The Business of Incarceration: Theological and Ethical Reflections on the Prison-Industrial Complex
Ebook
Overview
There has been perhaps no political issue in contemporary America able to garner as widespread agreement as the need to end our system of mass incarceration. Racial justice advocates, fiscal conservatives, prison abolitionists, and more believe that America incarcerates far too many of its people. This book provides tools for Christians seeking to understand this massive social injustice, its theological and historical origins, and faithful ways of resisting and ending this system.
The Business of Incarceration places the political-economic system that is the prison-industrial complex at the center of the story it tells, the analysis it provides, and the engagement it recommends. The second volume in The Business of Modern Life series, this book extends the groundbreaking theo-ethical analysis in The Business of War: Theological and Ethical Reflections on the Military-Industrial Complex to another social sphere that is supposedly oriented to the common good but is now dominated by logics of market and profit-making.
As a theological ethicist possessing professional experience in both corrections and policing, I welcome this edited collection of essays. When I initially wrestled as a Christian with questions about classism, racism, and incarceration four decades ago while ‘on the job,’ there was little if any attention given to the criminal justice system and its injustices by Christian ethicists, biblical scholars, systematic and other theologians. While I do not necessarily agree with every observation or recommendation in this volume, I endorse it as a much-needed conversation partner.
——Tobias Winright, Professor of Moral Theology, St. Patrick’s Pontifical University, Maynooth, Ireland
This is a book that deserves to be read, shared, and discussed! It contains some of the most thorough and accessible writings on the business and practice of mass incarceration that I have read. Christians and non-Christians alike will learn from this book, including strategies for resisting mass incarceration in ways that are restorative, transformative, and abolitionist.
——Barb Toews, Associate Professor, School of Social Work and Criminal Justice, University of Washington, Tacoma
The authors of this text go beyond critiquing the exploitative systems of incarceration; they do the hardest work of all—they give us hope for actual Christian resistance and ignite our imaginations for building new worlds not governed by the business of incarceration.
——Rachelle R. Green, Assistant Professor of Practical Theology and Education, Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education, Fordham University
The Business of Incarceration is a comprehensive study of cutting-edge research addressing the pervasiveness of mass incarceration that intersects with multiple facets of life. An important argumentative arc is its claim that capitalism works together with religion to proliferate harmful systems of punishment. Still, religious communities can also challenge, and even resist, its participation in carcerality with transformative approaches oriented toward abolition. As an abolitionist and thought leader on religion and mass incarceration, I commend the curation and contributions of this significant volume.
——Nikia Smith Robert, Assistant Professor of Religious Ethics and Social Justice, University of Kansas