During the previous election cycle, California voted on two ballot measures that impacted people who are incarcerated: Proposition 6, an initiative that would have banned forced servitude as a punishment for a crime, and Proposition 36, which allows for felony charges and increased sentences for certain drug- and theft-related offenses.
According to the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit dedicated to exposing issues related to mass incarceration, Proposition 36 cuts funding for prevention and reentry services and is projected to increase the incarcerated population in California by 35 percent by 2029. Proposition 6 failed, and Proposition 36 passed.
As a resident of Louisiana, the state with the highest incarceration rate in the union, this deeply concerns me. If a relatively liberal state like California can’t pass legislation to help people who are incarcerated, what are the odds of systemic change happening in a more conservative state like Louisiana?
At Angola, the state penitentiary in Louisiana, people who are incarcerated are forced to labor for between $0.02 and $0.40 per hour. Forced labor at Angola has been compared to modern-day slavery by formerly incarcerated plaintiffs suing the prison, saying the practice is cruel and unusual punishment. (Prison staff have been accused of telling people who are incarcerated that they were “slaves.”) An investigation by the Associated Press linked prison labor across the country to some of the biggest food brands like McDonald’s, Tyson, Costco, and Walmart. This is an interconnected web of exploitation in which we are all complicit any time we buy food.
As a Christian, I spend a lot of time meditating on what it means to love those who have been incarcerated. These people are a specific group Jesus names in Matthew 25:36-40, saying that when we visit people in prison, we’re visiting him. Throughout the Bible, God demonstrates a concern for the marginalized. When Christians meditate on what it means to love our neighbor (Matthew 22:37-39), we shouldn’t only think of those who live next door to us, but also those who are imprisoned. But with literal walls and bars separating the incarcerated population from the rest of society, what does it actually mean to love your incarcerated neighbor?
According to Hannah Bowman, abolitionist and theologian, loving your incarcerated neighbor is about solidarity. Practically, that looks like finding what organizers and activists are already doing and joining in. To stand in solidarity with people who are incarcerated, you need to educate yourself about what’s going on in the U.S. carceral system. Outside of learning about the carceral system, organizing with activists, and pushing abolitionist legislation, loving your incarcerated neighbor might simply mean finding a pen pal on the inside and writing letters.
When I talked to formerly incarcerated advocates from the California Coalition for Women Prisoners and attended a prison pen pal orientation with Letters for Liberation, I was surprised to find that loving your incarcerated neighbor is both harder and easier than I thought. It requires us to look at structural issues, but it also requires us to make individual commitments.
Structural change is incremental and requires public buy-in. It took years of persistent work and persuasion by activists and advocates for the city of Chicago to finally pass a bill dedicated to teaching about police torture and offering reparations to police torture victims. I’ll confess that when faced with big issues like these, sometimes I feel so overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problem that I don’t do anything in my day-to-day life.
This is why loving your neighbor also requires a commitment to individual action on a daily basis.
Loving your neighbor is easy if you do it only in the abstract. Abolition is abstract if you don’t know people who are incarcerated. It’s easy to make a post on social media condemning the prison industrial complex. It might be popular to say in certain social justice sectors that people are not defined by the worst thing they’ve done. But what’s hard is to be faced with an actual human person who has specific material needs, forge a relationship with that person, and then figure out how to love them in a way that goes beyond slogans.
When asked what it looks like to love those on the inside, Jane Dorotik, a member of the CCWP Coordinating Committee, said that it’s about communicating care and attention.
“It doesn’t have to be money, it doesn’t have to be gifts, it doesn’t have to be anything like that,” she said. “It has to be something that says, ‘Hey, I know you’re a decent human being, and I know you’re having a rough time, and I just want to support you.’”
At the Letters for Liberation pen pal orientation workshop I attended, we were told what the support would look like: We would need to have a mindset that doesn’t see letter writing as charity but as genuine connection. We were also told to expect a lot of rules from the prisons that seem quite arbitrary.
You have to write on white paper using black ink pen (apparently, a glitter gel pen is seen as a potential mechanism for smuggling drugs in some facilities). Your pen pal might be in a facility where it is preferable to correspond via an email-like system, but in order to find out, you need to write a physical letter and mail it to them and then wait 4 to 6 weeks for a response. The waiting list for those on the inside is very long.
We were asked not to Google our new pen pals to figure out what they may or may not have done. When signing up for writing letters, they asked that we be sure we could commit to an ongoing relationship, not just a couple nice notes. To that end, they asked us to list any crimes that could be potentially triggering or deal breakers for us in building a relationship with someone — the last thing Letters for Liberation wants is for someone to start writing and then drop out after the person on the inside shares the reason that they are in prison. It would force the person on the inside to rejoin the waiting list all over again. At that point, I started thinking about my decision to pen pal more seriously. Could I really do this? I feel committed now, but will I in two years?
People who are incarcerated are forced to live in a way that is intentionally isolated from society. This is done, in part, to keep people’s attention away from what’s being done to them; it’s easier to exploit people’s labor when you never have to see them. Loving your incarcerated neighbor requires that you persevere despite the arbitrary rules and very real challenges that pop up along the way.
For some, emphasizing the humanity of people who are incarcerated seems naive. In conversations with friends and colleagues, they are quick to point out that some of the people who are incarcerated have committed real harm. What about prisoners who have committed domestic abuse? What about the survivors and their families? As a survivor of domestic abuse, I empathize with the concern, but the criminal legal system is not designed to address it or hold the perpetrator accountable.
As Bowman told me, paraphrasing Danielle Sered’s Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair, the system “can be more punitive or less punitive, but what it can’t actually do is promote accountability.” And that’s ultimately what I wanted.
Real harm happened. Punitive punishment would not undo it or make me feel better. Both things can be true. Part of the healing process has been to reckon with this reality. I don’t fully know what a society that promotes accountability would look like. Models like restorative or transformative justice haven’t been tried to scale.
But what I do know is that no one is too far gone. Fundamental to Christian teaching is that we believe that God’s forgiveness and redemptive power applies even to the people we’d like to write off. Christians should advocate for systemic change in the carceral system, and we should also take on one-on-one work with people who are incarcerated and want to change but need the opportunities, resources, and hope to initiate that process.
On a systemic level, I think loving my incarcerated neighbor requires organizing patterns and methods of care. Practically, that looks like caring for the communities people were part of before their incarceration or being a friend to those who have a parent, spouse, or sibling in prison. When we do this, we are joining in with others to take collective action.
On a personal level, loving my incarcerated neighbor looks like writing out letters on white paper to my new pen pal and in 4 to 6 weeks writing another one and another one and another one.
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