CHURCH AND PRISON BY REV DR JOE ALDRED
T
he popular meaning of ‘prison’ is a place of confinement to which convicted people are sent as punishment for a crime they have committed. There are, of course, wider philosophical definitions that include mental conditions of confinement or restrictions, for example: being imprisoned or captivated by a harmful and undesirable habit or practice. We can make a distinction too between jail and prison: the first describing being confined pre-trial, and the latter as confinement after conviction. However defined, prison alludes to a loss or curtailment of liberty or ability to live freely according to the dictates of one’s free will. Growing up, my religious and spiritual context had popular biblical stories about prison. Two come to mind. First is in Isaiah 61:1, repeated or paraphrased in Luke 4.18, that speaks of ‘proclaiming liberty to captives and opening of prison to them that are bound’. This concept of freeing imprisoned people is set as a central mission of God in Jesus, following to being an expressed will of God’s salvific will in the world. I suggest, however, that the point in Scripture is not that people should not be punished for crimes committed, rather that people unjustly imprisoned should receive justice and be freed. Taking on this mission of giving ‘liberty to captives’ is a sign of the Spirit of God at work in us – individually and as the people of God. Reflecting on those imprisoned unjustly, we quickly come to our context, where it has been shown in several reports that UK Minority Ethnic people, particularly UK African and Caribbean people, receive longer sentences than the UK
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White Ethnic Majority. We ignore this injustice at our peril. A second popular narrative in my faith community is that found in Acts 16, where the followers of Jesus, Paul and Silas, miraculous escaped by divine intervention after being put in jail for preaching the Gospel. Even before they were brought to trial, the angels of God loosed their chains and set them free - to the astonishment of the guards tasked with ensuring they were brought before the courts and punished. This was understood mostly as depicting that if one were persecuted for preaching the Gospel of Jesus, they could expect divine intervention to free them. Alas, there are other texts that clearly show not everyone so jailed or imprisoned received divine intervention to free them, some were killed without mercy, leaving us with theological questions about the ways of God and the complex outcomes between God, the imprisoned and the community of faith and non-faith. To suggest that the prisoner is always freed is to be disingenuous to historic and contemporary experience. As a young pastor, I recall becoming aware of the disproportionate numbers of particularly young Black people caught up in the British prison system. Some speak of a pipeline that starts in school under-performance, leading to activity that engages the police, the criminal justice system, imprisonment
‘AS A CHRISTIAN, I AM A DEALER IN HOPE, AND THIS HOPE MUST BE KEPT ALIVE.’
