Imprisonment in this country is long on punishment and shamefully short on rehabilitation.
jails and prisons
"Why you even invite us to any of this," asked Richard, "if you’re just gonna humiliate us and throw us out anyway?"
In the context of a seminary class behind bars, Jesus' question to Simon is a probing and challenging one.
American evangelicals and mainliners often seem worlds apart when it comes to engagement with social issues. Take prisons as a case in point. The rhetoric diverges along the lines that one might expect: mainliners rail against the American mass incarceration system, the new Jim Crow that locks away minorities and the poor and is sustained by in-prison private labor and for-profit facilities. They want to fight this sinful system through activism (protests and petitions), academia (lectures and scholarly books), and artistic endeavors (photo essays and poetry). Evangelicals seek inmate conversion.