As an undergraduate student 25 years ago, I found myself behind bars””not as an inmate but as a correctional officer. One of the youngest members of a large metropolitan sheriff’s department on the west coast of Florida, I worked full-time at the maximum-security jail in order to pay for college. Those four years working in the slammer schooled me, and they raised a number of questions for me as a Christian, especially about the death penalty and the use of force. I am continuing to unlearn certain attitudes and assumptions I held then, including some about punishment itself.
By vividly putting into words much of what I have personally pondered about prisons and punishment, these two books should help American readers””Christian or not, possessing firsthand experience with incarceration or not””to step back and take an honest look at what is happening in our current practice of large-scale imprisonment. Each book also asks why we insist on continuing down this punitive path.
Why is it, for example, that the U.S., which has 6 percent of the world’s population, incarcerates 25 percent of the world’s prisoners? We currently have some 2.3 million persons in federal, state and local jails and prisons””an estimated half-million more than are locked up in China, whose population is more than triple that of the U.S. We spend more money building and maintaining prisons than public schools””to the tune of $50 billion a year. Some 644,000 persons are incarcerated per year and about 625,000 are released, but then 50 to 75 percent of those who are released end up returning to prison within a few years. No other democratic nation today imprisons people on such a scale or for as long as the U.S. Yet what are we accomplishing?