The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world, with over 2.4 million people currently behind bars. What can Quakers do about it?
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Discussion Questions:
- Laura Magnani says, “One of the definitions of sin is separation from God, and when we allow ourselves to separate ourselves from each other, we’re creating divides. And we’re creating greater brokenness.” What do you think about that definition of sin? How does this relate to our criminal justice system?
- Historically, Quakers have been very active in prison reform, from our own imprisonment in 17th-century dungeons to the advent of the “Penitentiary.” How are Friends called to engage with our prison system today?
Transcript:
Laura Magnani
The system we have now is based on violence. That is at the core. We give ourselves permission to be as violent to certain human beings as possible, up to and including death.
How Quakers Can Help to End Mass Incarceration
Lewis Webb
For me, mass incarceration is really over-incarceration. A system that has criminalized too many activities, and focused on a particular population to enforce that criminalization
Laura Magnani
So when I first started working on it in California at its low point—which was when Reagan was Governor of California—we were down to about 17,000 prisoners in the state prison. Now we have… we went as high as 170,000.
Targeting People of Color
Laura Magnani
It’s pretty shocking to walk inside any jail or prison in the United States and see the demographics because it’s very disproportionately people of color compared to the general population.
Farajii Muhammed
It’s really a system that’s designed to keep us in a state where we have no power. A system that’s really designed to keep the poor, keep those who are not accessible to resources, the disadvantaged, the marginalized, the disenfranchised… and I think for Black people it goes as far back as the institution of slavery itself. It really puts the people in a place where they can’t find themselves any real… there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. They can’t find themselves free.
The Impact of Incarceration
Lewis Webb
About a week ago, I was talking to a gentleman who came home after 44 years of incarceration, and I asked him, “What are you experiencing?” and I thought he would say, “Well, I can’t get a job. I can’t do this…” But he said, “I don’t know how to cross the street.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “When I left, cars were not moving this fast.”
The realities of spending 40-plus years, for many men and women, away from the world… I just don’t know what they’re going to do. And it’s not an isolated case. We are incarcerating people, not just at high numbers, but for unbelievable periods of time.
Laura Magnani
I think there’s a tendency often for white Quakers—of which I am one—to think it doesn’t affect us in the same way as it might if we were people of color primarily, and if our own loved ones were inside. But because of the impact that it has on the economy, because of the way that its devastating our cities, because of the fact that the money spent on prisons, like the money spent on military, is draining funds from everything else we need to make us healthy. It is impacting all of us.
Impact on Families
Laura Magnani
I think another way that it’s had a tremendous impact is on the families left behind. So people forget about the fact that when we incarcerate parents, children are also in effect doing time.
Lewis Webb
Mass incarceration has created single-parent homes and will continue to create them. I’m afraid for the women in my community. The men are being taken away. And therefore, our numbers as a people are going to go down. Some people call it genocide, I’m afraid that I’m not quite there yet, but if we don’t fix it, this may prove to be a genocidal result.
And so the impact is far reaching and frightening.
A New Paradigm
Laura Magnani
One of the definitions of sin is separation from God, and when we allow ourselves to separate ourselves from each other, we’re creating divides. And we’re creating greater broken-ness. That’s what separation is, it’s broken-ness. And so what we have to be talking about is wholeness. How can we bring people back in? What would it take to restore or to create for the first time a whole and healthy and inclusive society?
We need a new paradigm. That’s what we need. And it needs to be a transformative justice paradigm that’s based on wholeness and healing and not on punishment and revenge.
An Issue of Faith
Lewis Webb
It’s really about, if you truly believe that God can be seen in all of us, then it’s incumbent upon us to make life as whole for all of us as possible, and prisons don’t do that. Criminalizing people, marginalizing people just doesn’t do that. It’s just not Quakers, all people of faith, all people of goodwill in my opinion have that responsibility… to mitigate if not eradicate those injustices.
Farajii Muhammed
It’s a huge imbalance in the criminal justice system. It targets Blacks, it targets poor. It targets Latinos. It’s a huge imbalance there. So our responsibility—our call to action with this whole system—is to bring true justice and real balance back into a system.
Time to Act
Lewis Webb
We as people of goodwill have allowed so much of this injustice to be done in our name that it’s our responsibility to reverse it. We have entombed justice behind “get tough on crime” policies. Punish the sinner, however you want to phrase it, and if we don’t remove that stone quickly, justice will die in that tomb.
It’s going to take a hammer and a chisel. We’re not going to be able to just roll the stone away this time. We’re going to have to chisel at it piece by piece, and I’m urging every member of any community of faith to pick up his hammer and his chisel. If it’s helping people re-enter from prison, then chisel there. If it’s really about organizing conferences, do your chiseling there. For Quakers and all of us who care, get to work.
The views expressed in this video are of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of Friends Journal or its collaborators.
This is an incredible video.
I knew that prison populations in the USA were high and we here in the UK have followed similar policies of banging up large numbers of the disadvantaged and ethnic minority communities. Our prison population doubled from 1994 when I wrote my MA dissertation on mentally disordered offenders from 44,000 then to currently nearly 90,000 in grossly overcrowded prisons suffering continuing staff cuts to dangerously unsafe levels with rapidly increasing prisoner suicides. We spending £40,000 per prisoner per year on incarceration. Those people incarcerated were already did-integrated from mainstream society, often unemployed, with mental health problems, addiction, from broken homes with parents who had similar problems (cycles of deprivation), suffering homelessness and so on. If we are willing to spend £40,000 a year on such people when they commit offences, then THERE ARE MUCH BETTER WAYS OF SPENDING (INVESTING) £40,000 per year on them than by banging them up in prison (warehousing) and further dis-integrating from mainstream society by making it even harder to get jobs, to form stable adult relationships, to set up homes -all those things which contribute to someone becoming a useful member of mainstream society. American society, like British society, needs to stop thinking punitively and vengeful ly (because vengeance is what it is) and instead think about helping offenders integrate better into mainstream society. For sure there is a percentage (relatively small in the UK) of offenders who must be incarcerated to protect society at large, and there are those who are “psychopathic” for whom we have no means of helping to integrate normally. But that must not deter us from finding better ways of spending the enormous sums involved in incarceration on offenders. AND THERE ARE MUCH BETTER WAYS!
I never really spent much time thinking about this subject. Thank you for the video and providing a truthful point of view.
Thanks for these three comments. I appreciate your engagement, Olivia, Noel, and Jim. I was thinking the other day about the huge increase in tuition and fees for college in the United States. I wonder whether anyone has done research to directly tie those increases to our massive spending on incarceration… Since a huge proportion of this money is spent at the state level, I think it could be correlated. So, we have huge indebtedness resulting from spending on higher education in the US, which constricts opportunity and choices after accumulating that indebtedness. I think there have been studies correlating this spending with divestment in public education in general. Linda Stout did a successful action with her community in Louisiana many years ago in which they staged a graduation from a community college at the proposed site of a prison and they stopped it. I think Laura’s point about what we lose, what we are not investing in as a result of massive spending and investment in incarceration is a really critical point – we all lose and society suffers. Certainly those incarcerated and their families the most, but it really does hurt us all.
I am inspired by the work of these friends, and I look forward to continue working with them. My meeting (15th St MM) has recently contributed to NYC AFSC’s collaboration with Riverside Church for parole reform, a program co-organized by Lewis Webb. And Laura Magnani speaks and writes movingly about the horrors of mass incarceration.
We all share a responsibility to dismantle the deadly prison-industrial complex. Thank goodness that people are beginning to understand this.
For people with little knowledge of the subject, a superb source of information is Michelle Alexander’s book THE NEW JIM CROW.
Thanks for this. Made me take Tim Newell’s 2000 Swarthmore lecture from the book shelve. He offers his experience as prison governor under the title ‘Forgiving Justice – A Quaker vision for criminal justice ‘. And then Dominic Barter and restorative circles.
I suspect the situation is nurtured by remnants of white entitlement embedded in the virus of colonialism. All colonised countries are contaminated by this curse. Perhaps we need to stop pruning the edges and concentrate on removing the root.
For example, in Australia the most disadvantaged are the First Nations people and they are most imprisoned indigenous people on Earth.
This is a country that has the audacity to claim that it is “….the land of the ‘Fair Go'”.
May we walk the path of Equity and genuine remorse.
This video is a vital response to mass incarceration. Recently, I read Douglas Blackmon’s book Slavery By Another Name. With each chapter, the realization hit me hard that we’re still doing this–I read about horrific cruelty committed against African Americans from the 1870s through to the 1940s in deeply racist areas of country. It was carried out by judges, sheriffs, politicians up to and including governors, and business owners. Present-day mass incarceration is a continuation of that legacy.