Loading...Eighteen women and men came from Greeneville, Chattanooga and Knoxville to St. John's Cathedral, Knoxville, on Thursday, November 3 to begin an intensive study of how the Church can help America “Get Smart on Crime” instead of simply being tough on crime.
Being “tough on crime” has been the mantra of both political parties for over thirty years. The policy is not working. Americanow has the highest documented incarceration rate of any nation in the world. And recent studies show that two out of three people released from our prisons return within three years. That’s a good working definition of the word “failure.”
The goal of our Church should be to help make it possible for American political leaders to come in out of the cold. They need a safe place to hide from the shattering reality that it costs more to send a person to prison than it does to send a kid to college. And the Church can provide that safe place, by calling for a national inquiry into our system of crime and punishment and by seeking solutions to criminal behavior that really do work.
In addition to a fine lunch at St. John, the group enjoyed the opportunity to learn from priests, professors, deacons, prosecutors, defense attorneys and most important of all, real people seeking solutions to the real problem of a national prison system that now turns out more repeat offenders than reformed offenders.
As a preliminary step, two groups were formed. One group will work to support the call for a US Commission on Criminal Justice to inquire into how and why the present expensive system of incarceration is broken, and how we can find more successful and less expensive ways to help men and women in prison learn to lead healthy and productive lives once they are released.
The second group will catalogue and assess proven strategies that we know work in East Tennessee and that help men and women achieve lives free from drugs and crime.
We plan to come back together again in January, perhaps inChattanooga, to continue the good work that was begun in Knoxville.
May God be with us as we remember it was Christ who taught us that when we serve those in prison, we serve Christ himself.
With Thanks and Blessings,
Bo Lewis
Charles Fels
