Mass Incarceration

Introduction

Introduction

Concluding Our Journey Through or Values

Series on Honor as we seek to be a people of movement from apathy to advocacy.

Journey started with our value of

Renewal

"we experience God’s restorative power flowing into and mending the broken and hurting places, and we join the stream of this grand renewal project by making known the all encompassing love of JESUS in our neighborhoods & city”

Through God’s Restorative Power we are Transformed from the inside out

Freedom

We are liberated through the person and work of Jesus to unceasingly experience the Spirit’s transformative power and presence, and as a distinct people marked by this freedom, we delight to behold and encounter the face of God as the Kingdom breaks in among us.

That we are free, because of Jesus, to Encounter God and to actively receive the Spirit’s Transformative Power

Honor

We affirm that every single person has immeasurable value because they are made in the image of God. Yet we live in a world where so many have their inherent dignity questioned & marred, often as the result of systemic injustices. In response, we will be a community of hope and action — seeking friendship and unity as we become reconcilers and advocate until all people in Chicago flourish.

Lofty Value

Its not enough to affirm the Imago Dei

Its not enough to recognize inequality & injustice

But to be a community of hope and action. reconcilers, advocates and friends.

This series will be anchored in and we will be looking at some of the major injustices in our city.

Will use the God-given revelation of love and grace as a way of boosting our own sense of isolated security and purity, or whether we will see it as a call and challenge to extend that love and grace to the whole world. No church, no Christian, can remain content with easy definitions which allow us to sit on the side lines in our cultural moment.

What is Mass Incarceration?

A phenomenon that refers to the current American experiment in incarceration, which is defined by comparatively and historically extreme rates of imprisonment and by the concentration of imprisonment among young, African American men living in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage.

Why are we talking about Mass Incarceration?

Our Value

We affirm that every single person has immeasurable value because they are made in the image of God. Yet we live in a world where so many have their inherent dignity questioned & marred, often as the result of systemic injustices. In response, we will be a community of hope and action — seeking friendship and unity as we become reconcilers and advocate until all people in Chicago flourish.

Our City

The United States is the world’s leader in incarceration.

The United States is the world’s leader in incarceration.

In the Land of the Free, there are 2.2 million people in prison and jail. This is a 500% increase over the last 40 years.

Changes in law and policy, not changes in crime rates, explain most of this increase.

Through a series of law enforcement and sentencing policy changes of the “tough on crime” era resulted in dramatic growth in incarceration. Since the official beginning of the War on Drugs in 1982, the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses in the U.S. skyrocketed from 40,900 in 1980 to 450,345 in 2016.

Today, there are more people behind bars for a drug offense than the number of people who were in prison or jail for any crime in 1980. The number of people sentenced to prison for property and violent crimes has also increased even during periods when crime rates have declined

We started sending people to prison for much longer terms.

Harsh sentencing laws like mandatory minimums, combined with cutbacks in parole release, keep people in prison for longer periods of time. The National Research Council reported that half of the 222% growth in the state prison population between 1980 and 2010 was due to an increase of time served in prison for all offenses. There has also been a historic rise in the use of life sentences: one in nine people in prison is now serving a life sentence, nearly a third of whom are sentenced to life without parole.

(NLT)

31 “But when the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit upon his glorious throne. 32 All the nations will be gathered in his presence, and he will separate the people as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will place the sheep at his right hand and the goats at his left.

34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry, and you fed me. I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger, and you invited me into your home. 36 I was naked, and you gave me clothing. I was sick, and you cared for me. I was in prison, and you visited me.’

37 “Then these righteous ones will reply, ‘Lord, when did we ever see you hungry and feed you? Or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 Or a stranger and show you hospitality? Or naked and give you clothing? 39 When did we ever see you sick or in prison and visit you?’

40 “And the King will say, ‘I tell you the truth, when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me!’

41 “Then the King will turn to those on the left and say, ‘Away with you, you cursed ones, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his demons. 42 For I was hungry, and you didn’t feed me. I was thirsty, and you didn’t give me a drink. 43 I was a stranger, and you didn’t invite me into your home. I was naked, and you didn’t give me clothing. I was sick and in prison, and you didn’t visit me.’

44 “Then they will reply, ‘Lord, when did we ever see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and not help you?’

45 “And he will answer, ‘I tell you the truth, when you refused to help the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were refusing to help me.’

46 “And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous will go into eternal life.” - (NLT)

Prayer

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

Where there is hatred, let me bring love.

Where there is offense, let me bring pardon.

Where there is discord, let me bring union.

Where there is error, let me bring truth.

Where there is doubt, let me bring faith.

Where there is despair, let me bring hope.

Where there is darkness, let me bring your light.

Where there is sadness, let me bring joy.

O Master, let me not seek as much

to be consoled as to console,

to be understood as to understand,

to be loved as to love,

for it is in giving that one receives,

it is in self-forgetting that one finds,

it is in pardoning that one is pardoned,

it is in dying that one is raised to eternal life.

Resources:

Oxford History of Prison

Discipline & Punish - Foucault

The New Jim Crow - Michelle Alexander

The Christian Imagination - Rev. Dr. Willie Jennings

How did we get here?

Development of Prison

The original purpose of confining a person within a prison was not to punish them, but was a means of keeping the perpetrator of a crime detained until the actual punishment could be carried out.

The most concise statement concerning a rationale for the punishment of criminals in Greece is found not in the legal literature but in a remark of the philosopher Plato.

Now the proper office of all punishment is twofold: he who is rightly punished ought either to become better and profit by it, or he ought to be made an example to his fellows, that they may see what he suffers, and fear to suffer the like, and become better.

Imprisonment was a piece of penal process, but by no means the vehicle for punishment.

18th Century

Between the early seventeenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries, the penal system changed greatly. At the center of this transformation was the emergence of the prison as the chief institution for combating crime.

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault seeks to analyze punishment in its social context, and to examine how changing power relations affected punishment.

He argues that before the eighteenth century, public execution and corporal punishment were key punishments, and torture was part of most criminal investigations. Punishment was ceremonial and directed at the prisoner's body. It was a ritual in which the audience was important. Public execution reestablished the authority and power of the King.

The eighteenth century saw various calls for reform of punishment. The reformers, according to Foucault, were not motivated by a concern for the welfare of prisoners. Rather, they wanted to make power operate more efficiently. They proposed a theater of punishment, in which a complex system of representations and signs was displayed publicly.

Prison is not yet imaginable as a penalty.

Disciplinary Power was needed.

Disciplinary Power take an individual and to form them into a mass or norm to control behavior. Disciplinary power has three elements: Hierarchical observation, Normalizing judgment and Examination.

It is exemplified by Bentham's Panopticon. Jeremy Bentham was a Philosopher who was against the death penalty and created a concept for a prison that would be used to hold prisoners as a form of punishment. Bentham drew up plans for a facility in which prisoners would remain for extended periods of time. His design was intended to ensure that the people who were locked up would never know if they were being watched by guards or not. In the end, this prison was never built, but the concept of a building that shows how individuals can be supervised and controlled efficiently remained. Institutions modeled on the panopticon begin to spread throughout society. Not only in the development of the modern prison, but also in the world.

Observation and the gaze are key instruments of this power. By these processes, and through the human sciences, the notion of the norm developed. That you are seen and observed by authority and the cultural majority. Less likely to commit a crime and more likely to keep in line.

Disciplinary power aims to deprive the individual of their freedom and to reform them. The modern system of discipline works on and attempts to reform the soul. The imagination and the psychology of a person and a people. Punishment shifted from body to the mind.

19th Century

By the 19th century, prisons were being built for the sole purpose of housing inmates. They were intended to deter people from committing crimes. People who were found guilty of various crimes would be sent to these penitentiaries and stripped of their personal freedoms. Inmates were often forced to do hard labor while they were incarcerated and to live in very harsh conditions. Before long, one of the goals of a prison sentence became the rehabilitation of inmates.

The Delinquent

Because this power extended beyond the prison and throughout human society.

In order for this penal system to work the prisoner must be replaced with the delinquent. The delinquent is created as a response to changes in popular illegality, in order to marginalize and control popular behavior. The aim of prison, and of the carceral system, is to produce delinquency as a means of structuring and controlling crime. The delinquent was not someone who broke a particular law, but part of a group whose very existence implied illegality and crime. The delinquent is “abnormal” sub-human.

Prison is all about power.

The racial impact of mass incarceration

The racial impact of mass incarceration

Sentencing policies, implicit racial bias, and socioeconomic inequity contribute to racial disparities at every level of the criminal justice system. Today, people of color make up 37% of the U.S. population but 67% of the prison population. Overall, African Americans are more likely than white Americans to be arrested; once arrested, they are more likely to be convicted; and once convicted, they are more likely to face stiff sentences. Black men are six times as likely to be incarcerated as white men and Hispanic men are more than twice as likely to be incarcerated as non-Hispanic white men.

Lifetime Likelihood of Imprisonment for U.S. Residents Born in 2001

See Slide

We have established the delinquent and created the enemy.

The New Jim Crow

Michelle Alexander, in the The New Jim Crow, argues that just as the Jim Crow laws that were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States that ended in 1965. Mass incarceration is a current form of slavery.

1619 marks the year when Africans were brought to the British Colonies to the banks of Jamestown, Virginia as the legal status of servant. However, as plantation systems expanded, specifically tobacco and cotton, the demand for forced labor and land increased, and America descended into slavery.

Slavery deprived the enslaved person of legal rights and granted the slave owner complete power over black men, women, and children; legally recognized as property. Michelle Alexander writes, “The notion of white supremacy rationalized the enslavement of Africans, even as whites endeavored to form a new nation based on the ideals of equality, liberty, and justice for all…Under the terms of our country’s founding, slaves were defined as three-fifths of a man, not a real, whole human being.”

Slavery was abolished in 1865 with the end of the Civil war and passing of the 13th amendment. The racial caste in the United States should have ended as well. However, the idea of race as a marker of value continued.

After reconstruction, majority of whites during this time believed newly freed African Americans were too lazy to work, which surged legislators to pass the black codes. These codes varied from state to state, but were rooted from slavery, and they foreshadowed Jim Crow laws to come. For example, employment was required for all freedman; violators faced vagrancy charges, they were were not taught to read or write, and public facilities were segregated.

Overtime, the black codes were overturned, and federal legislation protecting newly freed slaves was passed during the Reconstruction Era.

These impressive achievements included the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery; the Fourteenth Amendment, prohibiting states from denying citizens due process and equal protection of the laws; and the Fifteenth Amendment, providing that the right to vote should not be denied on the account of race.

Vagrancy Laws - Aggressive enforcement of these “criminal offenses” birthed convict leasing, which in turn helped rebuild the south, and supplied labor for farming, rail road, mining, and logging. During convict leasing, prisoners were contracted under the legal status of laborers and were sold to the highest private bidder.

Most importantly, convicts had no concrete legal rights. They were understood to be slaves. The Thirteenth amendment did abolished slavery, but it allowed an exception: slavery remained appropriate as punishment for a crime.

During this time as well Jim Crow was thriving and the idea of race inferiority remained. For another 100 years black people were segregated, denied the right to vote, and stripped of their dignity. Nevertheless, The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ’60s helped to end legal racial segregation, but racial bias persevered.

Today a dark cloud of guilt is disproportionately assigned to many people of color who are arrested, convicted of crimes, and sent to prison. Black men between the ages of 18 to 35, their prime years to learn and grow, have a one and three chance of going to prison in their lifetime.

Response

Like the Lawyer we can ask the question, “what can I do to...”

We can make it about us

Facts - Seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge

Failure - Feelings of guilt and sadness

Failure - Feelings of guilt and sadness

Fix it - Feeling of Power to solve the situation

Fix it - Feeling of Power to solve the situation

Contemplative Peacemaker & Faithful presence

with Jesus living out the way of Jesus

with your neighbor

be a good neighbor

loving by listening

serving from learning

Incarceration

Let’s remember that our work to undo the threads of slavery and act to address racism starts with the work of ending these institutional systems of control. I lead with Malcolm’s words, “any person who claims to have a deep feeling for other human beings should think a long, long time before he votes to have other men kept behind bars– caged.”

Social Reform

Let’s remember that our work to undo the threads of slavery and act to address racism starts with the work of ending these institutional systems of control. I lead with Malcolm’s words, “any person who claims to have a deep feeling for other human beings should think a long, long time before he votes to have other men kept behind bars– caged.”

Let’s remember that our work to undo the threads of slavery and act to address racism starts with the work of ending these institutional systems of control. I lead with Malcolm’s words, “any person who claims to have a deep feeling for other human beings should think a long, long time before he votes to have other men kept behind bars– caged.”

Fix - Feeling of Power to solve the situation

Where do we start?

Where do we start?

Where do we start?

Where do we start?

Eliminating mandatory minimum sentences and cutting back on excessively lengthy sentences; for example, by imposing a 20-year maximum on prison terms.

Eliminating mandatory minimum sentences and cutting back on excessively lengthy sentences; for example, by imposing a 20-year maximum on prison terms.Shifting resources to community-based prevention and treatment for substance abuse.Investing in interventions to that promote strong youth development and respond to delinquency in age-appropriate and evidence-based ways.Examining and addressing the policies and practices, conscious or not, that contribute to racial inequity at every stage of the justice system.Removing barriers that make it harder for individuals with criminal records to turn their lives around.

Shifting resources to community-based prevention and treatment for substance abuse.

Investing in interventions to that promote strong youth development and respond to delinquency in age-appropriate and evidence-based ways.

Examining and addressing the policies and practices, conscious or not, that contribute to racial inequity at every stage of the justice system.

Removing barriers that make it harder for individuals with criminal records to turn their lives around.