Incarceration is based on fear.
What about love for police, some might say. This isn't about hating the police. We don't seek to express hatred against police like locking them up. Love isn't just an emotion, it's an action. We seek to eliminate the hate, such an action is love, by freeing prisoners.
Prisons by their very nature propagate and spread infectious diseases, exposing everyone within their walls to the danger of infection.
I think that's why the formerly incarcerated can't donate plasma. I think the incarcerated have a lower life expectancy.
“O sing to the LORD a new song, for he has done marvelous things. His right hand and his holy arm have gotten him victory.”
Do people forget about this? Do the suicidal forget the marvelous things in life? I'd also say parenthood is a marvelous thing. And I'd say childlessness is caused by forgetting he does marvelous things like provide for you and our children.
Paul heals another woman, an enslaved woman, and gets incarcerated for it.
All prisoners are slaves.
22 The crowd joined in the attack against Paul and Silas, and the magistrates ordered them to be stripped and beaten with rods. 23 After they had been severely flogged, they were thrown into prison, and the jailer was commanded to guard them carefully. 24 When he received these orders, he put them in the inner cell and fastened their feet in the stocks
They were victims of police brutality.
This text from Deuteronomy places sabbath observance in a liberatory context. “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm,” God tells Moses, “therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.” Sabbath is not only a cessation of work (for yourself and for those who work for you) but the antithesis of captivity.
Something associated with something else makes the opposite of something also the opposite of something else. Well not really. It uses the word "therefore."
“Go and learn what it means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’”
Popular understandings of safety, security, and even justice depend on the sacrifice of prisoners (guilty or not)
Certainly it’s good that Jesus was able to heal a dangerous man, I thought, but why did he have to send a herd of pigs to destruction?
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if the story is put in its starkest terms, as my wife phrased it, it is about the Son of God destroying economic utility in favor of the restoration of someone that no one else cared about.
Jails and prisons, designed to cage people,
I gue
ss all prisons are cages, not just solitary confinement. They're just big cages, but cages nonetheless. All prisons are cages. I'm not an expert. https://abc7chicago.com/amp/post/ki...tions-staged-near-iowa-caucus-voting/5902586/
Psalm 107 is a psalm of liberation as well: in addition to delivering people from the power of the deep, God “breaks bars asunder…shatters the doors of bronze and cuts in two the bars of iron” (v. 14-16),
This is actually important because they're freed merely after crying to the Lord. I was too lazy to reread this chapter entirely though: "
Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he saved them from their distress. He brought them out of darkness, the utter darkness, and broke away their chains."
Ironically, the person in prison–John–is not the person in the story committing murder, an important feature of the story that can call us to remember the “crimes” of those imprisoned versus the criminal actions of those who, on the “outside,” determine their fate.
18 I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us
25 But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy
Public prisons and jails enrich vendors and operators, as well.
early church fathers wrote about wealth as theft
Whenever any proposals for life-saving, life-sustaining, or otherwise substantial change arises in our public discourse we find ourselves drowning in excuses.
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How would we reduce crime without police?
Perhaps abolition is as good as Jesus curing since both are opposed with excuses. The excuse for healing was it's on the Sabbath Perhaps not.
“Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” (Romans 12:21)
The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; you shall not murder; you shall not steal; you shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
This matters because you need to love yourself(as this says) which means you shouldn't commit suicide since you shouldn't kill your neighbor.
The point of this parable is that a community structured around non-punitiveness and a community structured around debt payment and retribution are entirely unalike, and God calls Christians to experience and practice a commitment to mercy.
I originally overlooked that the parable of the unforgiving servant involved incarcerating those who can't pay their debt. What happened to forgive so you'll be forgiven?
What if they were just a bad sheep and if we kept him in the flock, he would just make other sheep turn bad?
This is the parable of the lost sheep. Inmates are the lost sheep.
The last verse: since raising children is expensive, it's the love of God not the love of money. Childlessness is greed.
We could wonder about the studies that show incarceration is associated with an increase in recidivism.120
To the statement that prisons provide safety, we should ask, “Safety for whom? And from what?”
www.yesmagazine.org
We could address the study that found sentencing someone to prison had “no effect on their chances of being convicted of a violent crime within five years of being released from prison.”
James puts forth a brief glimpse of a model of community justice. He proposes that when your sibling wanders from truth, that you bring them back (v. 19). You don’t hide them away in a capitalist’s
modern plantation.
Instead, maybe this passage should be considered more deeply by those who would break up a household from the outside. Perhaps judges should consider this before sentencing someone to years in prison
This is about the verse against divorce.
This structure certainly falls woefully short of Leviticus 19:16’s injunction against “profit by the blood of your neighbor.”
The entire system also centers on retribution rather than love for neighbors.
The key question that an RJ process starts with — what are the needs of the person who was harmed? — reflects Jesus’ question to Bartimaeus: “What do you want me to do for you?”
Maybe Bartimaeus is someone who was a victim of eye for an eye.
His perpetrator was blinded but that didn't help Bartimaeus. That can apply to all blind people healed by Jesus.
The criminal legal system, by contrast, assumes the answer to every harm is punishment and exclusion. It ignores survivors who do not want harsh punishment, and can treat them with hostility and even retraumatize them. This is one reason, among many, that 70% of survivors of sexual assault choose not to report it to the police.
Tax collectors are imperial collaborators, extortionists, traitors, thieves, and subjects of general derision in first century Palestine, particularly from the point of view of the Jewish people. And yet, tax collectors receive not the swift retribution many thought they deserved, but a far more transformational place in Jesus’ thought
Tax collectors are among the first to seek baptism from John (3:12-13).
Jesus calls us to show mercy to others
Jesus taught that the merciful are blessed (Matthew 5:7)
We recognize that all have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory (Romans 3:23), and that means that we cannot point the finger at others while there are still logs in our own eyes (Matthew 7:3-5).
I guess we should incarcerate everybody since everybody has sinned.
Perhaps seeing this violence for what it is is part of what it means to “stay awake.” I’m reminded of the etymology of “woke” — “stay woke,” be aware of the structures of oppression.
If police are good, was Jesus' arrest good?
