Talking about incarceration

In a recent interview with the Century, Michelle Alexander, the civil rights lawyer and author of The New Jim Crow, wonders about the stigma in many churches attached to people who have been recently released from prisons. “The deep irony,” she says,” is that the very folks who ought to be the most sensitive to the demonization of the ‘despised,’ the prisoners, have been complicit and silent.”

But the kinds of conversations that Alexander’s book seems to demand are very difficult to have--in churches and outside them. They require looking many deeply rooted national and communal demons in the face. The church can be fragile territory for that.

One group in Washington, D.C. has taken this challenge on. A group of ex-offenders, prison guards, corrections officers, civil rights advocates and students read Alexander’s book together in a class called “Mass Incarceration and the Gospel’s Call to Freedom.”