Cracker crumbs and incarceration: A letter to the locked down

A Taste of Prison

It seems like every pastor, writer, thinker, professor, philosopher, poet or speaker has written and promoted an article along the lines of “Reflections from COVID 19”. I mean everybody. Anybody! If you have a blog, or a YouTube channel on kettle bells (or kettle chips for that matter), if you finished your spelling homework in second grade, or accidentally logged into your brother-in-law’s Twitter account, you have instructed me to “reflect” to “make the most of this time”, to “not waste the quarantine”. And boy do I feel the pressure!

People are making predictions too about what’s going to happen: the virus, the economy, the election. But not me! I have no idea where this is all headed or what the state of the world will be in 6 months. All I firmly believe is that they will do their best to get us back to normal so we can continue to purchase Diet Coke and Ford F150s.

So, let me assure you that I am naïve. I am a fool, a novice, a Johnny-come-lately. I have no wisdom to share that hasn’t already been put out there by someone wiser and better at writing. I barely reflected at all during this quarantine. I did not emerge from it all with a renewed vigor for life or a drastically reduced body mass index. In fact, just the other day I ate tortilla chips for breakfast. For breakfast! And I didn’t even have salsa, so I used ketchup instead!

My big take-away from quarantine time is that prison doesn’t work. In fact, quite the opposite, it can drive a man crazy.  My old Detroit house is spacious, with a back and front yard, multiple rooms, a big basement, and comfy places to sit. The fridge is packed with delicious food. There are all sorts of distractions – books, movies, games, exercise equipment. And yet in the midst of it all I found myself going, as they call it “stir crazy”.

I’ve shared the quarantine with my wife and five-year-old son. At one point we had no contact with people for over a month. But imagine having no contact with the outside world for 10 years. 25 years. The remainder of life. Instead of family in a big house, I share this time with my roommate who has untreated mental illness and trauma.

COVID patients we quarantine, because what they carry around is too dangerous to allow exposure to the general public. We quarantine and we get them the help they need. We mourn the ones who don’t make it and we celebrate those who recover. They aren’t left in isolation for any longer than is necessary.

Essentially, prison is a form of quarantine as well. We actually believe that there exists a viral criminality that is essentially untreatable and so dangerous that some folks cannot be allowed to be in our midst. From a place of fear, they are separated and put away from us.

I’ve never been to prison. I’ve never even been inside a prison. COVID has given me just the tiniest taste possible to even be able to imagine what it might be like. Logically, it seems like going to prison wouldn’t rehabilitate people. I don’t feel rehabilitated after being locked up in my man cave for a month. So how could me sharing a small cell with a guy named Fish Stick rehabilitate me?

What they should be doing is sending inmates to Sandals Jamaica. That’s some real rehabilitation. Think about it, your parents go down there for 10 days and come back all tan and woke. Your mom has her hair in corn rows talking about how “the ‘local’ people were so fun and friendly!”

We are all one

COVID has revealed the oft forgotten fact that we are all one. What happens in Wuhan, China does in fact impact the Wendy’s drive through in Commerce Township, Michigan.

Right now, it’s so easy to forget that we are one and rather see the world through the lens of “us” and “them”. And of course, whether somebody is one of us or one of them determines how we view the issues at hand.  

An interesting example is that when corona first starting hitting Michigan there were thousands of people in the city of Detroit who had no running water.[1] The city government quickly responded to restore water to these households because the unsanitary conditions were greatly increasing the risk and spread of the virus. In other words, these folks’ problems (no water) were not our problems, until we saw them as affecting us (spread of the virus). I don’t really care if you can’t wash your clothes, that’s your business. But I do care if you can’t wash your hands, that’s our business. Or so our lying logic goes.

When crisis strikes, it is something that happens to us, but something that happens because of them. It’s all a matter of perspective. For example, the resulting economic fallout from the requirement to shelter in place needed a monetary response from the government. So, they sent out 1200$ checks to all of us and put together an aid package for businesses. This assistance is called ‘stimulus’, or to say it in a worse sounding way a ‘bail out’. We use these words because mainly, this money is going to us not them. And don’t forget that this crisis didn’t happen BECAUSE OF us, it happening TO us.

But terms like ‘stimulus’ and ‘bail out’ are just ‘us’-centric terms for welfare. These terms assume that we are responsible and able to handle our business, all we need is a little ‘stimulation’. But to those families in Detroit without water, to help them would have amounted to ‘welfare’ or to say it in a worse sounding way a ‘hand out’. To our minds they are not a part of us and there is no need to stimulate those who are incapable or refuse to help themselves. This is another great lie we believe. The lack of running water, in our minds is not a crisis that happened TO them, but the result of their own bad choices and lack of responsibility.

Mass incarceration is of course the quintessential “us” and “them” issue. We take for granted that white folks are underrepresented in the incarcerated population, while blacks are overrepresented. (Blacks being 13% of the US population but 40% of the population behind bars) [2] By the way, this statistic is not some closely guarded government secret like who killed John F. Kennedy or how does Jennifer Lopez still have the body of a 25-year-old? A quick google search and a couple of books [3, 4] later and you can be ranting semi-knowledgably on your blog just like me! Yay!

So COVID, for all its nastiness, has done us a favor by teaching us two lessons: 1) There is no “us” and “them”, we are all connected. 2) Prison sucks and doesn’t work.

After 2020 we can now all claim to have first-hand experience of being “locked up” for a while. Though, of course in the easiest, most comfortable way possible – with bags of Doritos stuffing the pantry, cases of Bud Light with lime, and hours of footage from The Last Dance. Even this experience nearly drove us mad, so how much more so prison!

But…. you’ll say, we didn’t do anything wrong, we committed no crime, so it’s not a fair comparison. My line of argument is that it’s not really about guilt or no guilt, but rather would we tolerate it if it were happening to us? The answer is, with the last two months as my evidence, we would not.

Now allow me to use to the Bible to thump you for something other than premarital sex with your girlfriend or going to the casino last weekend. The book of 1 Corinthians 12 verse 12 through 14 says:

Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many.

And Paul goes on to say in verse 26

“If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.”

As the church, you would think we would have more empathy for people who are incarcerated. Damn near half of our holy book was written by people who committed a crime or spent time behind bars:  

Joseph (incarcerated),  

David (homicide),

Jeremiah (incarcerated),

Peter (assault with a deadly weapon, enemy of the state, incarcerated, later received the death penalty),

Paul (disturbing the peace, prison, later received the death penalty),  

Moses (homicide), 

Jesus (enemy of the state, received the death penalty)

Mainstream American church is quite respectable now, having embraced “Law and Order”. We have gotten away from our roots, but we come from a strong prison and crime-riddled tradition.

            I suspect the Church with a capital C is alive and well within the confines of America’s penitentiary system, but for us on the outside we experience the dislocation that comes when we do not live out the Lord’s desire that we may be one as Father and Son are one.

That uncomfortable feeling you get when inviting someone to church feels like selling an Amway product, this is the fruit of our sin. Indeed, the gospel we are peddling in the suburbs is not compelling and all the light shows and fair-trade coffee in the lobby cannot cover up the lingering odor of the inauthenticity of our fellowship. Rather than trying to make church hip, we would probably be a lot more convicting to people if we focused on repenting: educating ourselves, changing attitudes and behaviors, realigning values.

I cannot convict you that “their” problems are “our” problems. After all, I am just a man covered in cracker crumbs, wearing his pajamas well into the afternoon. It is beyond the world’s wisdom or my brilliance to make things right. Only the Holy Spirit can give us eyes to see that the Church is one.

I’ll leave you with one more verse:

Matthew 5:23- 26

“So, if you are presenting a sacrifice at the altar in the Temple and you suddenly remember that someone has something against you, leave your sacrifice there at the altar. Go and be reconciled to that person. Then come and offer your sacrifice to God.

When you are on the way to court with your adversary, settle your differences quickly. Otherwise, your accuser may hand you over to an officer, and you will be thrown into prison. And if that happens, you surely won’t be free again until you have paid the last penny.”

Our tendency is to see ourselves as the accuser in these verses and not the accused. But imagine the chorus of voices coming from the men and women who are locked up – crying out for justice. And who do you suppose they are asking for justice against? The ones who created the system and tolerate it existing. The ones who deny we are all brothers and sisters. COVID can be our sudden remembrance. We are on our way to the court and we are guilty. Let’s plea bargain and settle our differences quickly, before we have to pay every last penny to be free.

References:

1. Detroit Free Press: https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/columnists/nancy-kaffer/2020/04/17/detroit-water-shutoffs-coronavirus-covid-19/5139695002/

2. Prison Policy Initiative: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/factsheets/pie2020_allimages.pdf

3. Alexander, Michelle,, and Cornel West. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Revised edition / New York: New Press, 2012. Print.

4. Hacker, Andrew. Two Nations : Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal. New York :Ballantine Books, 1993.

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