`You were in prison …'

Christian Century, Sept 26, 2001 by William C. Placher

In short, we face pragmatic questions of how to protect potential victims and rehabilitate criminals to lead better lives, but Christians can think about such questions free of the need to distinguish innocent and guilty, and free of the need for punishment.

WHAT WOULD THAT MEAN in practice? Charles Colson, a conservative Republican who first got interested in prisons when he was sentenced to one for his part in the Watergate scandal, has founded the Prison Fellowship and the Justice Fellowship to try to help American prisoners. His work offers a particularly useful example, since Colson is such a tough-minded conservative that his views cannot be dismissed as typical liberal softness on crime. In the Prison Fellowship, Christians work with prisoners in seminars and Bible studies and in general just visit prisoners and serve as their pen pals. They arrange for community service for furloughed prisoners, and they pair released prisoners with members of Christian congregations who will help them in their efforts to readjust to life "outside." Prisoners are treated not as outsiders, but as potential and then actual members of Christian communities. Welcoming prisoners into such communities even while they are imprisoned and promising them a greater degree of fellowship after their release are crucial to the program's success. So here is a place for individuals or congregations to begin: visit prisoners; establish human contact; offer to help them get settled when they are released; invite them to join a Christian congregation.

The influential contemporary Christian ethicist Stanley Hauerwas, though he has not talked much about prisons, argues in general for such a model of Christian action: act through local congregations, one by one; don't get involved as Christians in politics to try to change governmental policies. Political involvement, he says, compromises Christian witness, since in politics we inevitably make regrettable compromises.

In Colson's programs, however, the work of the Justice Fellowship supplements that of the Prison Fellowship, campaigning for alternative forms of punishment for nonviolent offenders, for an end to the worst abuses within the prison system, and so on. How, Colson asks, can one visit prisoners, connecting with them as Christian brothers and sisters, and hear their stories of brutality or sexual abuse within their prisons without doing something by way of publicity or political lobbying to improve their condition? How could prisoners accept as sincere invitations to join Christian communities whose members were not trying, through political activity, to reduce brutality and injustice? It is hard to believe someone who says, "I really care about you, but I'm not going to vote against the sheriff who lines his pocket by cutting back on your food. I don't want to corrupt myself by political participation."

If Christians were to start working with prisoners in significant numbers, it might be the beginning of radical changes in our criminal justice system. Or it might lead to rather modest decreases in brutality and improvements in rehabilitation. I see no need to try to predict the end before we begin. As Will Campbell and James Holloway have written,