Faith Works 3-16-19
Jeff Gill
Defining terms in prison
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It's probably no surprise to many of you that some of the first drafts of my columns can be found on social media, which on a good day is a sandbox for open inquiry and random feedback.
On a bad day it's a fever swamp of political partisanship and anonymous bots generating trend influencing memes which often make no sense, but that's a different column.
What I did do recently was get my foot caught in the bear trap of making a comment after reading an article posted by "The Atlantic" magazine about the Paul Manafort sentencing. "The system isn't broken because Manafort got four years rather than the 19-year recommendation that the sentencing guidelines spat out. The system is broken because other people get the long sentence—because other poorer and often darker people don't get the same chances."
I agree, and not because I have any reason to defend Mr. Manafort, but because his sentence rang a bell I've been pulling on for some time. Four years for a non-violent crime seems like the most we should be giving anyone. Our prisons are crowded, our incarceration rates in the United States are the most punitive in the entire developed world, and our outcomes are not exactly making that look like a good call.
Here's a different angle on the same question: are there really any non-violent crimes that warrant more than four years in prison? At all, for anyone? On a purely pragmatic, practical basis, four years clearly disrupts your life (that's a feature, not a bug), gives time to break ties to unhealthy relationships, and a period more than long enough to deal with anything from simply rethinking your life to dealing with recovery . . . or earn a degree. I honestly am asking: why would anyone who hadn't committed a violent crime ever get more than four years of lock-up? Are we perhaps not thinking reasonably about what we want from criminal justice, incarceration, and rehabilitation? Or is it just about shifting sands of vengeance and retribution?
There are, of course, arguments against my view here. One is "what about repeat offenders?" Okay, there's room for escalation if folks keep coming back around having not learned any lesson, I suppose.
Others asked me about non-violent crimes which cruelly tear apart people's lives. Usually Bernie Madoff was invoked. I was thinking of Madoff when I wrote this, and my only response is "but where does that end?" In general, I lose zero sleep over Bernie spending decades in prison; in practice, we end up with large numbers of people in prison for many years on small matters, and I think we're spending millions to no good end. If sentencing was indexed to amount stolen and non-recoverable, I'd probably vote for that. However, I think many people underestimate the social impact of prison, and just how much a term in lock-up disrupts lives. Beyond a certain point, you're just setting an inmate up to develop a "new normal" of prison life, from which they have to transition to come back into life on the outside.
Meanwhile, 95+% of those who go to jail or prison return to our communities: I think our goal should be that, having invested the time and environment in convict housing, we see better outcomes than we currently get.
As a Christian, I struggle to determine where my faith and religious tradition guides me in a question like this. My reading of the New Testament says that civic authority should be respected, and that good government is part of a godly social order; it also tell me that we can rebel against injustice, and should. I don't think the general idea of locking up criminals is against Christianity, but I think a corrections system overly reliant on retribution and vengeance might be. Even if you push aside the Gospels and go back to "an eye for an eye," much about our current sentencing feels like we sometimes take an eye, a hand, and a toe against an eye-level offense, and that leads me to speak up.
My faith does lead me into the practice and promotion of restorative justice, which isn't about offenders getting off scot-free, but asking if we are truly giving victims what they need for wholeness, especially in crimes where society is the victim as much as any individual.
Feel free to argue with me!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's very interested in counter-arguments, honest! Just not political partisanship. Tell him what you think at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
