At Chicago’s Cook County Department of Corrections (CCDOC), approximately 100,000 individuals are processed through the jail annually. The county’s daily jail population prior to COVID-19 averaged 6,100; Black and Native Americans were significantly overrepresented. A third of the county’s total incarcerated population has been diagnosed with mental health challenges, making CCDOC one of the largest mental health providers in the country, according to 2018 and 2019 articles by Matt Ford in The Atlantic and by Samantha Michaels in Mother Jones, respectively. While we can rightly acknowledge that people with mental health challenges are getting their needs met, for prisons and jails to replace mental health facilities is problematic and alarming.
Because jails are pretrial detention centers, most of their residents are behind bars because they cannot afford their money bond. Too often humans made in the image of God are housed behind bars because they are locked in a cycle of poverty or substance dependency or mental health challenges. These conditions tragically detach them from the communities and social networks with access to financial capital, resources and opportunities to meet basic material needs, such as employment, housing, food, health care and education. Plainly, most of the jail population remains behind bars because they reside on the wrong side of the class and race hierarchy.
The conditions in the Cook County Jail system are symptomatic of a larger, endemic hyper-incarceration. The United States is home to about 5% of the world’s population but houses about 25% of the world’s prisoners – more than 2 million people – according to James Kilgore, author of the 2015 book Understanding Mass Incarceration: A People’s Guide to the Key Civil Rights Struggle of Our Time.
In a 2000 article in Indigenous Law Bulletin, Angela Davis rightly asserts, “Imprisonment has become the response of first resort for far too many of the social problems that burden people who are ensconced in poverty.” She goes on to say, “These problems are often veiled by being conveniently grouped together under the category ‘crime’ and by the automatic attribution of criminal behavior to people of color. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.”
Million dollar blocks
To illustrate, according to Chicago’s Million Dollar Block project, Illinois allocated $1.4 billion to the Department of Corrections in 2015 despite a decline in crime. These funds were disproportionately allocated to segregated, low-income and minoritized communities on Chicago’s West Side and South Side.
In a “million dollar block” (sometimes spanning an entire neighborhood, sometimes just one city block), enough residents are incarcerated that their prison costs total at least $1 million. Chicago’s Million Dollar Block project estimates that between 2005 and 2009, the West and South Sides of Chicago had 851 blocks with more than $1 million committed to prison sentences, including 121 blocks with more than $1 million spent on prison sentences for nonviolent drug offenses; $550 million was spent on incarceration among the West-Side Austin community. On average, more than $38,000 is spent to incarcerate one person annually in Illinois, which includes general operations, salaries, employee benefits, pensions and capital expenses.
The movement for higher education in prison
In response to these startling realities, movements for liberation and restoration have been catalyzed through local grassroot community organizers, formerly and currently incarcerated people, communities of faith and scholar activists seeking alternatives to incarceration that promote community healing. These movements are bound by a common understanding that while safety is a universal need, incarceration does not make communities safer, nor does it offer justice or accountability when harms have been committed. At best, incarceration creates the illusion of safety by forcibly removing people from their neighborhoods, places of work, families and communities and instead placing them in cages with limited resources and supports for rehabilitation, all in the name of
public safety.
Movements for higher education in prison have detailed the value of offering education resources and postsecondary education to incarcerated learners. A 2013 policy impact report from the Rand Corporation provided evidence for these education benefits, saying, “A $1 investment in prison education reduces incarceration costs by $4 to $5 during the first three years post-release.” Moreover, “incarcerated learners who participate in correctional education programs have 43 percent lower odds of returning to prison than those who do not, and employment after release was 13 percent higher among prisoners who participated in either academic or vocational education programs than those who did not.”
Rather than address the underlying social sins of poverty, trauma and systemic oppression (racism, sexism and so on) that make America the prison capital of the world, we banish and criminalize people by unleashing the vengeance of incarceration. Incarceration undeniably disconnects people from vital networks of support and belonging and from social, political and economic resources. The systemic realities of the incarceration anchor McCormick Theological Seminary’s Solidarity Building Initiative for Liberative Carceral Education (SBI), a higher education in jail initiative at Chicago’s Cook County Jail that is addressing the lived realities of our incarcerated learners.
These carceral institutions (jails, prisons, detention centers and the like) continually require seminaries in the service of progressive theological education, such as McCormick Theological Seminary, to remember that their higher education in prison programs first and foremost exist to serve some of the most marginalized communities in society. In other words, programs of higher education in prisons and jails do not serve privileged institutions. We can never forget that some incarcerated learners are second- and third-generation children of an incarcerated mother or father. It is a fact that 2.5 million American children – around 1 in 50 – have an incarcerated parent.
The liberative work of SBI
As the director of the SBI, every time I walk into the Cook County Jail to meet with incarcerated students, I walk in knowing God is already present with every one of them. I am not bringing God with me; rather I am joining God and the spiritual community that already exists behind the walls of the Cook County Jail. Too often people of faith, while well intended, enter carceral spaces as ministers with a posture of spiritual superiority and arrogance, believing they are somehow bringing God and salvation to “those sinners,” “those criminals” in need of saving.
But Christians are called not to save but rather to be in solidarity with those who have been pushed to the margins of society, just as Jesus’s own life and crucifixion demonstrated. In the 2001 book Salvation: Black People and Love, bell hooks proclaims, “To heal our wounded communities, which are diverse and multilayered, we must return to a love ethic, one that is exemplified by the combined forces of care, respect, knowledge and responsibility.” Jesus demonstrated this type of love while on the cross, convicted as a criminal. While hanging on the cross of state-sanctioned violence with criminals, in his darkest hours, he offered mercy, love and care to two men sentenced to death. Indeed, Jesus offered life in the face of death.
In the SBI’s carceral classroom, liberative carceral education provides resources for intellectual and spiritual growth and flourishing to incarcerated learners, and it creates communities of belonging and advocacy. For us, education and the practice of learning are about building deep community. community that embodies bell hooks’s love ethic and spurs on healing. Together, as cosojourners, we form the type of community that honors the fullness of our students’ humanity. They are people with a story of experiences that formed and shaped them long before their current location of incarceration. Together we cocreate learning communities that allow them to be defined by the fullness of their multidimensional existence rather by the worst actions they have been accused of taking.
We intentionally use the classroom not only as a site of acquiring academic and theological knowledge that provides students with critical skills and development for successful integration upon release, but also as a place where they can acquire healing, community, critical thinking skills, self-reflection and self-advocacy skills. We invite and encourage students to exercise their agency as cocreators, creating a learning community where we problem-solve, engage in healthy debate, share ideas, support one another, heal together and seek solutions to social issues.
The benefits of the SBI’s carceral classroom
Not only do students form community with and learn from their peers, teachers, guest speakers and other formerly incarcerated educators and community leaders—they also build social capital. They form critical connections that can serve them upon release. When we ask our students what they find most impactful about SBI’s carceral classroom, they resoundingly point to being in community with and learning from people who share their lived experiences of incarceration and who have been released and have become successful community and business leaders. Representation matters, and they are building their network of support that will follow them upon release.
The second thing they point to is their expanding sense of self in relation to the world around them. They are no longer who they once were. If they’d had access to quality education prior to incarceration, they would have had different avenues to pursue.
A third benefit is that our students know we care about who they are and who they are becoming. We support them while in pretrial detention and upon their release, when we reconnect with them and invite them to join us in the ongoing work of SBI. They have served alongside us in advocacy and fundraising efforts during COVID-19; they have joined public speaking events, trainings and team gatherings. They remain a vital part of our community.
As an initiative of McCormick Theological Seminary, SBI exists to mitigate the numerous material, social and political barriers experienced by system-impacted individuals (and their communities) while they are incarcerated and upon their release. Our faith commitments compel us to colabor toward restoring and repairing the present realities of disconnection that incarcerated students experience by creating resourced communities of belonging from incarceration to release.
Our origin story
The SBI at McCormick Theological Seminary originated in seminary president David Crawford’s plan to develop and launch a pilot theological studies certificate program at CCDOC. The pilot certificate in theological studies was inspired by the work of Jennifer M. McBride, assistant professor of theology and ethics and associate dean of doctor of ministry programs and continuing education. She also served as program director and theology professor in a certificate in theological studies program in a women’s correctional center in Georgia.
At the conclusion of the pilot certificate program, incarcerated students expressed their desire to participate in more courses offered by McCormick. In 2020, I was hired as the director and established the SBI. The initiative is now part of McCormick’s commitment to community engagement and alumni relations under the direction and leadership of Nannette E. Banks, vice president of community engagement and alumni relations.
To learn more about our work and origin story, visit SBIMcCormick.org.
