Rethinking Incarceration: a book review

 

Rethinking Incarceration

Dominique DuBois Gilliard

Intervarsity Press, 2018

I think a majority of us are familiar with Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow where she laid out the argument that the US penal system is in place to enslave and criminalize an underclass of the black population. She was very persuasive. The facts underscored her conclusions. Since the publication of that book we’ve seen the birth of the Black Lives Matter Movement. Issues of not just social justice but literally justice are/were starting to be addressed.

If anything the current administration and Attorney General have put unequal sentencing back into focus.

This is not an easy read. And, I read a lot. I reckoned I could whip through the book in plenty of time to review it before Dominique’s book launch this Friday, February 16 at 7:30 pm at Wilson Abbey, 935 W. Wilson, Chicago, IL 60640. FREE admission. But as I read certain questions began to sit with me. How much money are for-profit prisons making? Is it a coincidence that stocks in the two major prison corporations soared after Trump’s election? Why the high number of incarcerated women? The pipeline of high school to jail for black and brown children. The number of mentally ill inmates. It seems all of our social ills have coalesced around prisons.

And now add immigration. Deportation centers are full of people being rounded up and quickly pushed through immigration court without due process.

As I’ve mentioned before I wish authors of non-fiction could use that one voice, the one that says: Yo! This is messed up!

Gilliard pulls together a dystopian picture of a population regularly avoided and seemingly discarded by society. Virtually out of sight, out of mind. He asks: Why? For what purpose?

But instead of going into deep-state speculation, his conclusions are meant to propel us forward, not toward a silver lining, but toward quotidian action. A long, slow, hand-to-the-plow turning back of injustice. The second half of the book is where he seeks to empower the reader.

Gilliard is the director of racial righteousness and reconciliation for the Love Mercy Do Justice Initiative of the Evangelical Covenant Church and sits on the board of directors for CCDA. Christian Community Development was founded in 1989 by Dr. John Perkins to engage the church at large on issues of social justice. As someone picked by President Ronald Reagan’s Task Force on Hunger, Perkins employed revolutionary language to contemporary problems. When was the last time you heard someone speak truth to power about redistribution. A-huh. Yeah. Like, why do certain school districts get top-of-the-line million dollar technology and some schools can’t get heat in winter???? Yo! Like, why can’t a rich country such as ours spread some of its wealth around?

Well, we’re still here, says Gilliard. He doesn’t sugar-coat the approach of the church. He tells it like it is. Much of the evangelical church is in bed with power, with a system that continues to penalize without wearing a blindfold. He traces the history and demarks where the church made certain turns—especially in the philosophical view that crime/sin needs to be paid. That criminals get what they deserve. But what are these “just fruits”?

I’m particularly struck by how ICE rounds up people—under the pretense of law and order. It’s framed that they are “illegals” and “aliens.” But where is justice? Gilliard makes the case for a balance of mercy and righteousness when determining individual cases. Under the current administration Trump has imposed quotas that ICE agents are striving to make—using a wide net to capture often law-abiding, tax-paying individuals, mothers and fathers. For instance please read: https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/bjy9k4/judge-in-immigration-case-compares-trumps-white-house-to-authoritarian-regime

We are not that country. We should not be the people who stand by and watch as community members are subjected to police profiling/intimidation, unfair sentencing, fear tactics.