Witness: Beginning to See the Light

Many North American churches are lighting Advent candles. But prisoners are setting themselves on fire. How many more will resort to these drastic measures before Christ-followers begin to see the light? I say, “Free’em all!” After presenting a paper at the first biennial, “Forward Conference: Religions Envisioning Change,” hosted by the National Museum of African American History & Culture, I attended a panel discussion on prison abolition. It was titled “Free ‘Em All: Islam, Black Faith and the Case for Abolition” and the panelists strengthened my conviction.“We don’t want warmer and fuzzier prison systems. We don’t want police who dance with us,” Dr. Marc Lamont Hill stated as a matter of fact while impressing upon his audience the need for a radical imagination.I nodded my head in agreement as I have long been against the prison industrial complex and the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans, who are overrepresented in the prison system because they live in communities that are often hyper-surveilled and overpoliced. According to The Sentencing Project, “One in five Black men born in 2001 is likely to experience imprisonment within their lifetime, a decline from one in three for those born in 1981.”For me, that’s one too many....