Concluding Meditations

In two concluding vignettes, the authors gesture toward how the religious traditions of their divergent upbringings inform their respective abolitionist commitments. Dubler, who was raised an observant Jew, reflects on how, among other aspects of the Jewish tradition, his formative encounters with Passover seder helped shape him into the abolitionist he is today. Drawing a connection between Jewish liturgy and the nineteenth-century abolitionist opponents of slavery, Dubler accounts for how the book acquired its title. Lloyd reflects on the experience of “witness” and how the ambivalence of this practice motivated his interest in prison abolition, and his scholarship. Both authors meditate on how direct action, prison education, scholarship, and citizenship are entangled, and how those tangles can be worked through Judaism or Protestantism.

Prison Religion and Prison Justice

Using trial records, court decisions, and ethnographic fieldwork, this chapter tracks how the disruptive religious practices of the prisoners’ rights era, including prison strikes, became the accommodating religious practices of America’s prisons today. In other words, it tells the story of the rise and fall of the collectivist prisoners’ religion of the 1960s and the subsequent ascendency of the depoliticized, accommodationist religious forms better suited to the controlled conditions of mass incarceration. Touching on a range of incarcerated people’s writings and rituals, including Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and his conversion to Islam, the Church of the New Song, and the black naturalist sect MOVE, the chapter explores how highlighting the politicizing force of prison and reclaiming the political-theological voices of prisoners might allow us to see new possibilities for justice beyond the prison. With an eye toward what has been repressed, the chapter concludes with the abolitionist promise of the new surge in prisoners’ political organizing.

The Limits of Reformist Religion

How have American religious communities responded to the rapid growth of the prison? With ambivalence—as we show through case studies of Protestant responses. Protestant institutions consistently spoke out against the growing prison system, charging that it runs against a Christian sense of justice. But, from the 1960s, liberal Protestant elites no longer had the public’s ear. Evangelicals, led by Charles Colson, also spoke out about the prison system from the perspective of biblical justice, but their methods of engagement were too easily incorporated into the prison state. At the margins, meanwhile, Protestant institutions funded a variety of grassroots anti-prison organizations, which generated the restorative justice movement and the international prison abolition movement.

Why Not Prison Abolition?

In a genealogical fashion, chapter 1 explores the processes, both historically and contemporarily, by which prisons are made “necessary” and abolition is rendered “impossible.” Drawing on interviews and published sources, the authors argue why, both on the merits and for the purposes of movement building, prison abolition, not prison reform, is the right position and the most propitious political frame with which to address mass incarceration. In spite of the secularist moorings of prison abolitionism, as a tradition abolitionism is, in its way, religious from the start. Winning prison reformers over to prison abolition will be well served by attending to and deepening abolitionism’s religious resonances.

The Political Theology of Mass Incarceration

Chapter 2 tracks the way American political elites talked about justice and punishment before and during the rise of mass incarceration. The authors show how these concepts were once closely connected with the religious imagination. When that link was severed, justice was reduced to the proper functioning of the law, to a criminal justice system, and a new set of ideas and institutions promoting law and order and victims’ rights took over. The chapter demonstrates how, at the level of political rhetoric, religion—along with economics and race—was essential for promoting incarceration as the sole mechanism for effecting justice.

The Spirit of Abolition

In the fifty-eighth chapter of Isaiah, the Hebrew prophet exhorts the reader to transcend rote ritualism and engage directly in service to the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed. In exhorting his allies to do likewise, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison drew on this language frequently, most canonically in his 1833 “Declaration of the National Anti-Slavery Convention” and his 1859 “Eulogy for John Brown.” In the generation in between, something extraordinary happened: the goal of ending slavery completely lurched from the cultural margins to the center. Inspired by this precedent, this chapter explores some of the extraordinary religious organizing taking place in the trenches under the banner of prison abolition, from Protestants and Catholics, to Muslims and Jews, to those who are spiritual but not religious.

Introduction

Contemporary American culture is infused with carceral logics that foreground punishment. However, the United States also has a rich tradition of abolitionism, which catalyzes social movements against entrenched injustice. Just as American prison culture is imbued with religion, American abolition culture is also imbued with religion. For this reason, the authors ask what role religion played in underwriting the explosive growth of prisons over the last five decades, as well as what role religion plays in sustaining mass incarceration today. In doing so, the authors weave religion into stories about economics, race, and politics that are told to explain the explosive growth of prisons in the United States. For the movement to “end mass incarceration” to win, this book argues, it must embrace abolitionism, not just reform. Religious ideas and rituals have much to contribute to this process, resourcing a social movement to end the carceral state and its attendant injustices.