Mass incarceration is a discipleship question for the church, and the reason starts in the Gospels. The Lord Christians follow was arrested, tried, condemned and executed by a government, and he was crucified between two convicted men. A church that worships a condemned man cannot treat prisoners as an occasional cause. Dr. Eboni Marshall Turman, director of the Office of Black Church Study at Duke University Divinity School, builds her case on that center: who Jesus was, and how he died.
She states the starting point plainly: “We recognize that Jesus Christ himself was condemned by the Roman empire, by the state, if you will, and that he died by way of capital punishment, crucifixion.” From there she draws the consequence: “When we recognize Jesus as the essential of our faith and Jesus dying the death of a criminal, on a cross, then we 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.”
Her argument rests on a reading of a few passages. Read closely, they carry it a long way, though not as far as a slogan might suggest.
What the crucifixion shows about condemnation
The passion accounts are narrative, so they describe events before they command anything. What they describe is a legal process. Jesus is arrested at night, questioned, handed to the Roman governor, accused of political crimes, and sentenced. Crucifixion was a Roman punishment, public and shameful by design.
Luke’s Gospel presses one detail over and over: the condemned man is innocent. Pilate says, “I find no fault in this man” (Luke 23:4), and he repeats the verdict in the verses that follow. At the cross, a centurion, a soldier of the government that carried out the sentence, says, “Certainly this was a righteous man” (Luke 23:47).
Luke is not writing about Roman courts in general, still less about modern sentencing. His concern is that Jesus is innocent. Yet the story leaves a reader with something hard to unlearn. In the central event of the faith, God’s own Son stands on the wrong side of a guilty verdict. Christians cannot assume that a state’s verdict and God’s verdict are the same thing. Sometimes they are. At Golgotha, they were not.
Marshall Turman’s concern reaches beyond whether individuals committed crimes. She is asking who gets suspected, charged and punished, and which communities live under that suspicion. Citing Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow, she says that more people of African descent in the United States are incarcerated now than were enslaved in the mid to late nineteenth century. That figure is her claim, drawn from Alexander, and readers should weigh it as such. Her larger point does not hang on one number. She describes the toll on families who lose a parent or child to prison: “It is a loss. It is a removal.”
Who else was on a cross that day
Jesus was not crucified alone. Luke records that “there they crucified him, and the malefactors, one on the right hand, and the other on the left” (Luke 23:33).
Jesus saw this coming. On the night of his arrest he applied Isaiah 53 to himself: “For I say unto you, that this that is written must yet be accomplished in me, And he was reckoned among the transgressors” (Luke 22:37). This is Jesus’s own reading of the prophet, not a later Christian guess. He expected to be counted among lawbreakers, and he went.
Then comes the exchange most readers remember. One of the condemned men rebukes the other and admits his own guilt: “And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss” (Luke 23:41). Jesus does not argue with that assessment or call the sentence unfair. He says, “Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43).
The scene holds two things together. An innocent man is wrongly condemned, and a guilty man is rightly condemned. Jesus’s welcome reaches the guilty one. The text does not erase the man’s crime or deny that punishment can be just. It refuses to let the crime be the last word about him.
That matters for a familiar church reflex. Marshall Turman names it: the attitude that if you did the crime, you should do the time, and nothing more needs to be said. She does not call accountability wrong. Her complaint is that the phrase ends the conversation, as though a conviction settles a person’s place in the community. The thief on the cross had his conviction, and he also had a promise from Jesus. A church that remembers only the first half has stopped reading before the end of the scene.
Does “I was in prison” mean every prisoner?
Many Christians reach for Matthew 25, where the Son of Man says to the righteous, “I was in prison, and ye came unto me” (Matthew 25:36), and explains, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matthew 25:40). The passage is relevant, but honest reading requires a pause.
Interpreters disagree about who “the least of these my brethren” (Matthew 25:40) are. A common reading takes them to be anyone in need, so that every hungry, sick or imprisoned person stands in for Christ. Another serious reading notes that elsewhere in Matthew, Jesus’s “brethren” are usually his disciples. On that view, the passage first concerns how people treat Christ’s followers, many of whom would be poor, sick, or jailed for their witness. Faithful Christians hold both readings.
Hebrews 13:3 raises a similar question. It says, “Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body.” The original audience was likely thinking first of believers imprisoned for their faith.
Even on the narrower readings, two things survive. Jesus names visiting people in prison as part of faithful life, not an optional specialty. And Hebrews asks for identification: Christians are to remember prisoners “as bound with them” (Hebrews 13:3), as though their own bodies were in the cell.
The wider claim, that the church owes this posture to all prisoners, rests on more than one verse. It rests on the cross itself, where Jesus is numbered with transgressors and welcomes a guilty man. It also rests on how Jesus describes his mission in Luke 4:18, reading from Isaiah: he came “to preach deliverance to the captives” and “to set at liberty them that are bruised.” In Isaiah, the captives are first the exiles of Israel, and Luke uses the language of release broadly, including release from sin. The verse is not a prison policy. It does place release for the bound at the heart of how Jesus understood his work.
What about Romans 13?
The strongest objection comes from Paul. Romans 13 describes governing authority as God’s servant: “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). Many Christians read this and conclude that punishment by the state is legitimate, that some people are dangerous, and that the church should be slow to call prisons unjust.
That reading takes Paul seriously. Romans 13 does teach that restraining evil is a real task God gives to governments, and nothing in the crucifixion accounts cancels it.
Paul defines the state’s role by its purpose, though: it is a minister “for good,” acting against “him that doeth evil.” The passion narratives show a government failing that purpose and executing the innocent. Romans 13 tells Christians what the state is for. The cross shows that the state does not always do what it is for. Scripture holds both.
Marshall Turman goes further than many readers will. She says “the abolition of the prison industrial complex is so very critical for our time.” Faithful Christians who share her reading of the cross land in different places. Some would work toward abolition. Others would press for reform of sentencing, policing and reentry while keeping some form of prison. The texts above do not settle that policy question.
They do settle something narrower. A Christian may believe the state rightly bears the sword and still owe prisoners presence, remembrance and welcome. The question cannot be dismissed as mere politics, and no single political answer can be treated as the gospel.
What discipleship looks like here
Marshall Turman warns against churches that approach “a prison ministry in a one dimensional way,” where a team visits the jail to preach and nothing happens before or after. The visit is good. It misses the road into prison and the road out. She widens the picture in several directions.
Walking with people coming home. During her ten years as an assistant minister at Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York, the church ran a reentry effort called the Exodus Ministry. As she remembers it, the program ran about a year and included classes, employment training, help with clothing, and a steady support system, so that people returning from prison would find “a place where they will be received lovingly.” She also describes a youth program that stepped in for young people on the edge of the system, letting adults advocate for teenagers who had no one else to do it. This is the scene at the cross turned into practice: a welcome that outlasts the sentence.
Preaching and worship that say what is true. She describes a priestly role for the church in proclamation and liturgy: preaching a gospel “that affirms the reality that there is space at God’s table for all people,” and one “that addresses the evil of mass incarceration in a very explicit way.” Readers may weigh her description of that evil differently, but the instruction underneath is clear. Sermons should not leave the condemned Christ in the abstract when people in the pews have sons, mothers and cousins behind bars.
Examining how the church judges its own. This is her sharpest point, and it is aimed inside the sanctuary. “We criminalize people for how they dress,” she says, and lists music, neighborhood and schooling: “We criminalize people based on the pigment of their skin.” She calls this the politics of respectability and describes it as profiling done to siblings in Christ. A church that reads the cross faithfully cannot use the world’s suspicion as its own membership test.
Proximity instead of observation. Marshall Turman describes a habit of watching people from a distance, studying them without ever coming near, as an ethic of surveillance. She ties it directly to mass incarceration. What she asks for instead is “being next to you, being with you or for you.” That is close to the language of Hebrews 13:3. To remember prisoners “as bound with them” is the opposite of watching from outside.
She adds a pointed historical observation: during the civil rights era, she says, most Black churches were not part of the movement, and a major Baptist body split over it. Her conclusion is not cynical. She says “we are a people who at least confess a god of justice,” and then admits that sometimes the confession is “just lip service.” The condemned Christ exposes the distance between what a church confesses and what it does.
The Gospels do not end with a closed tomb, and they do not leave the condemned man where the state left him. The church’s hope rests on God overturning a guilty verdict on Easter morning. People who stake everything on that reversal should be the last ones willing to let a verdict end anyone’s story.