#28: Where the Gospel Meets Mass Incarceration

#28: Where the Gospel Meets Mass Incarceration

Note: The Love Thy Neighborhood podcast is made for the ear, and not the eye. We would encourage you to listen to the audio for the full emotional emphasis of this episode. The following transcription may contain errors. Please refer to the audio before quoting any content from this episode. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay so there’s this guy Steve Prince. He’s an artist from New Orleans and he’s a Christian and one of the primary ways that he expresses his faith is actually through his art. So not long ago, there was a church here in Louisville that contacted Steve because they wanted him to do some art for their sanctuary for the season of Lent.

STEVE PRINCE: Originally it was a Catholic church, and it has the spaces where the station of the cross would fall in these niches within the church. 

JESSE EUBANKS: So this building, it used to be a Catholic church. It’s not anymore. And it had these hollowed out spaces around the sanctuary where the stations of the cross had used to be. And Steve was like fascinated by these spaces in the wall, like ‘what could I do with these that would be really compelling?’ 

STEVE PRINCE: I said, ‘Could I put the stations of the cross back in those spaces? But I’d like to reboot them and give them, y’know, contemporize them.’

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, just so we’re on the same page here, what exactly are the stations of the cross? 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay yeah, so the stations of the cross, they’re in most Catholic churches and it basically tells the story of Jesus’ crucifixion. So they focus on 11 pivotal moments in the story of the death of Christ, from his betrayal to the nails being driven in his hands all the way to his ascension. So Steve starts thinking, y’know, ‘How can I tell this story in a way that’s gonna have its roots in modern society?’

STEVE PRINCE: ‘Can we see Jesus, the Jesus story, in an everyday story that happens around us? Let us think about that, yes, that is Christ, but let’s think about other ways in which people are being crucified today.’

JESSE EUBANKS: And here’s the thing. Steve’s actually, he’s African-American. And he started thinking about, y’know, ‘what’s a way in which a lot of modern society is harming African-American men especially?’ And it didn’t take long for Steve to come up with the answer.

STEVE PRINCE: And I said, ‘One of the spaces where I feel that people are being crucified are within our prison systems.’

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JESSE EUBANKS: You’re listening to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks. 

RACHEL SZABO: And I’m Rachel Szabo. Every episode we hear stories of social justice and Christian community.

JESSE EUBANKS: Today’s episode is where the gospel meets mass incarceration. So today’s episode is actually in partnership with the Pass the Mic podcast. And unfortunately they could not be in the studio with us, but they gave us access to many of the stories that we’re going to share with you today.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, and actually this episode was kinda hard to narrow down because, let’s be honest, like mass incarceration is a huge topic. We could talk about policy, we could talk about private prisons, we could talk about cash bail system, we could talk about prosecutors. Like the list goes on and on and on.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, and just to be clear, this episode, it’s not meant to be a comprehensive study of all things related to mass incarceration. Instead, we’re going to briefly look at mass incarceration from three major lenses — ethnicity, wealth, and proximity. We’ll talk about what mass incarceration is, where it came from, and some of the radical things Christians are doing about it. Welcome to our corner of the urban universe.

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JESSE EUBANKS: Okay so check out this headline from The New York Times this past April.  It says, ‘Crime Is Down, Yet U.S. Incarceration Rates Are Still Among the Highest in the World.’ 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah so, I looked up the stat, and the most recent count is we have 2.2 million people behind bars. And like just to put that in perspective — so the United States has 5% of the world’s population and we have 25% of the world’s prison population. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, so we lock up a very significant number of people. I mean just what we spend on it alone is pretty staggering. We spend about 87 billion dollars on jails and prisons.

RACHEL SZABO: And so, y’know, the question is — why? Like are Americans just more prone to criminal activity? Which, y’know, I don’t think that’s true because that New York Times headline said crime is down. So what’s going on here?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, and y’know, earlier, the artist Steve Prince, he said that people are being crucified within our prison system. And I think that part of what he means is that just as Jesus was tried and killed unjustly, we do have people today who are experiencing injustice at the hands of the justice system. And we’re gonna revisit Steve later in the episode, but first I think it’s important that we understand that this is not a modern problem. Judicial injustice, it has been around a long time.

In the Old Testament, the prophet Jeremiah was also known as the weeping prophet. He wrote the book of Lamentations, where he laments over the destruction of Israel. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, and Israel was being destroyed because they continually disregarded God. And you can read in Jeremiah and also in the book of Isaiah how a lot of their disobedience had to do with the ways they were enacting justice. They were exploiting the poor, the Bible says they would use unjust scales, and so they only looked out for their own interests and profit instead of the interests of their vulnerable neighbors.

JESSE EUBANKS: And Jeremiah, he’s the one that calls this out. In Lamentations 3, he writes — ‘To crush underfoot all the prisoners of the earth, to deny a man justice in the presence of the Most High, to subvert a man in his lawsuit, the Lord does not approve.’

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, and you know, the sad reality is even though Jeremiah spoke those words more than 2,000 years ago, we can still see that same thing happening today. And so, y’know, when people talk about mass incarceration, what they’re really referring to is the injustice of the justice system. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Right, they’re not talking about people that are receiving fair sentences.

RACHEL SZABO: Right.

JESSE EUBANKS: They’re talking about the fact that we have a system that oftentimes unfairly punishes people. Even if the crime was real, the punishment does not fit the crime. So that brings us actually to our first lens for looking at mass incarceration because one of the major ways we see this is in regards to ethnicity.

DOMINIQUE GILLIARD: One in three African American men are predicted to spend time behind bars in their lifetime today, and the number’s one in six for Hispanic males.

RACHEL SZABO: So that’s a guy named Dominique Gilliard. Uh, this is from a conversation he had on the Chasing Justice podcast. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh yeah, yeah. He’s the guy that wrote Rethinking Incarceration. 

RACHEL SZABO: That’s right.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah.

RACHEL SZABO: So, I looked up some stats on this. So one in three African Americans will be locked up, but that number is one in 17 for white people.

DOMINIQUE GILLIARD: And so you see this really alarming reality where black bodies have been, um, criminalized.

JESSE EUBANKS: And that’s one of the contributing factors of mass incarceration is that we lock up a lot of minorities. And of course, if we’re locking up a lot more minorities, the question has to be asked — does that mean that minorities are more criminal than white folks?

RACHEL SZABO: Well not necessarily. Okay, so in order to understand why there’s a disproportionate number of minorities behind bars, Dominique says we need to take a look at our history. 

DOMINIQUE GILLIARD: I will say that there has been this kinda fallacious notion that really mass incarceration started with the launch of the war on drugs around the 1970’s.

RACHEL SZABO: So Dominique mentions the war on drugs and we’ll talk about that in a minute, but he believes that imprisoning large numbers of minorities actually started way before that.

DOMINIQUE GILLIARD: If you trace the research, you actually see that mass incarceration, particularly in relation to black bodies, evolves right after the Emancipation Proclamation. You see the rise of black codes.

JESSE EUBANKS: And just to clarify, like what are black codes? What does he mean? 

RACHEL SZABO: Okay so after the Civil War, the 13th Amendment was added to our constitution. And do you know what the 13th Amendment was for?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I mean essentially it put an end to slavery. It made slavery illegal. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah that’s right, but there was an exception. Actually, let me read to you — this is what is written in the 13th Amendment, okay? It says ‘Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States. And so, since African Americans could no longer be made slaves, states made up these black codes. They were these laws that allowed them to put much of the African-American population behind bars so they could be put back to work. 

DOMINIQUE GILLIARD: And you have black people who are being arrested for things as simple as walking too close to a wooden fence or vagrancy laws that literally said that a black person could be arrested for not being able to prove that they were employed. Um, and so you had this legislation that really started to funnel black people in mass, into incarceration. 

JESSE EUBANKS: I think the question that comes to mind probably for a lot of folks is like, we hear that and we’re like ‘they were foolish, unwise, racist.’ But then we look now and we go ‘but thank God that’s behind us.’ So it sounds like you’re saying it’s not behind us.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, well, that brings us to the ‘70’s and the ‘80’s and the war on drugs.

AUDIO CLIPS: America’s public enemy number one is drug abuse… Now we have to have very tough penalties, emphasis on penalties…

RACHEL SZABO: So, here’s the deal. In 1972, the prison population was 200,000. But since the implementation of harsh drug sentencing, we’re at 2.2 million. In fact, nearly half of all federal inmates are locked up for drug-related offenses. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Well, I get that, but like drugs are serious. What’s so harsh about drug sentencing? I mean, most drugs are illegal.

RACHEL SZABO: Well, let’s do this. Okay, let me give you an example of how there can be injustice when it comes to drug sentencing. So I’m gonna tell you about two different cases, and I want you to compare them. Now granted, it’s practically impossible to do a direct comparison between two different cases because there’s so many factors that go into that. But for these two particular cases, at least both happened around the same time and in the same state.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, go ahead.

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, case number one. It involves a white businessman, and he’s caught as the leader of a 20-person drug ring. So he’s been trafficking cocaine. Now drug trafficking, it’s a serious crime, and the mandatory minimum for this guy is 10 years in prison. However, this guy agrees to give over names of other people involved in the drug ring. And so, in turn, the judge reduces his sentence to just three years. So he ends up spending a total of three years for drug trafficking.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so yeah. White businessman. Uh, he’s the leader of like a drug ring. Busted for cocaine. Was supposed to get 10 years. Judge reduces it down to three because he offered up some names.

RACHEL SZABO: Right.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay.

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, the second case. This one involves an African-American college student, and he gets arrested because the police got a tip off that he might be a drug ring conspirator. Now drug conspiracy is not the same thing as trafficking, and so the sentence isn’t going to be quite as harsh. And also the other thing that’s in this kid’s favor is that there’s no evidence of drug activity found anywhere in his home. So it is a possibility that the tip off was bogus. However, what sentence do you think this judge gives this African-American college student?

JESSE EUBANKS: Well, I’m gonna assume that it’s gonna be less than 10 years, right? I mean he’s not trafficking. So I don’t know, maybe five years? 

RACHEL SZABO: So the judge sentences him to 19 years in prison. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Wait, but why?

RACHEL SZABO: I mean, your guess is as good as mine. Granted, I’m not a judicial expert. However, it’s hard to ignore the fact that — what is one of the major differences between these two men?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I mean their ethnicity. 

RACHEL SZABO: And that’s just one of millions of cases like that. Actually according to the Center for American Progress, black Americans are nearly six times more likely to be incarcerated for drug-related offenses than white Americans despite there being equal substance usage rates.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay so there’s all this research that’s showing that basically if you have black or brown skin you’re far more likely to get a more strict sentence, even if the facts remain identical. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah.

JESSE EUBANKS: So I guess the question becomes, y’know — what do we do with this reality living in this time and place? If we’re seeing that there’s this massive discrepancy between how black and brown bodies are sentenced versus how white folks are sentenced, y’know, what do we do about that? And that’s the question that one young lawyer asked himself. Y’know, he was seeing case after case of these discrepancies, these inequalities, and he decided ‘I’m going to do something about this. I can’t take it anymore.’

BRYAN STEVENSON: I spend most of my time in jails, in prisons, on death row. I spend most of my time in very low-income communities, in the projects and places where there’s a great deal of hopelessness.

JESSE EUBANKS: So this is a guy named Bryan Stevenson. And at the time he was just this young lawyer, but he just kept seeing how everything about the justice system seemed to be stacked against him and his clients. So one day Bryan just got fed up, and he did this crazy thing. So this is a story from a TED Talk that he gave back in 2012.

BRYAN STEVENSON: I represent children. We have life imprisonment without parole for kids in this country. The United States is the only country in the world where we sentence 13-year-old children to die in prison. And I go to the jail and I see my client who’s 14 and he’s been certified to stand trial as an adult and I start thinking ‘Well, how did that happen? How can a judge turn you into something that you’re not?’ And I was up too late one night and I started thinking ‘Well gosh, if the judge can turn you into something that you’re not, the judge must have magic power.’ Said ‘Yeah, Bryan. The judge has some magic power. You should ask for some of that.’ And because I was up too late and wasn’t thinking real straight, I started working on a motion. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay so now for those of us that aren’t lawyers, a motion is like asking the judge for a certain request, like a particular request. And in this case, Bryan had a very particular request.

BRYAN STEVENSON: I start working on this motion, and the head of the motion was a motion to try my poor 14-year-old black male client like a privileged white 75-year-old corporate executive.

RACHEL SZABO: That’s like insane. Like he’s not really gonna use that in court, right? Like he didn’t actually do that?  

JESSE EUBANKS: Well… 

BRYAN STEVENSON: The next morning I woke up and I thought ‘Did I dream that crazy motion or did I actually write it?’ And to my horror, not only had I written it but I had sent it to court.

JESSE EUBANKS: Coming up — an angry court, a janitor, and the cost of justice. We’ll be right back.

COMMERCIAL 

JESSE EUBANKS: You’re listening to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks.

RACHEL SZABO: And I’m Rachel Szabo. Today’s episode — where the gospel meets mass incarceration.

JESSE EUBANKS: So we’re telling the story of Bryan Stevenson. Bryan’s a lawyer, and one night on a whim he sent a motion to the judge asking that his quote ‘poor 14-year-old black male client be tried like a privileged white 75-year-old corporate executive.’ And if you have questions about this motion, you are not the only one. It turns out the judge had a lot of questions too. 

BRYAN STEVENSON: As soon as I walked inside, the judge saw me coming and he said, ‘Mr. Stevenson, did you write this crazy motion?’ I said, ‘Yes sir, I did,’ and we started arguing. People started coming in because they were just outraged that I had written these crazy things. Police officers were coming in and assistant prosecutors and clerk workers, and before I knew it the court room was filled with people angry that we were talking about race, that we were talking about poverty, that we were talking about inequality.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay so this actually brings us to the second lens that we’re gonna look through today, which is wealth. So not only did Bryan ask for his client to be seen as white, but he also asked that he be seen as wealthy. And there’s a reason for that.

BRYAN STEVENSON: We have a system of justice in this country that treats you much better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent. Wealth, not culpability, shapes outcomes.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah okay, so I was curious about this and I looked up how much it costs to have a lawyer defend you in court. And lawyer fees can range anywhere from $250 to $520. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, and I mean that’s per hour. You know, you’re paying that fee per hour. 

RACHEL SZABO: Right, and so this can easily add up to thousands of dollars. And if you’re in an urban area, lawyers tend to be more on the expensive side.

JESSE EUBANKS: And I realize that some people are going like ‘Oh yeah, but you can get a free lawyer, but —’

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, but they have so — we have 2.2 million people in prison. They have so many cases.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, public defenders are like way overloaded. Y’know, their case loads are huge, they can barely prepare for them in time, and so there’s a little bit of truth here where you get what you pay for. And so public defenders are doing great jobs, but their hands are tied in a lot of cases. And you don’t just need money for lawyers. I mean we have this cash bail system that we talked about briefly in episode 11 of this podcast. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah in fact, cash bail is why our jails are so crowded. So actually 76% of all people being held in jail — so this is not prisons, but this is local jails — 76% of people in our jails haven’t even been convicted of a crime yet. They’re just stuck there because they can’t afford the bail to get out.

JESSE EUBANKS: Right, so we have this justice system that says innocent until proven guilty. So these folks are in jail having not been proven guilty, but they also cannot afford to get out. So the bottom line is that we’ve made justice just really expensive in this country. 

So going back to Bryan Stevenson. He’s in the courtroom, he’s made this outrageous motion, everyone is up in arms, they’re furious with him, and Bryan is feeling pretty discouraged. 

RACHEL SZABO: I would think so.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I mean to him it looks like there is no way to get actual justice for his client. But then, as the arguing in court continues, Bryan notices what looks like the janitor outside the courtroom.

BRYAN STEVENSON: And out of the corner of my eye, I could see this janitor pacing back and forth and he kept looking through the window and he could hear all of this hollering and he kept pacing back and forth and finally this older black man with a very worried look on his face came into the courtroom and sat down behind me almost at counsel table. 

JESSE EUBANKS: So Bryan had no idea why this janitor had come in, but just a few minutes later he found out this janitor was actually exactly who he needed.

BRYAN STEVENSON: About ten minutes later, the judge said we would take a break and during the break there was a deputy sheriff who was offended that the janitor had come into court and this deputy jumped up and he ran over to this older black man. He said, “Jimmy, what are you doing in this courtroom?” This older black man stood up and he looked at that deputy and he looked at me and he said, “I came into this courtroom to tell this young man, ‘Keep your eyes on the prize. Hold on.’”

JESSE EUBANKS: So this janitor ends up sharing these words to him that are from the Civil Rights Movement. Those are words that African-Americans would say to each other in moments of real hardship and real oppression as they were pushing back against injustice, and those words ended up helping Bryan to understand that it wouldn’t be easy but this fight was worth it. Bryan didn’t end up saying what happened to that particular young man that he was representing. However, in 2012, Bryan stood before the Supreme Court, where he argued successfully to have mandatory life-imprisonment-without-parole sentences for all children under the age of 17 permanently banned. And he went on to start this thing called the Equal Justice Initiative. It’s an organization that provides legal representation to people who have been illegally convicted, unfairly sentenced, or abused in state jails and prisons. And often, those people are poor.

BRYAN STEVENSON: Ultimately you judge the character of a society not by how they treat the rich and the powerful and the privileged but by how they treat the poor.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, and what Bryan’s talking about here, I mean that’s some scriptural stuff, right? I mean you’ve got Jesus in the book of Luke saying that he came to preach the good news to the poor. In the Beatitudes — ‘Blessed are you who are poor for yours is the kingdom of God.’ You’ve got the book of Psalms saying ‘Blessed is the one who remembers the poor. May he judge your people with righteousness and the poor with justice.’ So, as uncomfortable as we sometimes get in modern times when we start hearing this thing, just thinking ‘Oh, that’s liberal talk’ or ‘Oh, that’s outside of my theology.’ No, that’s biblical. Justice and caring for the poor — that’s from God.

RACHEL SZABO: You know, I hear about the things that Bryan is doing with the Equal Justice Initiative and I think it’s spectacular. But I think the question that comes is — ‘Well what is mass incarceration have to do with me? I’m not standing in front of courts. I’m not petitioning judges. I’m not lobbying for policies. What do I do?’

JESSE EUBANKS: Well, I think that that brings us to the last lens that we should look at. So we’ve talked about ethnicity, we’ve talked about wealth, and now I think that we need to talk about proximity because for some of us, y’know, we don’t live in environments where the effects of mass incarceration are apparent every day. It really isn’t a reality for us. Okay so, I have a story for you actually about proximity. And well actually at first, it’s about lack of proximity and this seminary professor who wanted to do something about that. 

So there’s a seminary in Chicago. It’s called North Park Theological Seminary, and one of the professors there is this woman named Michelle Clifton-Soderstrom. Now the seminary really wants to not just teach students about what the Bible says and fill their heads with knowledge, but they want their students to actually learn what it means to live it out. It’s a lot like what we do at Love Thy Neighborhood. They want their students to be boots on the ground doing the work. And Michelle was noticing this disconnect, and so she came up with an idea.

MICHELLE CLIFTON-SODERSTROM: What it would look like for us to teach inside a prison, which is a community of people who are very under-resourced. They are segregated off from society. They are unrecognized, often invisible. 

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, but here’s the thing. She not only wanted to teach inside the prison, but she also wanted to take her students in there with her so they could learn alongside the inmates. There’s just one small problem with that, and that was — the closest prison to North Park Seminary was this place called Stateville Correctional Center. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Why is that place a problem?

RACHEL SZABO: Stateville Correctional Center — it’s a maximum security prison. And up until 2016, it was the last prison of its kind because it had an operational roundhouse. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Wait, wait, wait. What’s a, what’s a roundhouse?

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, so a roundhouse is typically what you see in movies if there’s a prison scene. It’s got the tower in the middle. There’s the cells all around it, ceiling to floor.

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh, like in Guardians of the Galaxy.

RACHEL SZABO: Yes, when Rocket wants to take the guy’s leg and they’re trying to get out.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what’s the big deal about a roundhouse? I don’t get it.

RACHEL SZABO: So roundhouses are actually incredibly controversial because they’re deemed inhumane. They create this cagelike atmosphere. It fuels chaos from the inmates. The acoustics are awful. It’s incredibly noisy. In fact, one critic called the roundhouse a sensory nightmare. And it wasn’t until just three years ago that Stateville finally shut theirs down. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay so Michelle wants to do this program at this place?

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah.

JESSE EUBANKS: Uh, why? Like why would she want to do it, and what does it have to do with mass incarceration?

RACHEL SZABO: Well, so, addressing mass incarceration isn’t just about reducing the number of people who get locked up. It’s also about ensuring the just and fair treatment of those who are already behind bars. And believe it or not, Michelle says education can play a huge role in that.

MICHELLE CLIFTON-SODERSTROM: In fact, there is one program in California that’s been running for over 10 years. In 10 years of having graduates, not one has gone back to prison for a violent crime. So education in general is pretty amazing for addressing mass incarceration. 

RACHEL SZABO: And so totally through like this friend of a friend who knew the chaplain at the prison sort of thing, Michelle got invited to come teach a test run class inside Stateville. 

MICHELLE CLIFTON-SODERSTROM: So we walked back to the education building, unescorted, walked by the yard. A lot of people in the yard would yell, you know, ‘What are you guys here for? What are you doing?’ And we’d, y’know, tell them we’re here for classes that we — trying to promote education wherever we go. And we got back to the education building and you, you know, that’s locked too. You go in and you sign in with the sergeants and the officers and there’s usually three or four in the education building along with the principal. And they give you a classroom. And the guys were, were in there, they were in the classroom with desks. There’s a chalkboard. There’s no technology. And that’s the environment. 

JESSE EUBANKS: So what happened? I mean were the guys even interested? Did it work? 

RACHEL SZABO: Well, stay with us.

COMMERCIAL 

JESSE EUBANKS: Hey, Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks.

RACHEL SZABO: I’m Rachel Szabo. Today — where the gospel meets mass incarceration.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay so Rachel, you’ve been telling me this story about Michelle. She’s a seminary professor, and she wants to offer seminary classes inside a maximum security prison.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, it sounds kinda strange, right? Like when you think seminary degree, you don’t think ‘Oh, yeah, convicted felons.’

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. Okay so where we left off, I’m still really curious — did anyone even come to this class?

RACHEL SZABO: Actually yeah. It was a full house. And, in fact, Michelle was rather surprised at the type of people she found in her classroom. Because she found a lot of them were like the people Jesus mentions in Matthew 25.

MICHELLE CLIFTON-SODERSTROM: All of the people that Jesus names in Matthew 25 converge and come together in our prison system. The people we lock up are Matthew 25 bodies.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so this thing Michelle’s referring to is from Matthew 25, and it’s this passage where Jesus is actually talking about the sheep and the goats. He’s actually saying those that will receive eternal life, those that will receive salvation, are those that feed the hungry, those that give something to drink to those that are thirsty, those that invite strangers in. He also says it’s those that go to visit those that are in prison. And he makes this equation where he says, ‘When you do these things for the least of these, you do it for me.’

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, well, and the thing that she never realized until she actually went into a prison was that, y’know, the sick, the hungry, the thirsty — they can all be found within the walls of a prison. So actually I was able to find two interviews with men that were students in Michelle’s classroom, and the first one is a guy named Alex.

ALEX: I was able to be a part of the Catholic church. I was actually a altar boy growing up.

RACHEL SZABO: So Alex is Hispanic American, and he actually grew up in church. But even though he grew up in church, that wasn’t the only part of his upbringing.

ALEX: The way I grew up is in a gang-infested community. Not only are your friends involved in gangs, but family members are involved in gangs. So the gang life has always been entrenched into our community, and that’s how we view things. 

RACHEL SZABO: And it was because of the gang involvement that one night Alex found himself in the middle of a group fight. And during the fight, someone pulled out a gun and fired.

ALEX: That person ended up being killed, and the witnesses for some reason end up involving me as the actual shooter. So although I’m not guilty of actually pulling the trigger, that’s the reason why I’m end up being incarcerated. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so I’m hearing Alex say all of this and, y’know, I don’t know the details of his case. Y’know, he’s saying he’s not guilty. Other people obviously thought that he was guilty, but I guess it’s easy to get caught on that. But he’s still worthy of love, he’s still worthy of someone’s effort, y’know, and someone’s care.

ALEX: I don’t wanna be here. I hate it. I’m being held captive. I’m being held hostage for something they said that I did that I know I didn’t do.

RACHEL SZABO: The other interview that I was able to find was from a guy named Howard.

HOWARD: Am I sweating? Wow, man, I’m sweating. Y’all just gotta remind me, man, that this is not like a interrogation.

RACHEL SZABO: So actually just like Alex, Howard also grew up in church.

HOWARD: I grew up in one of those traditional Baptist Christian families… my grandparents coming to pick me up, blowing a horn, 6:30 in the morning, to go sit in Sunday School. 

RACHEL SZABO: But as he grew up, Howard had the habit of abusing alcohol. And he said that people told him all the time not to drink and drive, but no one ever warned him not to drink and carry a firearm.  

HOWARD: I carried a gun at night when I traveled. Worst decision I ever made was putting that gun in my pocket while intoxicated on my way to a liquor store, y’know, so, I ultimately ended up making a mistake and taking someone’s life. So I was ultimately convicted of first-degree murder, sentenced to 55 years. And I live with that, that event taking place in my life, you know, that reoccurring in my mind every day.

JESSE EUBANKS: So I feel like this is a good time to point out, like, there are crimes that take place, y’know like Howard just said, where justice is punitive. You’re being punished for what you’ve done. There are consequences for certain actions. And so punitive justice is really important. I think it’s very justifiable. I think it’s also important though that we also understand like punitive justice is one side of justice, but the other side of justice is restorative. And restorative justice is not focused solely on the punishment. It’s focused on how can we restore you to a better place, a right standing with society, with God, with other people. And so we have to look at justice and go — how is this justice punitive appropriately? And then how is it also restorative appropriately?

RACHEL SZABO: Well yeah, and this is where proximity becomes so important because it’s really easy for us to just focus on the punitive part.

JESSE EUBANKS: So I guess the question is like — why is it that we as Christians so often fixate on punitive justice, but we don’t seem to be as interested in restorative justice?

RACHEL SZABO: Well actually, y’know, we can’t blame the media for everything, but part of the way that we view prisoners and punitive justice comes from television and Hollywood. Yknow, there was one research article that talks about this, and there’s a term for it. It’s called the “othering” of prisoners, and so we see them as not human, they’re evil, they’re barbaric, they don’t deserve privileges. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Like there’s like us, and then there’s the other. And the other is just like out there far removed from us, and they’re dangerous to us and our way of life.

RACHEL SZABO: Right, and for those of us who aren’t in proximity to the incarcerated, we get our knowledge from secondhand media and movies and historically those screen images have painted prisoners as violent, dangerous, and uncontrollable. Y’know, in fact, Dominique Gilliard talks about this in his book Rethinking Incarceration.

DOMINIQUE GILLIARD: And so we start to think of criminals as those people, those immoral people, those people who make our communities dangerous, those people that we need to keep our children away. And so it becomes this way in which subconsciously we start to think of the incarcerated as people who are beyond God’s redemption.

RACHEL SZABO: But Dominique would actually argue that this “othering” isn’t the sort of narrative that we see in the Bible.

DOMINIQUE GILLIARD: We have to understand that there is really a fundamental connection between incarceration and Scripture, and I think we have underestimated how significant that connection is. Literally we would have no Bible were it not for criminals. I mean when you really press into — you got John the Baptist, Paul, Jesus, Samson, Joseph, Malachi, Stephen, Jeremiah, Peter, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, Silas. All of these great biblical leaders were incarcerated. They’re criminals.

RACHEL SZABO: And so through her classes at Stateville, Michelle has been able to help her entire school view prisoners differently.

MICHELLE CLIFTON-SODERSTROM: So we’ve had hundreds, literally hundreds of our Chicago campus students, faculty, board members, senior administration, come into the prison. And even coming in once, they’re deeply affected. So all of that engagement with people who are incarcerated allows our campus to then become not only a more hospitable place to people with records, but also to understand the complexities around who gets incarcerated and to, y’know, have, start to have a passion to address those things. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay so Michelle had this great idea, and it seemed like it went well. Like what does that look like now?

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, so today North Park actually offers a full four-year Master of Arts in Christian Education degree inside Stateville. And actually Michelle says that her students at Stateville are some of the school’s best students.

MICHELLE CLIFTON-SODERSTROM: So our first year, um, we had a 95% retention rate, which is pretty amazing. It’s higher than any program on campus, and all of the students got at least a C or better in every class. So, so, some of our, our top students are incarcerated.

RACHEL SZABO: And not only is this program changing the experience of incarceration for people at the school — it’s also changing the lives of the inmates too. 

ALEX: What I’m learning in this course is that there’s other ways that we can get our point across without having to be violent.

HOWARD: They always emphasize Christ’s divinity, right. In my household and the church that I went to, right, they always emphasize like performing miracles or, y’know, walking on water, right, that made him almost seem, appear, a bit supernatural, right, and far away and distanced. But throughout this North Park program, right, they kinda like not only emphasize his divinity, right, but they also emphasize his humanity as well. And so it brought him a whole lot closer. It brought Christ from heaven and brought him like right here in the classroom with me.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so remember Steve Prince?

RACHEL SZABO: Oh yeah, the artist. He was doing the stations of the cross thing.

JESSE EUBANKS: Well he made each station still tell the story of Jesus, but it happened in modern times. And each image, it actually took place within a prison complex because as Steve was working on this he realized that the parallels between what happened to Jesus and our current prison system — they are eerily similar.

STEVE PRINCE: One of the things that I came across in research is when a person is killed within the prison system or executed — one of them is lethal injection. And in the photographs that I’ve seen of people getting their lethal injection, they have been put on a table that’s in the shape of a cross. And that’s the same way in which I have the person who is dying within this prison industrial complex, he is dying on that cross with the hypodermic needles embedded in his arms as a replacement of the nails.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay so I feel like there’s just, there’s one other thing I just have to share with you, like it’s too good just to leave on the table. So I wanna share one last story with you from Bryan Stevenson. So this is from a talk that he gave at last year’s Skoll World Forum. So as part of his work through the Equal Justice Initiative, to date he’s actually helped release over 135 death row inmates who were wrongly convicted. So that’s 135 people who would have been executed in the name of justice because of an unjust sentence. And working with people on death row — it’s one of the hardest things that Bryan does for his job. But it’s also the place that reminds him why he works in justice reform.

BRYAN STEVENSON: A few years ago I represented a man who was facing execution in 30 days. He was intellectually disabled. I got involved in his case very late and I went to the trial court and I said, ‘You can’t execute this man. He suffers from intellectual disability.’ And the courts had banned the execution of people with intellectual disability, but this court said, ‘No, it’s too late.’ I said, ‘No, it’s not too late.’ I went to the state court. They said too late. The appeals court said too late. The federal court said too late. Every court I went to said too late. And on the day of the execution I was waiting for a ruling from the United States Supreme Court, I was pacing in my office, and finally the phone rang. And it was the clerk of court at the United States Supreme Court. The clerk told me that my motion for stay had been considered and reviewed but the judgment of the court was that our motion was due to be denied. Too late.

I then had to get on the phone and do the hardest thing I do in my work. I got this man on this phone and I said to him, I said, ‘I’m so sorry, but I can’t stop this execution.’ And then the man did the thing that I dread the most in my work. He started to cry. He just began to sob. He said to me, he said, ‘Mr. Stevenson, please don’t hang up. There’s something important I wanna say to you.’ I said, ‘Of course.’ And then this man tried to say something to me, but in addition to being intellectually disabled he had another challenge. When he got nervous, when he got anxious, when he got overwhelmed, he had a speech impediment and he would begin to stutter, and all of a sudden this man couldn’t get out a single word and he kept trying and he kept trying and the more he tried and failed the more he was ripping my heart apart. And before I knew it, I was standing there holding the phone and tears were running down my face.

JESSE EUBANKS: And as Bryan is on the phone with this man, he starts having a flashback, actually back to when he was nine years old at church with his mom and he saw a new kid there.

BRYAN STEVENSON: And he was standing there at the church and he wasn’t saying anything and I asked him, ‘What’s your name? Where are you from?’ And I remembered that night how that little boy tried to answer my question but he also had a very severe speech impediment and he began to stutter, and then I remembered that I did something really ignorant. When that little boy tried to answer my question in church all those years ago, I remembered that I laughed at that little boy. My mom came over and she gave me this look I’d never seen before and she pulled me aside and she said, ‘Bryan, don’t you ever laugh at somebody because they can’t get their words out right.’ I tried to apologize. My mom wasn’t having it. She said, ‘Now you go over there, and you tell that little boy you’re sorry.’ I said, ‘Okay, mom.’ And I took a step to go see this little boy. My mom grabbed me by the arm. She said, ‘Wait. After you tell that little boy you’re sorry, I want you to hug that little boy.’ I rolled my eyes a little bit, and I said, ‘Okay, mom.’ And then my mom grabbed me by the arm again. She said, ‘Wait. After you hug that little boy, I want you to tell that little boy you love him.’ I said, ‘Mom, I can’t go over there and tell that little boy I love him.’ She gave me that look again, so I did. I went over to this little boy. I said, ‘Look man, I’m really sorry.’ And then I lunged at this child and gave him a little boy man hug. And then I tried to say to this little boy as insincerely as I possibly could, I said, ‘Look man, you know, well I don’t know, well you know, I don’t know, well, um, I love you.’ And what I’d forgotten until the night of this execution is how that little boy hugged me back, and then I remembered how he whispered flawlessly in my ear. He said, ‘I love you too.’ 

And I was thinking about that while this client tried to get his words out, and finally my client got his words out. He said, ‘Mr. Stevenson, I wanna thank you for representing me.’ He said, ‘I wanna thank you for fighting for me.’ And the last thing that man said to me, he said, ‘Mr. Stevenson, I love you for trying to save my life.’ They pulled him away, they strapped him to a gurney, and they executed him. 

I hung up the phone. I said ‘I can’t do this anymore. I’ve gotten too close. It’s too much. It’s too uncomfortable.’ I kept thinking about how broken he was. The question in my mind was — why do we want to kill all the broken people on this planet? And I sat down and I began reflecting, and it was in that moment of reflection that I realized something I’d never realized before. That was the night I realized why I do what I do, and it shocked me. And what I realized is that I don’t do what I do because I’ve been trained as a lawyer. I don’t do what I do because somebody has to do it. I don’t do what I do because it’s about human rights. I don’t do what I do because if I don’t do it no one will. What I realized that night that I’d never realized before is that I do what I do because I’m broken too.

JESSE EUBANKS: You know, as Christians, we live with the premise that this world is less than it should be. We live with the truth that man-made systems are flawed. And what that means for us living in America is that we can look at some of our own systems that we’ve created and we can start with the humility that it’s probably broken in some way. But as Christians, our ultimate hope isn’t in a perfect system. It’s in a God who perfectly executes justice, and one day he will right all wrongs. But until that day, God calls us to love our neighbors. So the question becomes — if we know a system is broken and we choose to do nothing about it, how then can we look at God and tell him honestly that we have loved our neighbor?

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JESSE EUBANKS: If you’d like to learn more about North Park Seminary and their restorative arts program, visit their website at northpark.edu/seminary. For even more resources on this topic, including more from Bryan Stevenson and Dominique Gilliard, or to hear past episodes of this podcast, visit our website at lovethyneighborhood.org/LTNpodcast.

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JESSE EUBANKS: Special thanks to our interviewees for this episode — Steve Prince, Dominique Gilliard, Bryan Stevenson, Michelle Clifton-Soderstrom, Alex, and Howard. Bryan is the New York Times bestselling author of the book Just Mercy. This month, Just Mercy will be released as a movie starring Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx. Special thanks to Pass the Mic and to the Chasing Justice podcast. Also thanks to 2100 Productions and the Illinois Department of Corrections for Alex and Howard’s interviews. 

RACHEL SZABO: Our senior producer and host is Jesse Eubanks.

JESSE EUBANKS: Our co-host today is Rachel Szabo, who’s also our producer, technical director, editor, and owner of far too many cat blankets.

RACHEL SZABO: Additional editing by Resonate Recordings.

JESSE EUBANKS: Music for today’s episode comes from Lee Rosevere, Podington Bear, Kevin MacLeod, and Blue Dot Sessions. Theme music and commercial music by Murphy DX.

RACHEL SZABO: Apply for your social justice internship supported by Christian community by visiting lovethyneighborhood.org. Serve for a summer or a year. Grow in your faith and life skills.

JESSE EUBANKS: Which of these was a neighbor to the man in need? The one who showed mercy. Jesus tells us, ‘Go, and do likewise.’