless, miserable, stupid, ugly, dirty.

What do they call it? Original sin? Why not just Born Bad? What good can come out of a belief in an inherent dirtiness? Don�t get me wrong. I�m all for admitting our powerlessness and limitations, even our darkness. Believe me, I know that, without God, I am nothing. I understand the thinking behind this doctrine and I agree with the part of it that says we need God. We do. Badly.

However, there is another doctrine, not so widely circulated. It�s Latin name is Imago Dei. It focuses on our being made in the image of God. What about that? . . .

Most of us already know how bad we are. We�re in dire need of the knowledge of our goodness.
(Forward Day by Day, May/June/July 2002, Sunday June 21)