I finally got around to reading this Glenn Loury piece on our scandalous rates of punitive and discriminatory incarceration. Very powerful stuff.

The theologian William Placher has written some very good stuff on this often-neglected topic. In his book Jesus the Savior he writes:

Practices like visiting prisoners grew out of the core of Christian faith. After all, Jesus was a crucified criminal. He was not merely punished, one important strand of Christian theology has maintained–he was guilty, for he had taken on our guilt. “For our sake,” Paul wrote, God made Christ “to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21)

[…]

Christ takes our sin, and frees us from it. Some of us may have a more immediate need of rehabilitation, or more need to be prevented from doing harm to others in the short run, but according to Christian faith it makes no sense to think of “distinguishing the innocent from the guilty.” Apart from Christ, we are all guilty. In Christ, we can all be found innocent. We may need to be helped, both by being protected from doing further wrong, and by being helped to be better, but there is no reason to punish anyone. (pp. 153-4)

If God in Jesus assumes solidarity not only with victims, but also with perpetrators, Christians should be the last ones to adopt the attitude of “Lock ’em up, throw away the key, and forget about ’em!”