Prison Ministry and the Redemption of God
Sermon by Brad Brockmann
March 19, 2006

Lectionary Readings:
Exodus 20:1-17
Psalm 19:7-14
Romans 7:13-25
John 2:13-22

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, oh Lord.

Good morning!  I'm honored and thrilled to be here.  I want to thank Ann for inviting me to speak with you this morning about prison reform and prison ministry.

Before I get into the heart of my message, I'd like to share some of my story with you so you can learn a little about me and then be able to put my remarks in context. 

I was a Wall Street lawyer for over a decade.  I had inklings that I was being called to do something else with my life, something that involved service, and more of my heart.  I managed to avoid the call for years, until my father died.  And with his death I had no more excuses, and finally gave in.  I quit my job in New York and moved to Mexico City to work at an AIDS hospice.  I was going to go for three months, but stayed in Mexico for two years, where I worked at AIDS hospices for several months, and ended up doing human rights work with the Zapatistas in Chiapas, the southernmost part of Mexico.  Early on during the journey, I met a marvelous mentor, the Rev. Delle McCormick, who introduced me to liberation theology and helped me to see how the difficult events I was confronted with were actually signposts from God, opportunities for spiritual development, occasions to see God working where I least expected it.  And so I began contemplating a career in the church. 

I returned to the US in the fall of 2000 to begin studies at Episcopal Divinity School, my mentor's alma mater.  I graduated from there in May of 2004, called not to work in a parish setting, but to work with prisoners, the often forgotten men and women who live behind the walls of the state's prisons and jails. 
While in divinity school I came to really appreciate the special place that prisoners play in the Christian imagination.  John the Baptist, who baptized Jesus and first named him the Messiah, was beheaded in a Roman prison.  Today's Gospel reading begins with the story of Jesus making a whip of cords, driving the money changers and other business folk out of the temple, overturning tables, and generally upsetting what apparently was otherwise lawful commerce.  Those actions were probably unlawful when Jesus did them, and certainly would make him a criminal today: he would have been charged with assault and battery for using the whip, as well as disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace, intentional destruction of property, malicious mischief, etc.  In fact Jesus was, in the eyes of his society, a criminal.  Even if he wasn't imprisoned for his actions at the temple, he was a prisoner at the end of life.  He died while in custody.  His most influential followers, Peter and Paul, were also prisoners who died in custody.   Christianity is a religion that was founded by men and women in deep trouble with the law, people who were familiar with the inside of prisons, whose message was "the last shall be first, and the first last." 

The summer after graduation I began working for Partakers, a faith-based not-for-profit founded by an Episcopalian social worker.  Partakers has been advocating for and providing education and other programs to prisoners since 1997.  They actively strive to bridge the gap between society and the more than 23,000 men and women behind bars in Massachusetts by offering educational opportunities for members of the public.  They work for prison reform including advocacy for humane prison environments and programs that foster accountability, responsibility, and rehabilitation.  Their flagship program is College Behind Bars, a college education program for prisoners, which I'll describe in more detail in a few minutes. 

There's one more twist in my call narrative I need to tell you about: in December 2004 I began working for Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, a public interest law firm that represents the state's prisoners in their civil actions (not criminal cases) against the state that arise out of the conditions of confinement, guard brutality, medical and mental health care services: whatever happens to prisoners in prison that isn't supposed to.  Like the stuff you've undoubtedly heard about Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq that we naturally think couldn't happen here.  Unfortunately it does.  I see it day in and day out. 

 Today's readings touch directly on, or evoke, criminal justice issues.  Today's Psalm tells us that "the law of the Lord is perfect," that "the statutes of the Lord are just," that "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous."  While God's laws and statutes and judgments may indeed be perfect and just and righteous, the same can obviously not be said about our laws.  It's clear that our laws and the way they are carried out are more and more skewed against the poor and people of color, and focus on retribution and retaliation, eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth justice if you will, rather than reform and rehabilitation.  This reflects the fact that we as a society have become extremely polarized when it comes to criminals and prisoners, on the one hand, and the rest of society.  Our politicians and the media set up a world of law-abiding citizens, the righteous, on one side, and criminals, the wicked and the damned, on the other.  This trend has been increasingly evident in the "tough on crime" policies that have been so popular for the past quarter century.  For example, in 1991, William Weld was elected governor after he vowed to "reintroduce inmates to the joys of busting rock."  The Commonwealth got tough on crime by, among other measures, closing minimum security prisons, and building much more expensive super-maximum facilities even as the seriousness and frequency of crime both began to decline.  The use of parole was sharply decreased and mandatory minimum sentences for many non-violent drug sentences were adopted.  Man's laws, as opposed to God's laws, were driven by politics and getting reelected as opposed to rehabilitation and an understanding of the underlying causes of crimes, and what would truly make a difference in reducing crime rates.

Let me state upfront that I understand the need for institutions to deal with many of the serious criminal problems we face in our society.  If someone commits a crime he or she will have to suffer consequences.  But the demonization and dehumanization of the other, particularly of incarcerated men and women, has progressed to a point that is widely agreed to be counterproductive at best.  This dehumanization, of focusing on punishment alone, is certainly not in keeping with the teachings of Jesus or with his call to us to follow him, to be his disciples. 

Even Gov. Mitt Romney and his administration agree that the get-tough-on-crime campaign has proven counterproductive and costly to the taxpayers of the state, and that the entire prison system needs fixing.  The Governor got behind this reform movement because of the murder of defrocked pedophile priest John Geoghan, who was killed in August 2003 in his maximum security cell in a super-max facility.  That the system wasn't working was splashed all over the news.  As a result, Gov. Romney appointed a blue ribbon panel to investigate and critique the prison system from top to bottom. 

The Governor's Commission on Corrections Reform issued its report in June 2004.  Among many other startling findings, they found that as a direct result of the get-tough approach and changes in sentencing laws, in 2002, nearly 3/4s of state prisoners released from high- and medium-security prisons were released directly to the street with no parole supervision, no program to help them stay clean, no resources with which to start a new life.  Even a higher percentage of prisoners, 84%, are restricted by statute from participating in pre-release programs that could help prepare them for life on the outside.  This is the direct result of the get-tough-on-crime strategy we adopted in the State.  Getting tough on crime meant cutting or eliminating education and other vocational and skill-building programs that might help released inmates make a living after release.  Prisoners who wanted to change or reform or rehabilitate themselves found it increasingly difficult to do so.  Our laws are not perfect, like God's, that is for sure; but neither are our statutes just, nor their application fair, which is inexcusable.
 I came face-to-face with the get-tough-on-crime approach and our incredibly unjust laws and statutes and their cumulative counterproductive results while I was in divinity school.  In my final year, I volunteered with a group in Chelsea that worked with kids who were at risk of involvement with drugs and gangs.  It was pretty intense.  In October, I began mentoring a young man, a former gang leader, who was intent on turning his life around, who was really seeking forgiveness, and who was actively engaged in a program talking to groups of teenagers about the dangers of gang involvement, using his own life as a living warning of the problems one faces when one joins a gang.  He was having a positive impact on other kids.  But he had a drug possession charge pending.  His trial was gripping.  A jury found him guilty, a finding that was likely supported by the facts.  At the sentencing phase, the judge was faced not only with the jury's verdict, but with numerous letters from folks in the community attesting to Ken's character and his good works.  But the judge's hands were tied, notwithstanding the positive testimony.  Without the mandatory minimum the judge had to impose of two years and a day, Ken would likely have been sentenced to time already served, or 60 days.  It was a travesty of justice.  This 20 year-old kid had begun to turn his life around, and now he was being thrown into an environment he had tried so hard to get out of, since gangs are still very active in prisons.  Since it costs over $44,000 a year to house an inmate in the state, our government would spend almost $90,000 to undo all the good rehabilitative work that had already been accomplished.  For less than $4,000 a year, he could have been placed on strict parole or other program, to see if the turn-around that the judge had sensed was for real.  It was after this episode that I decided the best way I could serve the kids I was working with was to turn to prison reform and prison ministry, to work to try to fix a very broken system.  Ken is in prison as a result of a get-tough-on-crime approach and the unjust, indeed foolish laws that resulted from that approach.  And it has been heart-wrenching to watch him literally fall back into his old ways.  Prison is a tough place, and as a former gang member, he had no real choice but to go back to his old ways, which is a real life tragedy. 

Young black men like Ken have a 1 in 3 chance of being sentenced to prison in their lifetimes.  That the system is skewed against the Kens of the world can be seen by glancing at a profile of kids committed to the Department of Youth Services: over 60% are children of color in a state whose population is less than 25% minority.  Over 80% were diagnosed with mental health or substance abuse problems, and 85% had significant academic difficulties.  The root causes underlying these tragic statistics and the very real faces behind them are truly complex, and include poverty and racism.  One of the only things that can be said about these root causes with any certainty is that they are all manmade and therefore preventable. 

What these kids need, what all people who find themselves subject to the unfairness and injustice of our criminal justice system desperately need, among many other things, is the powerful God of deliverance we hear speaking in today's passage from Exodus.  God proclaims to the people of Israel who he had liberated: "I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery."  We desperately need a God who can deliver his people from the slavery of addiction, from the slavery of corrupt, counterproductive justice, from the slavery of poverty and homelessness and racism.  Unfortunately, instead of the God of deliverance we so urgently need, we too often meet and see the terrible results of the jealous god of vengeance, who also speaks in today's passage in Exodus.  "I the LORD your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me."  This is a chilling image of a nasty, petty god.  For it is children like Ken and those in the custody of DYS who are punished for the iniquity of their parents and the inequity of a criminal justice and socio-economic system that has kept alive the god of vengeance.  Indeed, if you listen to right-wing talk radio and the rhetoric of neo-conservatives, you can hear loud and clear that the god of vengeance is actually worshipped in America today.  [He may actually have been elected President.]  It is this perverted concept of god that the rabid right and seemingly large chunks of the current political elite evoke in their sanctimonious, patriotic righteousness.

 We see the god of vengeance at work in the DYS statistics I mentioned, and more generally in the get-tough-on-crime approach to criminal justice, which did result in more prisoners figuratively busting rocks.  The god of vengeance also manifested himself in the dramatic reduction and elimination of rehabilitative and vocational programs over the past quarter century.  We can see the god of vengeance in the rise of the recidivism rate, the rate at which ex-offenders return to prison, which rose along with the get-tough-on-crime approach to criminal justice. 

The rise of recidivism translates into a huge cost to taxpayers, as criminals increasingly recycle through the system instead of returning to society as productive citizens.  The focus on punishment and retribution, at the expense of rehabilitation and reform, is proving disastrous in terms of public safety as well, as more prisoners are being released to the street without any supervision, and without the skills that could help them build a life independent of crime.  We know that money spent on educating and training prisoners is money well spent since it dramatically reduces the rate at which they return to prison.  Even as the prison budget has been rising dramatically year after year to the point where it now eats up more of our tax dollars than the budget for the entire higher education system, the amount of money spent on education and training programs is falling drastically.  As I mentioned earlier, it now costs around $44,000 a year to house a prisoner in the state.  We save a lot of money if we can help these men and women stay out of prison. 

Think about it.  97% of the people incarcerated in the state will eventually be released.  In Massachusetts that's over 15,000 people a year.  6,000 of them will return to prison or jail within three years as things now stand.  At $44,000 a year for each of those who return to prison, that's a cost to us of hundreds of millions of dollars over time.  Turning our backs on the problem costs us financially but also morally.  If we can reduce the number of people who return by even 1,000 by focusing on improving rehabilitation opportunities in prisons instead of retribution we will have helped some people turn their lives around and saved tens of millions of dollars at the same time.  In the process we would begin to evoke more and more the God of deliverance we all seek and need. 

How, then, can we more actively resurrect the God of deliverance, and put to rest the god of vengeance?  How can we redeem God, as Carter Heyward put it in her first book, the Redemption of God?  Indeed I think it is our greatest challenge as Christians to redeem God by taking on ourselves individually and as a society the role of becoming God's hands and heart and soul, and bringing deliverance to the people and places in our society that are pleading for it, particularly within the criminal justice system.  It's a supreme irony that we speak of and pray to a God who is claimed to be omnipotent, all-powerful.  The truth is that in certain respects God is in fact powerless.  Whether the God of deliverance is evoked, worshiped and thereby empowered or whether it is the god of vengeance who is evoked, worshipped, and empowered is truly up to us.  Which God is omnipotent and all-powerful, which God's hands and heart shall be brought to bear on any particular issue, is intricately tied up with the decisions we make about how we choose to lead our lives as individuals and as a society. 

The vast majority of men and women I have encounter in prison are hungry for the tools and skills and programs that will help them to avoid returning behind bars.  But as I discussed, rehabilitation and education programs have been defunded and deemphasized as we got tough on crime over the past two decades, creating a huge gap in what a functioning, moral prison system should be doing, and what ours is actually doing.  With our collective actions and choices, we enshrined and empowered the god of vengeance, and exiled the God of deliverance as far from our consciousness as possible.  

This gap between what is needed for prisoners to turn their lives around and what the system actually provides, or rather fails to provide, between the God of deliverance and the god of vengeance, was recognized early on by private not-for-profits, including Partakers, the faith-based organization I work with.  They sponsor several prisoner programs.  One of the most successful is College Behind Bars.  We know that the lowest rate of recidivism among ex-offenders is for those who have gotten a college degree while in prison.  As I mentioned, between 40 and 50% of ex-offenders return to prison after three years.  That rate falls to almost zero for those who are college-educated.  The more education and training you have, the greater the chance that you can find work, and the lower the chance that you will return to jail.  Where ten years ago there were over 300 college education programs across the country, today there are a dozen.  And we are determined to keep this one alive.  Partakers has almost 40 congregations and faith-based groups sponsoring over 90 inmates who are preparing for or enrolled in Boston University's college program, both men and women.  There is a long waiting list of prisoners who are seeking sponsorship in the College Beyond Bars program.  So we are actively looking for church sponsors to support prisoners both emotionally, as mentors and supports in their educational efforts, and financially, to pay for courses and supplies and other services.  We're exploring some exciting cross-congregational prison ministry possibilities here in the Alewife deanery, joining interested people from different parishes in this work.

 Another option for prison ministry is leading a series of emotional literacy workshops in prison where prisoners learn coping and other emotional skills like anger management, stress management, meditation, and self-forgiveness.  This is a powerful program based on the book, Houses of Healing, which has at its core the healing of relationships with self and others - and with society -- through different practices and exercises.  I was amazed when I first encountered and led the course my first semester of divinity school.  It was like stumbling on a self-help book that pulled together the most important lessons I had learned in numerous personal growth workshops over a 20 year period.  Teaching the lessons in the book provides an incredible opportunity to support our brothers and sisters in prison to gain the emotional and psychological skills that are necessary for living a healthy, productive life.   But they also provide the teachers with the same lessons and skills since you can't really teach it without doing the exercises yourself.  So it becomes a very powerful experience both for the teachers and the students, as each learns from and is taught by the other. 

 Before I close, let me emphasize that it is not only the prisoners who get an education in either of these programs.  Volunteers also come away transformed.  By building personal relationships with prisoners as mentors or teachers, we learn what it means to partake, to share in another's struggles and successes, to experience the transformative power of relationship.  By sponsoring an inmate in College Behind Bars or teaching emotional literacy to prisoners, participants can be active instruments of rehabilitation, repentance, and forgiveness, and thereby become instruments of God.  Through this type of work, we actually become God's hands and God's heart and God's feet.  By our loving acts to the other, we truly redeem and strengthen the God of deliverance and banish the god of vengeance.  Working with prisoners is an awesome opportunity that I invite you to think about. 

The theme of this Lenten season is Proclaim Deliverance!   We are the ones who must proclaim deliverance, who must actually be deliverance, because the God of deliverance will not appear by magic, whether in a thunderous cloud atop Mt. Zion or otherwise.  We must by our actions and our words evoke and manifest the God of deliverance.  In the process, we redeem God and, I would add, we redeem ourselves.  So if you're feeling at all called to learn more about prison ministry or prison reform, and how we can collectively move the process of redeeming God forward, I invite you to come to the education forum immediately after this service. 

 Thank you so much for listening and for thinking about this.  God bless you.