From the Editors: What is the Worth of a Human Life?

IN 2015, Pope Francis told inmates at Philadelphia’s Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility that the purpose of prison is rehabilitation, “to give you a hand in getting back on the right road, to give you a hand to help you rejoin society.” The pontiff said these words in front of a throne-like walnut chair made for him by prisoners participating in Philacor, a program that, according to news coverage about the pope’s visit, offers job training in carpentry, catering, printing, and textiles to those behind bars.

Which is true. But as Will Young reports in “Who Built Your Pew?” prison industries such as Philacor (“one of the largest grossing jail industry programs in the nation,” according to its website) are complicated. While the programs can help reduce recidivism, the use of prison labor is rooted in the system of “convict leasing” developed after chattel slavery was abolished. Today, inmates working in state-operated prison industries earn an average of 87 cents an hour.

How do we measure the worth of a human life? Obviously, it’s not a question we can answer through balance statements and spreadsheets. And yet, so often that’s exactly how we operate, explains Princeton Seminary professor Keri Day in “Markets and Morality.” Day peers into the logic behind systems such as prison industries—and immigration laws and environmental policies and international trade agreements—and finds there a calculation “based on crude pursuit of profit and a devaluation of the basic humanity” of the people involved, “an obvious violation of Christian principles.”

When we’re confronted with these ugly truths about “market morality,” the temptation is to avoid thinking about money and economics altogether. But, as Rose Marie Berger explains in “Spiritual Reflections on My Paycheck,” the real task is to think deeply about money, unlearning the ways we value wealth above people. “Remember,” Berger writes, “wealth and assets, debts and wages are all topics for Christian discipleship.”