Day 9
My fourth Stations of the Cross series explored the theme of mass incarceration. The series is inspired by my experience teaching in the American prison system. I have taught in a state prison and a county jail. I have written a lot of mass incarceration in the years since this project came out. Somewhere floating around my Google Drive is the original artist statement that I wrote for this series. But, instead of sharing any of that writing, I thought that I’d begin by sharing a sermon that I wrote on Hebrews 13:3. I’m interspersing the first three Stations of the Cross: Mass Incarceration with the sermon. I will share the entirety of the sermon over the course of the next two days. More tomorrow!
Jesus is Condemned to Death
On October, 27, 1970 President Richard Nixon signed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act. The Act allowed police to conduct "no-knock" searches, established "schedules" for drugs, and created a sentencing structure in which multiple drug sales, if prosecuted in one proceeding, can result in a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
I had just finished a Master of Theological Studies and I was hired to be a member of the summer faculty in a prison theology program at Lee Arrendale State Prison for Women in Alto, Georgia -- a rural town about an hour-and-a-half from Atlanta. It’s an incredible program in which incarcerated students are able to take any number of courses designed and taught by graduate students and professors from a consortium of seminaries in Atlanta, including the Candler School of Theology at Emory University where I had just finished my studies.
The prison theology program is a two year commitment for students, it’s still in existence almost a decade later. It has many of the same course requirements that seminaries have, students take a balance of coursework in systematics, pastoral theology, Biblical studies, homiletics, and more. The class that I taught was on liturgical art, a particular area of interest for me, which meant that my class was less papers and systematics and more finger-painting and poetry.
In Georgia -- and many other states -- inmates can only take continuing education or vocational classes while in prison if they’re within a certain number of years before their release. This means that people facing life sentences without the possibility of parole are often unable to access the already limited opportunities for education while in prison. Because the prison theology program is part of the ministry of the chaplain’s office those rules didn’t apply to us. Which meant that many of my students were women serving life sentences, women who were considered the highest of security risks in a high security state prison that has a reputation as a place of incredible violence.
Entering Lee Arrendale on that first day was a somewhat terrifying experience. The prison campus itself looks enough like a depressed, grey and aging, military school for wayward teenagers to not be all that menacing. Except for all of the razor wire. Everywhere. Before the prison dormitories are even in sight, there is razor wire. Razor wire and heavy chain-link fences around every building. Guards are everywhere and inmates are marched from one building to another with their heads down. Entering the prison for the first time was an anxiety-producing experience to say the least.
But whatever ideas I might have had about who my students were evaporated the second they walked into our shared classroom. In spite of the very rigid rules laid out by the Department of Corrections that stipulate that there must not be physical contact between teachers and inmates, one after another of my students hugged me by way of greeting and thanked me for teaching the class. With each embrace, I was forced to confront preconceived ideas about my students that I had been unwilling to admit to myself. In spite of the fact that I started my work at the prison, convinced of the structural injustices of the justice system, I had not yet fully accepted my students for who they are: my siblings, bound to me in the kinship of the family of Christ.
Jesus Accepts His Cross
On May 8, 1973 New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller signed the Rockefeller Drug Laws, which established mandatory minimums for the sale and possession of illegal narcotics with a minimum sentence of 15 years and a maximum of 25 years to life.
My experiences teaching at Lee Arrendale and, later, in the Shelby County jail system in Memphis, TN made our reading in Hebrews a mandate on my life:
Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured. Heb 13:1-3
What Hebrews implore us to do -- to visit the incarcerated -- is something that transforms the life of our communities. It expands our understanding of God’s presence in the world because to visit the imprisoned is to be reminded that just as nothing can separate us as individuals from the love of God in Christ, nothing -- not even the highest razor wire -- can separate anyone else from the love of God in Christ. We are bound to one another by Christ’s love for us. We are loved by Christ and the people we find the least loveable are just as beloved.
At the time the Letter to the Hebrews was written, the realities and attendant fears of imprisonment were immediate in the community and great importance was placed on visiting the imprisoned. Prisoners of the Roman Empire often died of starvation, relying as they did on food being brought to them by outsiders. In his Baptismal Instructions, the early church father John Chrysostom characterized the Christian practice of visiting the imprisoned as one of the ‘sweetest tasks’ of Christian devotion. Chrystotom laid out his instructions for visiting the imprisoned in a text titled Baptismal Instructions because for him, and for the early church, caring for people in prison was a part of our baptismal covenant, a covenant that reminds us that in the waters of baptism we are each of us claimed by Christ just as we are, wherever we are.
And Chrystotom is clear that Christians must not visit only fellow Christians, but also ‘murderers, and grave-robbers, and purse snatchers, and adulterers, and libertines, and men weighed down by many crimes.’ Expounding on this directive, he writes, “For we have not been bidden to show mercy to the good, and to punish the wicked, but to show this kindness to all.”
Jesus Falls the First Time
Prisoners serving life sentences as a result of mandatory minimums are unable to have their sentences retroactively reviewed and reduced under Supreme Court decisions ruling that the way in which they were sentenced is unconstitutional.
More tomorrow…