Bruce Western (Punishment and Inequality in America) excels in sociological analysis and in tying mass incarceration and economic inequality together. Alexander and Western complement each other. Next some quotations from Western's final chapter entitled "Conclusions."
* In the last decades of the twentieth century [and up to 2013], mass imprisonment became a fact of American life. The deep involvement of poor black men in the criminal justice system became normal. Those drawn into the net of the penal system live differently from the rest of us. Employment is more insecure, wages are lower. Families are disrupted as incarceration separates children from their fathers and breaks up couples. Pervasive incarceration and its effects on economic opportunity and family life have given the penal system a central role in the lives of the urban poor.
* By taking vast numbers of poorly educated young men out of the labor market, economic statistics on wages and employment were artificially improved. . . . The criminal justice system tightly grips the low-wage labor market, hiding inequality behind prison walls and deepening the disadvantage of ex-prisoners after release.
* One in ten young black children had a father in prison or jail by the end of the 1990s.
* Although originally conceived to control the crime and disorder of the inner cities, mass imprisonment has become part of the problem, preventing the full integration of poor urban communities into the American social fabric.
* Here I draw two conclusions. First, that mass imprisonment has significantly sealed the social immobility of poor blacks. Second, if we view the effects of the prison boom in the context of causes, mass imprisonment has significantly subtracted from the gains to African American citizenship hard won by the civil rights movement.
* In political campaigns and media portrayals, criminal offenders were regularly personified by poor young black men [leaving the deep impression that such men were inherently a problem]. The racial stain, unlike poverty or school failure, was an unfading deficiency beyond the reach of government reform.
* Through its effects on work and families, incarceration redirects the life course onto a road of lasting disadvantage. Inspired by beliefs about its permanent inferiority, mass imprisonment cemented the distress of the black underclass.
* What about the future of mass imprisonment? My analysis suggests it will remain a feature of the regulation of urban poverty in America. Although increasingly expensive and perhaps a little obsolete in a time of low crime rates, mass imprisonment is likely to be preserved by the political and economic forces that created it.
Now some of my (Noble) observations: The abolitionits and Emancipation Proclamation---good; the civil rights movement and the abolition of legal segregation--good; the Army and its integrated Afro-Anglo culture---good. Good, but not biblically good enough. None of the above identified and addressed American oppression and ethnocentrism, as Jesus did in Luke 4, or to put it another way, the American trinity of hyperindividualism, hypermaterialism and hyperethnocentrism.
The Army was ahead of the American church, but a fully biblical church would have been ahead of the Army. The church should have preached and practiced the kingdom of God gospel (to be spelled out in greater detail in coming essays) long before the Army established the Afro-Anglo culture. The kingdom of God culture goes deeper than the Afro-Anglo culture.
When the British, Puritan colonists packed their suitcases to come to America, along with their Bibles they also packed generous portions of ethnocentrism and oppression which the British had just perfected in a brutal military campaign against the Irish who, by the way, were of the same race. After arriving in America, the Puritans were soon using their ethnocentrism and oppression against Native Americans, setting in place a genocidal pattern that continued for several hundred years all across the American continent.
American WASPs have never ceased, right up to 2013, this lavish use of ethnocentrism and oppression. The American church, especially white evangelicals, has largely been silent, seldom preached about these social evils which Jesus specifically addressed at the beginning of His ministry (Luke).
Thomas Hanks (God So Loved the Third World: The Biblical Vocabulary of Oppression) provides this scholarly observation; a Hebrew scholar, Hanks asserts that there are 555 references to oppression in the OT (the whole semantic field):
Anyone who has read much in the theological classics (Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Barth, Berkouwer et. al.) will recognize that the theme of oppression has received little or no attention there. One might think that the Bible says little about oppression. Furthermore, one searches in vain for the theme in Bible dictionaries, encyclopedias, and the like. However, when we strike the rock of a complete Bible concordance, to our great surprise we hit a gusher of texts and terms that deal with oppression. In short, we find a basic structural category of biblical theology.
Hebrew roots commonly translated in English as oppression have meanings such as : crush, humiliate, animalize, impoverish, enslave and kill.
After Hanks book was published (1983 in English, originally printed in Spanish), the revised ISBE did include an significant entry on oppression, but, unfortunately, nothing on oppression in the NT. We need an urgent effort to create a comprehensive theology of oppression; we can't skip lightly over to oppression and quickly rush to justice.
Jesus called the Jewish temple a "den of robbers," or paraphrased "a system of oppression." The temple had an immense impact on all of Jewish society in Palestine; it had not only religious impact, but also large political, economic, and social impact. There was also serious oppression in the agricultural sector (James 5) and widows and orphans were oppressed (James 1). Then, of course, there was Roman oppression, but, bad as it was at times, Jesus never mentioned Roman oppression; He concentrated on the oppression within, not from without.
Oppression permeated Palestine society; we must remember the extent of oppression as we think about Jesus statement (Luke 4:18) that He had come "to release the oppressed" And we must remember that again and again he entered the temple and confronted the oppressors there on their own turf.
To be continued as I discuss in some detail what the kingdom of God answer to the above issue should be in future essays
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