Rethinking Incarceration

I appreciate the value of this book, examining the issue of incarceration from a Christian lens and advocating that the Church needs to pursue justice that restores. I thought there were some really great explorations of the history of incarceration and the Church's role in it. However, the style of the writing was very academic and theological, which made it hard to digest, especially as I recently read Just Mercy, which is written in a very approachable and compelling style. I like the added faith lens of this book, but I wasn't completing engrossed by it.

Short thoughts: This is a book well worth reading. I think the main problem of it is that it is trying to do too much. There is 199 pages of main content and in that, he tries to have shortened version of New Jim Crow, trace the (mixed bag) line of Christian reform movements within prison, make a theological argument for restorative model over retributive model and convince people that systematic racism is a part of the whole history of the criminal justice system.

I glanced around at negative reviews last night and many of them seem to focus on a couple areas. 1) Gilliard takes aim at Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA) theory. I think he make a good point at why he is targeting PSA, but I think he also falls into the trap that many PSA proponents have of thinking of atonement theories as the actual work of Christ's death and resurrection instead of metaphors and mental maps of what is going on. I think if he had kept a tighter focus on PSA as one of many facets of the atonement, he could have pointed out the way that PSA lends itself toward punishment and God as judge metaphors and how that influences how we think of criminal justice system theologically. I also think he would benefit from interacting with Fleming Rutledge's book Cruxifixction. She does not dismiss PSA as a model but believes that it is over emphasized and her corrective without dismissal would be a helpful model.

I also think he would do better to cite more people. As helpful as I think Michelle Alexander and Bridgemon and Marshall were to his project, over dependence on them I think limited some perspective. Others also think similar things and citing more people would help the book by rounding it out more.

Where I think Gillard shines is his work at illustrating justice, not just punishment as the focus. There were some negative reviews that dealt with this, but mostly they showed that they do not understand was the purpose of restorative justice is. There are some that seem to believe that restorative justice is about removing pain or punishment from the process. But the point isn't to make things easier for the criminal. It is to restore right relationship and community trust to the community as a whole. The Black Lives Matters movement has taken off in large part because there is no trust that justice is a real goal.

When I read reviews that take individual stats and argue with them as a means of trying to dismiss racism as a whole, it really does show me how far we as a society have to go to understand the real harm of racism.

Criminal Justice is just one area, but it is one area where the focus on individualism instead of community really matters. Evangelicals that are individually focused and not communally focussed will continue to miss God's mission and minimize the role of justice in the life of Christians.

My slightly longer review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/rethinking-incarceration/