Abstract
Break Every Yoke starts by declaring that the US is a prison nation. Not only does it incarcerate more than most other countries, but—drawing on Michel Foucault (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, London: Penguin, 1977), Stanley Cohen (Visions of Social Control: Crime, Punishment and Classification, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985) and others—the idea of imprisonment reaches everyone and everywhere in a social control web. As Joshua Dubler and Vincent Lloyd suggest, ‘a network of ideas, feelings, and practices around the institution of the prison pervades American culture … Not all are equally impacted, but not one of us goes untouched’ (p. 1). According to the authors, ‘[t]he prison is a particularly American problem, and America is particularly—peculiarly—religious’ (p. 1). My initial thought on reading this was that correlation does not necessarily equal causation; yet in this fascinating book the authors make a convincing argument that religion—particularly Christian religion—has had an influence on America’s desire to punish and this has resulted in mass incarceration.
The book details the changing influence of religion on American politics. The authors note a shift in the 1960s from mainline Protestantism to evangelicalism and secularism, and a concurrent move to law-and-order politics, leading eventually to Clinton’s infamous three-strikes penal policy of the 1990s. This populist approach to crime and punishment also appealed to Tony Blair here in the UK (Trevor Jones and Tim Newburn, Policy Transfer and Criminal Justice: Exploring US Influence over British Crime Control Policy, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2007). More recently, Obama’s rhetoric showed signs of change—as the authors contend, ‘the green shoots of abolitionism poking up through the soil’ (p. 96). But even for Obama, ‘peace entails submission to the law, even and especially in the face of racist, systemic state violence’ (p. 96). The situation did not improve under Trump.
Despite this trajectory, the authors argue that religion can play a part in the downfall of the carceral state, and in the birth of a utopian abolitionist future where there are no prisons. As the authors assert, ‘prison abolition is no mere strategic posture. It means what it says: every jail and prison in your town and state will eventually be closed’ (p. 35). From a Christian ethical position, prison abolition is attractive, and it may be a logical response to Jesus’ call in Luke 6:35 to love enemies (Andrew Millie, ed., Criminology and Public Theology: On Mercy, Hope and Restoration, Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2021). But the question remains that, if we close all of our prisons, what replaces them? The authors take inspiration here from notions of restorative and transitional justice, especially influenced by Howard Zehr (Retributive Justice, Restorative Justice, New Perspectives on Crime and Justice 4, Elkhard, IN: MCC US Office of Criminal Justice, 1985), who in turn drew from Mennonite theology as well as European criminology. Yet the authors acknowledge that in ‘its more secularized and bureaucratized iterations, restorative justice largely represses the abolition spirit’ (p. 119).
I am certainly in favour of decarceration. Depriving someone of their liberty, or as Dubler and Lloyd put it, ‘locking human beings in cages for inordinate periods of time’ (p. 31), is a morally problematic thing to do; yet for the sake of public protection, there may still be some individuals who need to be separated. The authors are right to assert that the seriously dangerous are a very small number of people when compared to the overall prison population. Their separation might not need to be in a prison in the traditional sense—although restrictions on liberty would no doubt remain. This is the difficulty of a truly abolitionist agenda that, drawing on Isa. 61:1, seeks to ‘proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners’. How do we deal with the few who would be a serious danger to others if released? And how is dangerousness or risk determined—whilst acknowledging the problematic nature of ‘risk’ calculations? As always, there are no easy answers.
The authors compare prison abolition to the abolition of slavery. There are certainly parallels in terms of the racial and social make up of those incarcerated in America’s supermax prisons. For the authors, the prison industrial complex is ‘a machine for containing the urban underclass’ (p. 5). Similarly, according to Loïc Wacquant (‘Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh’, Punishment and Society 3.1 (2001): 95–134), America’s criminal justice system is deployed as an ‘instrument for the management of dispossessed and dishonored groups’ (p. 95) that has worked historically alongside slavery, Jim Crow laws and the ghetto. For such cases, abolition is the morally right thing to do. And yet, at the current time it seems very unlikely to happen. It is not an easy argument to make when penal populism has dominated the political agenda for so long; but it is certainly one that needs to be had, and Dubler and Lloyd are right in suggesting scope for religious contributions to this discussion.
In the various chapters, Dubler and Lloyd consider the argument for abolition, the political context, the religious push against mass incarceration, and religious language and practices among those who have been incarcerated. The final chapter is inspired by recent protest, direct-action movements and #BlackLivesMatter in calling for the adoption of what the authors call a ‘spirit of abolition’. The tone of the argument is evangelical. For instance, Dubler and Lloyd state that: ‘One day, not too long from now, we will collectively think and do justice differently. One day, not too long from now there will be no more prisons’ (p. 15). As Lloyd suggests in his ‘concluding meditation’, the book tries to use academic research in order ‘to tell stories that motivate organizing’ (p. 240). Break Every Yoke will appeal to an activist reader, one that is already motivated to abolish the prison. The question is whether it will succeed in gaining converts to the cause. The book is an engaging read. Even if the reader is not convinced by the authors’ zeal, the book is suitable for a broad academic audience and it makes a serious contribution to the debate.