There are three orienting facts that render mass incarceration in the United States an ethical problem worthy of our deep consideration. First, the rate of incarceration has grown dramatically over the last 40 years so that today there are 2.2 million people in prison or jail, and another 5 million on probation or parole. This means that 1/32 adults in the USA are under state supervision. Second, the application of incarceration is disproportionately applied to the poor, people of color, and other vulnerable populations. Research shows that 85-90% of those in the criminal justice system fall below the poverty line, and the experience of incarceration only impoverishes people further. The consequences of having a criminal record are harsh and debilitating, ranging from family disruption, social alienation, and disenfranchisement. In these ways and others, the current situation of crime and punishment represents a dramatic moral challenge. Finally, victims of crime are themselves poorly served by the current system, often ignored or sidelined in the machinery of punishment. This course seeks to discover alternatives to the current systems of crime and punishment in order to imagine a more inclusive, just and moral society.
Dean Emilie Townes: "Faith, Values, and Mass Incarceration"
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From the course by Vanderbilt University
Justice, Mercy and Mass Incarceration
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From the lesson
Course Welcome and Introduction
This module introduces the course's focus on mass incarceration in the United States as an ethical challenge. The facts that define the issue reveal a nation in crisis. We begin with an exploration of religious faith as one starting point for our investigation. However, this course is intended for anyone who is concerned with the problem of incarceration. Beyond following the theological call to attend to the least of these, the course is also motivated by the sociological observation that we learn much about ourselves and our society by exploring how we treat those we deem "criminal." The first module describes the elements of mass incarceration in the United States, and begins to investigate the causes and consequences of this reality.
Meet the Instructors
Graham ResideAssistant Professor
Vanderbilt University Divinity School
[MUSIC]
thank you for coming to engage us in this conversation
>> You're welcome.
>> About Mass Incarceration, Justice and Mercy.
So this course on justice, mercy, and
mass incarceration is being hosted by the Divinity School.
Some people might wonder why it's not being hosted at the law school,
or at Peabody.
What would you say is the reason that it's an appropriate context for this class?
>> No, what did you say the first two words of the course title are?
>> Justice and Mercy >> Stop right there.
That's why.
That one of the things that we in a Divinity School
like Vanderbilt try to do is help students, faculty, staff,
whomever understand the inter relationship between religious or
spiritual ideas with the world around us.
And something like this course and
it's hope of helping everybody involved in those who might be seeing it
online and never even see the actual people in person.
Understand that its not just
a course concerned about the prison system as if
the prison system is onl issue you think about in sociology or
political science, or law school or whatever.
It is also a course that we think about in a divinity school setting where we're
trying to find folks get prepared to face the world, they're going to walk into.
And certainly now, is we think more about mass incarceration,
as issues of historical justice begin to take more, come more to the fore.
This is a course that has found it's time in the divinity school and
we're glad to host it.
>> Can you say a little bit about the history of the Divinity School in relation
to questions of incarceration?
>> Well, the divinity school is one of the four
founding colleges of the university.
We're only two years younger than the university itself.
And actually I recently learned we're only about 51
years younger than Yale Divinity School.
That often gives the appearance of being a much older school.
So we're not as young a gun as I thought we were.
But what we try to do and have done over the years in the Divinity School,
is face into the issues that have been pressing in the society,
that it lives in each generation.
So for instance, in the 1920s, there's a story I'm still trying
to chase down to get the actual facts and names of two of our students.
Who both white males, that's who was attending at that time.
Who spoke out against segregation.
Live to tell the story.
Even that churches and pastored and
had pastorates of several, if not lifelong existence.
So, there's always been that edge within the Divinity School itself
of understanding that we can't just sit quietly by.
And let the world around us happen as if there not going to be lives affected.
That our students, and often, our faculty are going to go out and interact with.
With the Divinity School,
as we come into the 20th Century the way that we started talking about it,
as I think about it, around issues of mass incarceration or just incarceration.
Came out of the sit in movement, and the ways in which our students,
led by Jim Lawson, got involved with the lunch counter campaign for
desegregation here in the city.
And the fact that Jim was expelled and later readmitted.
And over a course of years, came back as a Doctor of Ministry student.
And helped train a new generation of social activists around,
not only issues of desegregation and racism but everything that links to it.
And one of those things was the way the present system works.
And it's disproportionate impact in black and brown lives.
And also for a white lives for generations.
This is not something new.
I think in many ways it's something that has become more pressing.
Because we're more and more aware of the disparities
with each generation of who gets incarcerated and why.
And those who are able to either plead out or get out of situations.
Where folks maybe more, well actually not more,
have less access to resources in depth in jail, and for longer terms.
So I would say that part of what we've done in terms of mass incarceration and
in terms of incarceration in its first ways we used to talk about it.
It's always been linked into a system or set of ideas that we see are interrelated.
So race, class, gender, increasingly now, sex and sexuality.
And so, it becomes a piece of
a complex matrix of problems that we absolutely must address theologically.
>> Thanks. You brought up a couple
of themes I'd like to follow out.
One is this relationship of justice, punishment, and mercy, but the other is
this question of inequality and inequity in the distribution of punishments.
Let me first push on this question about justice and punishment.
Seems that crime violence against another person demands or
requires some kind of punishment.
But at the same time there has to be room it seems for mercy, kindness in the world.
So how would you have us think about or
have us reflect on this relationship between justice and punishment, and
then it's more basic or fundamental relationship between justice and mercy?
>> There's a way in which I think, too often in our current
society we've defined punishment as only looking one way.
That is, if you do something you either pay a fine, you go to jail.
Or if you're lucky you get a good lawyer who can get you
out before you have to do any sort of time whatsoever.
I think that's a narrow view of punishment that doesn't really get at the fulsomeness
that happens when a person has violated their social contract.
Be it with the state or the city or the community itself or with individuals.
And so for me it becomes a matter of what do we do if for
me we lead with a notion of the common good.
What is going to help us be a better society?
Is it going to be locking people away and
giving them no skills except how to be better criminals.
That if they're going in with some sort of addiction.
They become better addicts.
That, to me, doesn't sound like punishment.
That itself sounds like a crime.
So rather than think of punishment of something that is
punitive only and seems to solve a problem.
And instead actually really I think creates greater whirlpools of
problems like ripples on a pond.
Let's think about what it would take to
restore right relationships with one another.
Let's think about through very carefully
how one would face someone you have wronged.
And understand first of all that you did something wrong.
That get past the rationalizations and whatever else is going on.
But really have to face folks that we've done harm to.
And certainly within that process there has to be I think in order to be effective
a sense of remorse.
A sense of confession, to use a more religious term.
But to recognize and acknowledge that we did, I did something wrong.
I have broken my contract with you as a fellow citizen,
in the life of the church as a fellow believer.
And that what I'm now seeking is a way to get myself back
in right relationship and I don't get to set the terms of that.
Maybe we set it together.
Maybe I give all that power to the person I've wronged or
the institution I've wronged.
But the idea is not to make someone pay for a crime.
It's to acknowledge a crime, to acknowledge a wrong and
then try to set the relationship right again.
So, for me that's where justice and mercy and incarceration and all of that.
They're all caught up in that kind of dynamic where it is,
I think, far too easy to put someone in jail and
often forget about them.
But I think of the woman who washes and
re-twists my hair every two months.
She has a son who committed a crime.
He's been in jail for a mighty long time.
And when I talk to her or hear her talk about it with other folks in the shop,
one of the hardest things she's had to do over the years
is maintain that relationship with her son as a felon.
And the joy she's getting of thinking soon he's coming out.
So how do I help him not repeat what he did, given all the skills he's acquired.
While being in prison that have not been the most
productive for a healthy and safe society.
How do we get at that?
Where parents, relatives, friends, partners, lovers,
are trying to figure out how to be supportive.
But the system works against that.
When they know that the skills that put them in to jail,
or skills they probably only gotten better at.
And they're not skills that are productive.
How do you turn those skills into something that is constructive
where we wont be constantly punishing folks when they come out of jail?
And understand that's where mercy comes in.
That's where forgiveness comes in.
That's where a second chance comes in.
And that's a dynamic that would have to be in close community with folks.
We can't just say, you did the time.
Now you're fine.
That's not necessarily true.
And it's certainly not what felons and ex- offenders face.
When they get out of jail they're having trouble finding jobs.
They're having trouble getting housing if
they can't be taken into relative's housing because they're a threat.
Well, how have we actually punished them by putting them in jail.
Where we reinscribe it over and over again when we release them from jail.
So there's something broken in that line of understanding
what punishment is about and our own
ability to accept someone who may well be changed.
Or may not.
But, do we even have the mechanisms in place to know that?
Or a way to find that out, other than somebody's own say so.
So, for me that's why I think a course like this,
that doesn't settle for easy answers, or easy resolutions.
But realizes that this whole notion of
punishment in our society at the United States is exceedingly complex.
We often don't meet our goals, and we often don't even know what our goals are.
We just do it.
Because that's what
we think the law requires.
[MUSIC]
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