When I first decided to visit prison it seemed to me that I was doing a good thing by simply bringing Jesus, the good news, to guilty offenders. I knew very well that Jesus said those who “visited him when he was in prison” would be welcomed into the Kingdom of Heaven. (Gospel of St. Matthew) And I also knew that St. Paul challenged followers of Jesus to “remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison.” (Paul’s letter to the Hebrews). However, I didn’t really know what that meant other than being compassionate. It seemed like a good thing to show compassion toward offenders even if they were “doing time for their crime.”
Whether
it was simply fortuitous or divine coincidence that my first foray into the
world of imprisonment took me to Latin America I don’t know. Whatever it
was the experience changed my understanding of prisoners and changed my life
forever. The nineteen eighties were a difficult and tumultuous time
throughout much of Central and South America. It was a time of social
upheaval and political conflict – when both revolutionary and theological
ideologies of liberation took root among people suffering in the throes of
immense social and economic inequality that was compounded by political
injustice and military repression. In traveling through the Dominican
Republic, Peru, Colombia, Panama, El Salvador, Guatemala and Belize I
encountered a depth of human injustice and inhumanity I had never seen first
hand. As a result I empathized with the anguish and anger of ordinary
people who were being repressed, and felt the painful yearning of people whose
basic human freedom was being denied, and saw how even the church was being
manipulated and made complicit as in instrument of suppression and injustice.Not only did I come to understand deep motivation underlying liberation theology, but I saw that our “normal” comfortable theology had to be liberated from captivity to political agendas and economic interests. Nowhere was this more clear than in Guatemala where General Rios Montt, a “Christian” had seized Presidential control and was fighting his opponents through a "guns and beans" campaign; maintaining "If you are with us, we’ll feed you, if not, we’ll kill you. Rios Montt had become the darling of Protestant Evangelicals even though he was responsible for widespread brutality and bloodshed. Evangelical success over the historical dominance of the Catholic Church depended on General Montts' influence and power. I wanted to meet the man but arrangements for the meeting fell through at the last moment and I visited prisons instead. Those visits would turn out to be infinitely more significant than meeting with a man who would later be charged with acts of genocide against the indigenous poor, Mayan peasants.
In the prisons of Guatemala, as in those of El Salvador, Colombia and Peru I met with many inmates whose only “crime” was being on the wrong side of politics. The vast majority of them were poor and powerless peasant people – “campesinos.” They had no political connections or influence with the powers-that-be and they had no resources with which to buy justice through legal means or customary bribes. The systems of justice and prisons were more complicit in maintaining social and political control than in upholding the rule of law and the fair administration of justice. Many of the people I met with in the prisons were victims not offenders, they were poor and powerless in an environment in which they had no real worth.
In the prisons of Latin America I met Jesus as if I was meeting him for the first time. I realized that I was not bringing Jesus to the prisoners but that I was meeting the suffering bleeding Jesus among them – the Jesus who was as brutalized and inhumanely treated and even tortured as many of them. My eyes were opened to the depth of what Jesus meant when he said, “I was in prison and you came to me.” And I understood more clearly the second part of St. Paul’s enjoinder to “remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.”
Ever since that tour through Latin America I’ve continued meeting Jesus in every prison I visit around the world and here at home. For there are many marginalized men and women who are imprisoned unjustly and undeservedly; Jesus is suffering with them and among them. And there are also many imprisoned men and women who are guilty of their offences and who yearn for freedom and liberation – a liberation that comes by Jesus who is imprisoned among them, who knows their circumstance, and who loves them in their guilt without condition. Jesus is “doing their time” with them even as he absorbed punishment on their behalf in the first place – as a prisoner on the cross. Prisons don’t bring freedom and prisons don’t do justice anywhere in the world. Many prisons are full of poor and powerless people, even guilty people. So when I visit prison, I am visiting Jesus the suffering one, Jesus the convicted one who is behind bars - I am joining him in compassion and love sharing the good news of liberation, freed and forgiveness, and ultimately of justice for all.