This study asks one question and keeps asking it. Where do you actually stand on prisons and on the people the law has convicted, and did Scripture put you there, or did your side? Over four sittings you will write down your current view, hear a serious Christian case for treating mass incarceration as a church matter, give the strongest opposing reading a fair hearing, and then turn the inquiry on your own congregation and your own reflexes.
You can work through it alone with a notebook, or in a group over four meetings. The goal is not a single policy everyone signs. Faithful Christians who read the same Bible disagree about what prisons are for and whether the present system can be repaired. The goal is narrower and harder. By the end you should be able to say why you hold your view, and you should be able to restate the view you reject so accurately that someone who holds it would say you got it right.
Session one: Write down your position before you read anyone else’s
Start with yourself, because everything later will be measured against this page. Write three short sentences. First, what you think prisons are for. Second, whether you think the American system mostly does that job justly. Third, what you think a local church owes people who are inside or coming home.
Now go back over each sentence and note, honestly, where it came from. A verse? A sermon? A relative who served time, or a relative who was a victim of crime? A news channel, a podcast, a political party, a neighborhood? Most people find that their convictions have more than one parent. That is normal. The exercise matters because the source of a belief tells you what kind of evidence could change it.
Read Proverbs 18:17: “He that is first in his own cause seemeth just; but his neighbour cometh and searcheth him.” The proverb describes a courtroom habit of mind. The first speaker always sounds right until the other side is examined. This study is built on that warning. Your three sentences are the first speaker. The next two sessions are the neighbor who comes and searches.
If you are leading a group, collect these sheets in silence or have each person keep their own folded until session four. Do not debate anyone’s starting point yet. People will speak more honestly later if they are not defending their first answer in front of others on the first night.
Session two: Hear one serious case in full
Dr. Eboni Marshall Turman, director of the Office of Black Church Study at Duke University Divinity School, spoke with Lisa Fields on the Jude 3 Project podcast about the Black church and mass incarceration. Her argument has two parts, and it helps to separate them before deciding what you think.
The first part is a description of harm. Marshall Turman points past the cell to the people around it: families who lose income when a parent is removed, children growing up with someone missing, neighborhoods living under constant police attention, and people coming home who face barriers to voting, public services and employment. She describes the grief of families this way: “It is a loss. It is a removal.” Citing Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow, she also says that more people of African descent in the United States are incarcerated today than were enslaved in the nineteenth century. Treat that figure as her claim, drawn from Alexander, and weigh it as you would any statistic you have not checked yourself.
The second part is theological, and it is the part that makes this a church question rather than only a policy question. She notes that Jesus was condemned by the Roman state and “died by way of capital punishment, crucifixion.” From that center she reasons that Christians “have no other option but to attend to the criminalization of certain kinds of bodies and to think seriously about how we respond to that.”
Read Luke 23:39-43 slowly, twice. On the first reading, simply notice who speaks and in what order. On the second, notice what is said about guilt. One of the condemned men says, “And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss” (Luke 23:41). Jesus answers him, “Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43).
Three observation prompts for this passage:
- What does the man admit about his own sentence, and does Jesus contradict him?
- What does Jesus give him that the sentence did not take into account?
- Which detail in the scene does your own position, from session one, have the hardest time explaining?
Now the practice for this session. Write Marshall Turman’s argument in your own words in three steps: the premise, the reasoning, and the conclusion. Then check your version against her actual words above. Did you make her claim stronger or weaker than she made it? A common slip is to turn her conclusion into “every prisoner is innocent,” which she does not say. Her claim is about attention: the church cannot look away from who gets suspected, charged and punished. Finally, mark the one step in her argument you would question, if any. You will need it in the next session.
Session three: Let the other reading make its case
Many Christians hear Marshall Turman’s argument and reach for Romans 13. That move deserves more than a quick dismissal, so give it its full strength here. Paul writes, “For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil” (Romans 13:4).
Stated at its best, this reading says something like the following. God gives government a real task: restraining people who harm others. Victims of violent crime are also God’s image bearers, and their safety is a matter of justice. Prisons, however flawed, are one way a society keeps that task. So the church should be careful before calling the system itself evil, and its main work is to bring the gospel and presence to people inside. Lisa Fields described exactly this common model, in which a church’s prison ministry “just consists of them, a group going to the prison and sharing the gospel, and that’s the prison ministry.” She called that “completely fine,” and then said it was incomplete, because it misses everything around the visit, especially what happens after release.
Marshall Turman goes further than reform. She names her goal as “the abolition of the prison industrial complex,” which she calls “so very critical for our time.” Other believers who share her reading of the cross would stop short of abolition and press instead for changes in sentencing, policing and reentry while keeping some form of prison. So you now have at least three positions on the table: faithful presence within the current order, reform of the system, and abolition.
Here is where the positions actually meet and where they actually part. Laying it out this way keeps the group from inventing disagreement where there is none, or pretending to agreement where there is not.
- Common ground. All three can affirm that Jesus was condemned by a state, that a guilty verdict is not the final word about a person, and that Hebrews 13:3 binds every Christian to “Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them.”
- First real division. Is the injustice mainly in particular cases that go wrong, or in the design of the system itself?
- Second real division. What does the sword of Romans 13 legitimately cover, and at what point does punishment stop being a “minister of God to thee for good” (Romans 13:4)?
- Third real division. How much weight should claims about racial disproportion carry, and how would you test them?
Notice that the second and third divisions are partly empirical. Two Christians who agree on every verse here could still disagree because they believe different things about how the system works. That is useful to know. It means some of your disagreements will be settled by evidence rather than by exegesis, and you should go looking for that evidence instead of assuming your side already has it.
One fixed point helps. Jude 3 affirms both individual sin and systemic, structural sin, and grounds justice in God’s character rather than in any political ideology of the left or the right. That rules out two shortcuts: dismissing this subject as politics, and treating one party’s platform as the gospel.
The practice for this session is the hardest in the study. Write a paragraph defending the position you disagree with most. Make it the version its best advocate would recognize. In a group, pair up and read your paragraph to someone who actually holds that view. Let them correct it until they say, yes, that is what I mean. Only then may you say why you still disagree, if you do.
Session four: Find the gate you keep
The last session moves the question from the state to the sanctuary. Marshall Turman argues that the church often repeats the profiling it criticizes. She describes the familiar church reflex that a person who did the crime should simply do the time, as if the conviction ended the matter. And she widens the word “crime” to cover the ordinary ways congregations judge people. “We criminalize people for how they dress,” she says, and she goes on through music, schools and neighborhoods to the plainest case: “we criminalize people based on the pigment of their skin.”
Read James 2:1-4. James opens, “My brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with respect of persons” (James 2:1), and then describes a church that seats the well-dressed visitor and tells the poor one to stand aside. He closes with a question: “Are ye not then partial in yourselves, and are become judges of evil thoughts?” (James 2:4). James is describing a seating chart. The sin he names is a verdict passed at the door.
Marshall Turman adds one more idea that connects this room to the prison. When Lisa Fields described well-meaning friends who approached her as if they were “only talking to you to study you,” Marshall Turman called it “a certain kind of ethic of surveillance.” What she asks for instead is presence: “being next to you, being with you or for you.” Set that beside Hebrews 13:3 and the overlap is plain. To remember prisoners “as bound with them” is the opposite of watching from a distance.
Choose one practice this week, and make it something you can actually finish.
- Ask a pastor or ministry leader what your church does when a member or neighbor comes home from prison. Write down the honest answer, even if it is nothing.
- If you know someone who is incarcerated, find out the facility’s rules for mail and write to them. Ask about their life, not their case.
- Pick one category of person your congregation quietly screens at the door. Learn one real person’s name and story from that group by talking with them, not by reading about them.
Then take out your sheet from session one. Read your three sentences again. Mark what changed, what held, and whether the source of any belief now looks different to you. A position that survived the neighbor’s search is stronger than it was. A position that did not survive is worth revising.
A word for anyone leading a group. Some people in the room may have been incarcerated or may love someone who is. Never ask anyone to disclose that. If someone chooses to share, slow the whole group down and let their account shape the conversation, rather than turning them into an illustration for the lesson. Equally, someone may have been harmed by a crime. Their concern for justice belongs at the table too.
Questions for the whole study
- Looking at where your session one beliefs came from, which source has more authority in practice than you would admit in theory?
- In Luke 23:39-43, the condemned man accepts that his sentence is just, and Jesus still promises him paradise. What does that combination require of a church, whichever policy position you hold?
- Marshall Turman moves from the crucifixion to attention to “certain kinds of bodies.” Which step in that argument do you find strongest, and which, if any, would you press on?
- After restating the view you disagree with, which part of it did you find hardest to say fairly, and why?
- Which of your disagreements in session three could evidence settle, and what evidence would actually change your mind?
- Where does your church practice the partiality James describes, and who notices it first: members or visitors?
- What would it take for your congregation to walk with one person coming home from prison for a full year?
Near the end of her conversation with Lisa Fields, Marshall Turman observed that most Black churches stayed out of the civil rights movement, even though “we are a people who at least confess a god of justice.” Then she added that “sometimes it’s just lip service.” That sentence applies to every position in this study, including yours. The question to carry out of these four sessions is not only which view is right. It is whether your view, whatever it is, has ever cost you a visit, a letter, or a seat given up at the door.