abolition

Anyone who has spent even a second in a prison knows it’s hell. Growing up in church, I noticed people who participated in the church’s prison ministry were both respected and feared. Respected because they were doing what the writer of Hebrews admonishes believers to do regarding those in chains: Remember them as though you were in prison with them (13:3). But they were feared because many of them had actually been in prison. Rather than the prison system or the criminal legal system being classified as barbaric, it was the prisoners who were typically understood to be barbarians.

Joe Ingle has spent a lot of time in prison. Ingle is a writer and death row minister who has been active in prison ministry since the ’70s. A native of North Carolina and a graduate of Union Theological Seminary, Ingle has dedicated his life to being present with and advocating for the 1.9 million people incarcerated in the U.S., especially the more than 2,300 incarcerated people on death row.

One of my favorite passages in the Bible is from in Isaiah 61:1: “The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners.” Christians will be familiar with this passage as Jesus quotes it when he stands up to read in the synagogue during the early days of his ministry (Luke 4). It’s a passage that gives me some hope for Christianity, since the central character of our religion believed that even the worst-of-the-worst deserve forgiveness.

IN THE EARLY months of the pandemic, the “Care Bears” team of my local chapter of Southerners on New Ground (SONG), a Black, queer-led community of carceral abolitionists, reached out to members of the SONG family by phone. A small box arrived in the mail a few weeks later. The Care Bears had decided I’d benefit from a “a gift of love in a trying time”—tangerine tea, a candle, colored pencils, a notebook, and a tiny bottle of dandelion tincture made by the resident SONG herbalist.

I was drawn into the extended SONG family in 2017 when I joined the Black Mama’s Bail Out Action campaign. For Mother’s Day, SONG members paid the bail of mothers and caregivers held in the Durham, N.C. county jail because, like tens of thousands of people imprisoned in the U.S., they couldn’t afford their release. As a minister familiar with the jail’s protocols, I was called on to help obtain consent from the women being held. SONG raised the funds as part of a practice of mutual aid through paying off bail debt. “Money kept you in,” Pat Hussain, a co-founder of SONG said. “Black love got you out.”

My involvement with SONG has taught me the interconnections of Black feminism, prison abolitionism, and mutual aid—all as part of movements to create everyday institutions that nurture life. Abolitionism is about undoing the violence of incarceration, Angela Y. Davis writes in Abolition Democracy, “but it is also about building up, about creating new institutions.” And abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore asserts that “abolition is about presence, not absence.”

Both Davis and Gilmore center the need for organized community to sustain life in a destructive world. They call for the creation of new institutions of mutual care while eroding the carceral system’s grip on society. With exceptional clarity, organizer and educator Mariame Kaba recently reissued this call: “Our work isn’t just a movement against cages and cops. It’s a movement for different ways of living together.” In this movement for a shared life where everyone can experience wholeness, “mutual aid exposes the failures of the current system and shows an alternative.”

The Abolitionist Action Committee was marking the 45th anniversary of the first execution in the modern era: Gary Gilmore was executed by firing squad on Jan. 17, 1977; he had been convicted of murdering two men in Utah in 1976, and the Supreme Court ruled the death penalty legal that same year.

The United States, regrettably, is still struggling to right the longstanding racial bias in our courts and policing. But one area we have entirely failed to examine is who gets labeled as a “gang” and what gets labeled as “gang activity.”

Nicole Thomas-Kennedy, who placed first in the primary race for Seattle city attorney, said that while voters have embraced more progressive ideas, she thinks moderate voters are still “freaked out” by the term abolition because of misconceptions about what it means. Her campaign was motivated in part by working as a Seattle public defender, where she saw the city “mostly prosecuting poverty and disability,” including, she said, a case where a person stole a block of cheese and a beer.

Director Anthony Mandler's movie Monster, focuses in on a myriad of social issues — race, class, mass incarceration, crime, and the U.S. penal system — but it also is a monster movie of sorts.

The U.S. Bureau of Prisons has no immediate plans to send thousands of inmates released during the COVID-19 pandemic back to prison, but to prevent that from happening in the future, Congress needs to change the law, its head said Thursday.

"We're going to use good judgment and common sense and work within the law," said BOP Director Michael Carvajal in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, noting the agency has no desire to "arbitrarily" disrupt peoples' lives by forcing them to return to prison.

THESE SCRIPTURES move with us from Christmas to Epiphany, drawing us into the mysteries of the divine life in the world. The incarnation is a call to notice where the Spirit surprises us with God’s presence. Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe guides our vision: “Christ is, indeed, to be found in the present but precisely as what is rejected by the present world,” he writes. Christ “is to be found in those who unmask the present world, those in whom the meaninglessness and inhumanity and contradictions of our society are exposed.” God’s mysteries are revealed among the rejected and despised, the people who expose society’s promises as the hypocrisies of political brokers who ensure the prosperity of the millionaires and billionaires—and, soon, the world’s first trillionaire.

To believe these scriptures about God’s presence is to realign our solidarities, to become conspirators with the One whose justice is liberation from the economic, political, and social patterns that are destroying life. These structures that organize our world for the benefit of the powerful are in the midst of collapse. They are “passing away,” as Paul claims. We’re always living through human self-destruction, with the United States as an instance of history’s cycles of cataclysm. If we want to go on in hope, then we must love those God has created, and give ourselves to the despised and rejected, to our neighbors caged in prisons and segregated from us by the border. There, God will astonish us with epiphanies: life’s survival on the underside of history.