Living Faith: Criminal Justice

The RMS Office of the Bishop in partnership with leaders across the synod has created a community discussion guide to engage challenging topics as people of faith. Each week we will share a personal reflection on that week's featured social statement.
 

The Church and Criminal Justice: Hearing the Cries presents a comprehensive perspective on matters related to the U.S. criminal justice system and the many communities affected by this system. The statement affirms the principles of the U.S. criminal justice system but also reveals the desperate cries that reflect the system’s serious deficiencies. It recognizes that many people in the system serve their professional vocations with competent and humane performance. Yet it also recognizes that current approaches, suchas the emphasis on mass incarceration, impose significant costs on all involved in the system and on society as a whole. These approaches are founded on an underlying punitive mindset and persistent inequalities based on race and class.Drawing from the biblical witness to God’s rich forms of love and justice for all people, the ELCA is compelled by a holy yearning to address the need for changing public attitudes and postures, and to call for dramatic reforms in policies and practices in the criminal justice system. This statement was adopted by the 2013 ELCA Churchwide Assembly.

Cups Clanging for Change
The Rev. Richard Gianzero

When the movie Just Mercy came out I trembled. I read the book when it came out and trembled then. I became a Christian in prison in the early 1990s and tremble every time a new documentary, book, or movie depicts the reality of prison. I tremble because I know all too well the cruelty of prison. At age 16 I became another soul incarcerated on the modern plantation.

Guilty of crime yes...personal responsibility yes...individual accountability yes...a teenager in the adult prison system facing the brutality of a plantation industry yes...
People often ask me to describe prison. I’ve shared parts of my story and amendment of life in quite a few places. I can only paint pictures with words to capture scenes. These scenes portray small hues and shades of what lurks in the shadows of the plantation canvass. They illustrate scenes of pain, guilt, suffering, despair, abuse, cruelty, longing and storm. Sometimes I remember the sounds of prison and the rare but eerie silence, which offers no solace, after the cups clanged.

In Just Mercy, when a man was led to the electric chair for execution the cups clanged. Those imprisoned beat their cups on the cell doors’ bars. It was a state of emergency with no ambulance of relief in sight. The shrill noise of the cups clanging made me tremble.
The cups often clang in prisons and jails. In those eerie moments of deafening silence, around 2AM, cups sometimes clang. A medical emergency in the cell next to mine - the cups clang. A seizure...a heart attack...an emotional breakdown...a mental health confinement crisis...a spiritual assault choking the soul of the incarcerated body...the cups clang and rip through the heavy air and made us tremble.

When someone is beaten in prison the cups clang. A Black Man was beaten, after being handcuffed and slammed face down, in front of my eyes in prison shortly after I turned 17. The cups clanged as we stood behind locked cells watching. I would see it again...and again...I heard the officers and prison officials walk the cell block gallery joking and laughing about how that “Black Man” (insert the n-word) sh*t himself after they beat him. Brutality was sport. And the cups clanged.

The cups are clanging in the world today. What some people could not believe they now see because of cell phone footage capturing individual acts of police brutality, which speaks to the larger culture of abuse in law enforcement. Imprisoned people do not have recording devices because recording is forbidden in prisons. The culture of cruelty, however, intensifies in law enforcement practices within prisons.

Our ELCA statement captures many issues facing the United States. Due to the movements to change law enforcement culture happening right now we need to connect the dots between the disproportionate rates of imprisonment between Black, Brown and Indigenous peoples and the US general population. We need to connect the dots between the over-policing of communities of color and the economic incentives attached to incarcerating people and why targeting communities of color is historically done with impunity by law enforcement. This is a macro-level call to education, advocacy, and activism which implores people of faith to question the morality and ethics of a prosperous society, on one hand, and an oppressive society, on the other hand, which incarcerates over 2 million people. For a more chilling statistic, which demonstrates the connections of over-policing and racism, consider that at any time today, as you read this, 30% of all young Black men between the ages of 20-29 will be in a jail or prison cell.

Future conversations and calls to action need to address micro-level realities of the prison industrial complex. These include the issues of physical, sexual, and substance abuse most often perpetrated by correction officers and correction employees. For example, the majority of drugs and contraband flowing through prisons are brought in by corrections officers. The connection between corrections’ unions and the ability to defy orders from higher ranking corrections’ staff also allow frontline officers and supervisors to abuse and exploit with impunity.

When I share my story, I always refer to my crimes as “crimes.” As a person and pastor who seeks integrity, I understand the liberating freedom of confession and forgiveness, repentance and amendment of life. This is the call of the cross to look upward at the length to which God goes to redeem through Jesus’s crucifixion. At the same time, the prison industrial complex, understood as the logical consequence of over-policing and targeting of communities of color, betrays its label as a “corrections” component of the criminal justice system. The system thrives because it makes money and represents an industrial enterprise exploiting the historic vulnerabilities of the poor in general and people of color in particular. It is important to me that my personal journey of redemption and accountability amplifies the call for systemic change and even abolition of the prison industrial complex.

I hope to meet you in conversation across the Rocky Mountain Synod as we seek to live into the gospel imperative of justice as expressed in our ELCA social statements.