Evangelical conservatives haven’t traditionally been involved in issues such as prison and sentencing reform, issues typically championed by liberals. However, there has been an awakening in the faith-based community and other conservative groups to get away from the false narrative of “tough on crime” and have pivoted to being “smart on crime.”
As we prepare for the annual National Prayer Breakfast at the Washington Hilton Hotel on Feb. 4, I’m reminded of the role the faith community could and should — and the late Nixon aide Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship still does — play in the criminal justice reform effort.
That’s because the Bible tells us Jesus himself was accused, arrested, tried and executed for supposed treason against the Roman Empire. He was arrested by the temple guards of the Sanhedrin in the Garden of Gethsemane, and immediately tried and condemned to death by an unfair and unjust system.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus said that how we treat those in need, including those who are sick or in prison, is exactly how we would treat Jesus himself.
We must pray and minister not only to those who are in the criminal justice system, but must also pray and minister to those families and to children who have had parents taken from the home. Many of those children come from low-income or otherwise disadvantaged communities, and that’s one of the primary reasons why all too many minority youths are growing up in broken (mostly fatherless) homes.
The best efforts of urban single moms to raise them notwithstanding, young boys still need positive male role models. Though it’s not an inevitable outcome, the absence of those role models in many urban households all too often perpetuates an intergenerational cycle of poverty, hopelessness and high school-dropout rates that can become the conveyor belt of what some have called the “school-to-prison pipeline.”
That’s not to say that most of those who are in the nation’s jails and prisons don’t deserve punishment, but the current criminal justice system perpetuates broken families by failing to address the core issues behind many of those incarcerations in the first place, including drug addiction and mental illness.
That’s an area of common ground where the “bleeding hearts” on the right and left can meet in the middle, as the Coalition for Public Safety attests. CPS is composed of four conservative organizations (including the Faith & Freedom Coalition, for which I’m the executive director), along with four progressive groups.
We’ve come together to advocate for, among other things, sentencing alternatives to incarceration for low-level, nonviolent drug crimes and more treatment programs for mental illness. These reforms would address the problem of overcrowded jails and prisons and the concomitant exploding cost of incarceration, while reserving the cells for violent and other hard-core offenders who are true menaces to society.
The system also puts up nearly insurmountable barriers to reintegration into society to those who have been released and who are attempting to turn away from a life of crime and instead live a life of substance (as opposed to substance abuse), including taking care of the very families they’d left behind while incarcerated.
Those barriers vary from being denied employment opportunities and driver’s licenses to losing parental rights and being refused student loans. Metaphorically, it’s like continuing to drag a ball-and-chain behind you when you exit the prison gates.
That’s a recipe for recidivism, if not a perverse “incentive” to return to a life of crime. The bipartisan Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, introduced in the U.S. Senate in October, is a major step in the right direction.
Among other things, the SRCA addresses recidivism in that it would allow young, nonviolent offenders who were tried in federal criminal court to have their records expunged. Another “clean slate” measure, this one at the state level, eliminates from civil-service job-application forms the box that applicants must check to indicate they had nonviolent criminal convictions in their past.
Seventeen states already “ban the box” on state-job forms, and we would urge the other 33 to follow their lead to help slow down the prison system’s revolving doors and make it easier for ex-offenders to find gainful employment after serving their time.
As a faith community of pastors and laypeople, we need not only to pray for the “least of these,” but to create a justice system that allows for redemption and change. After all, but for the grace of God go we.
Timothy Head is executive director of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, a member organization of the Coalition for Public Safety.
