"Dangerous, racist and falling apart. By nearly every metric, the nation’s penal system is not just failing, it’s making things worse."
Photo: Medium security range at Stony Mountain Institution in Stony Mountain, Manitoba (Correctional Services Canada/Flickr)
Wayne Northey: The article highlighted above does not sugar-coat the reality: Canadian prisons (and for that matter most around the world) are indeed “Houses of hate.”
Senator Kim Pate as mentioned in the article has been a leading voice for prison reform in Canada. There have been many before her: women such as Agnes MacPhailalmost a century ago; more recently Claire Culhane1 and Ruth Morris, another intrepid abolitionist. (There is more about the latter two in the paper mentioned below.)
But meaningful “reform” beyond mere window-dressing, like a desert mirage, seems simply never to arrive . . . Anywhere!
What rather is needed is prison abolition, as I delineate in this paper: Restorative Justice: Peacemaking Not Warmaking; Transformative Justice: Penal Abolitionism Not Prison Reform, written for The Kenarchy Journal, an exciting venture launched in 2019, highlighting a “politics of love,” and:
Promoting overall wellbeing by
- Instating women
- Prioritising children
- Advocating for the poor
- Welcoming strangers
- Reintegrating humanity and the environment
- Restoring justice to prisoners
- Healing the sick
The paper above is due for inclusion this year in the spring edition.
On prison abolition I write in part (highlighting theological aspects):
In light of this brief consideration of the unmitigated failure of prison, Lee Griffith, adduced above begins his study, The Fall of the Prison: Biblical Perspectives on Prison Abolition with:
The gospel is profoundly scandalous, and until we hear at least a whisper of its scandal, we risk not hearing any part of it.
Doubtless part of the scandal is Christian believers must be significantly at odds with centuries-long Western Criminal Justice convention.2
…
But I shall move on to his understanding of New Testament prison and justice. In biblical “principalities and powers” language, prison is ever associated with the power of death. He writes:
As such, the problem is not that prisons have failed to forestall violent criminality and violent rampages; the problem is that prisons are identical in spirit to the violence and murder that they pretend to combat . . . Whenever we cage people, we are in reality fuelling and participating in the same spirit we claim to renounce.3
Therefore, when Jesus announced in Luke 44 “freedom to the prisoners,” it broadcasts a renunciation of . . . the power of death, and it therefore points toward the resurrection itself.5