Love in a Cauldron of Misery

Perspectives on Christian Prison Ministry

Blackard

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781621894650
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Christians are called to minister to people in prison. But most know next to nothing about prisons, the needs of the people in them, or the biblical basis for addressing those needs. Love in a Cauldron of Misery fills that void. This book provides a brief historical perspective that orients the reader and a discussion, mainly in the words of people with real experience, of what prisons and prisoners are really like and why the need for ministry is so great. It then explores the biblical charge for Christians to meet these needs and discusses ways in which they can do so. Love in a Cauldron of Misery is an invaluable resource for any pastor, teacher, or lay-person who is participating in, considering, or just wants to know more about prison ministry.

Part 1

Prisons

1

Historical Perspective

Crime and corrections in the United States have a long and often sordid history. Our system originated in England and was adapted to meet the myriad needs of the developing colonies and subsequent states. Ultimately, perhaps inevitably, the federal government provided an overlay that made it one system, albeit of many parts.

The role of prisons in the system evolved over time, largely as a result of the efforts of Christian reformers to make colonial practices more humane and effective. That is where our story starts.

Colonial America

Murder, robbery, rape, burglary, and other such crimes were relatively rare in the early colonial period—the 1600s—because of strict social control within the small towns and villages that dotted the Eastern Seaboard. Family, church, and friends were too close for comfort. They generally did whatever was necessary to encourage would-be bad guys to conform to existing cultural standards.

The criminal law that did exist was inherited, for the most part, from Europe, predominantly from the British common law with its roots in medieval Christian religious practices. In the colonies it was typically against the law to swear, be caught in a state of public drunkenness, miss church services, engage in inappropriate behavior on the Sabbath, or engage in unacceptable conduct between members of the opposite sex. Also outlawed were other sins of the flesh such as gambling, illegal liquor, adultery, abortion, prostitution, or other offenses that violated the strict moral code of a religious people. The most common crimes were fornication and drunkenness. For example, many women were pregnant on their wedding day in Essex County, Massachusetts, and authorities prosecuted about 60 percent of them for fornication—with little apparent effect.1 A typical criminal was not an outcast from society but an ordinary person who had sinned—and gotten caught.

Most petty crimes were dealt with by some form of public punishment involving humiliation before family members, friends, or acquaintances that aimed to shame the wrongdoers into not offending again. A wrongdoer who broke the moral code was required to confess his sins before the church. Adulterers were often forced to wear the letter “A” sewed on their clothes. Public punishment might also include pain and brutality that seems shocking today, such as whipping, confinement to a pillory (head and hands locked while standing) or stocks (ankles locked while sitting against a wall), dunking in water, and dragging through the streets from the back of a wagon. A heretic might have an “H” branded into his forehead, and a woman convicted of sodomy might have a half-inch hole carved into the cartilage of her nose. Fines and restitution were often imposed for property crimes and minor offenses against public decency. Those guilty of other offenses might have their ears clipped or have their head and hands locked in a pillory. In more severe cases, where poor souls were deemed unfit to live in the community, banishment (which could lead to death in that rugged environment) or public executions, regularly attended by thousands of people, including women and children, were sometimes imposed. However, these were avoided where possible, as the colonies needed offenders’ labor.

The punishment of Nicholas Stephens and Owen Sullivan in Providence, Rhode Island after their conviction of counterfeiting demonstrates the severity of colonial punishment. In 1752 the local constable used a red-hot branding iron to burn an “R” into each of Stephens’ cheeks and also cropped both ears. Sullivan pleaded for and was given mercy. The constable planted the brand above the hairline where it would be less visible, and instead of cutting large pieces off his ears, only severed bloody strips from the edges. Unfortunately, this penalty did not change Sullivan’s behavior. He was hanged in 1756 for subsequent counterfeiting offenses. And in those days hanging was not by the “long drops” familiar from western movies, but was a slow and painful death by strangulation.2

Although prisons have existed since antiquity, for the most part of human history they were not used to punish common criminals. Incarceration was not common, even for convicted felons. People who were locked up typically were being held pending trial or were debtors detained at night while they worked off their debts during the day. This began to change when Massachusetts established a “House of Correction” in 1656, and Pennsylvania passed a law in 1683 directing each county to construct “a sufficient house, at least twenty foot square, for restraint, correction, labour, and punishment of all persons as shall be there-unto committed by law.”3 Historians believe these houses of correction provided the model for the U.S. prisons that appeared in the late 1700s and early 1800s and set the stage for a change in prison function, from a system for detaining people before trial or sentence to a mode of punishment in its own right.

•

The handling of witches—or perhaps more accurately those accused of having magic powers or of practicing sorcery—provides an interesting perspective on colonial times. Their prosecution was an issue in a number of colonies for most of the seventeenth century. The decade of the 1660s saw twenty-five trials, thirty-two people charged, five convictions, and four executions for witchcraft in sixteen different towns in New England.4 The most famous witch-hunt of all occurred in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692–1693, where as many as two hundred alleged witches were imprisoned, nineteen hanged, and one crushed to death between heavy boulders.5

Rebecca Nurse was one of them. She was born in England in 1621 and immigrated to Massachusetts with her parents while still a small girl. Her father became entangled in a number of legal controversies. Her mother was suspected of being a witch—perhaps a factor in Rebecca’s vulnerability, as witchcraft was believed to be a heritable condition, passed through families from one generation to another like red hair or blue eyes. Rebecca married Francis Nurse, and they reared eight children. The family prospered and was active in the community, but, like Rebecca’s father, became embroiled in controversy with various neighbors. Through it all, Rebecca was a member in good standing of her church.

In March, 1692, twelve-year-old Ann Putnam—one of a little circle of young girls repeatedly driven to “fits”—came upon the apparition of a witch and was “afflicted.” She identified the apparition as Rebecca on the basis of where she usually sat at the church meetinghouse. During the weeks that followed, Ann, her friend Abigail Williams, and Ann’s mother each claimed that it was as though Rebecca were flying, crying, and throwing firebrands about the room, threatening to tear the souls out of their bodies. They claimed Rebecca was afflicting them with biting, pinching, and pricking and maintained they were almost choked by the apparition. These afflictions by Rebecca Nurse’s apparition quickly became the subject of much agitated discussion in the community.

Rebecca, at the lusty age of seventy-one and having been bedridden for some time, was called to the local meetinghouse for an “examination” by two magistrates and the local minister. Onlookers, gawkers, and gossips from the village and beyond were in attendance. Her supposed victims, now numbering around ten, gave evidence against her. Two of them fell into fits and writhed about on the floor in apparent pain. Both claimed that Rebecca’s specter, projected out from her person as they alone could see, had directly attacked them. Several others testified similarly against Rebecca.

She denied the allegations. Thirty-nine of Rebecca’s friends petitioned on her behalf, but her accusers persisted. Several continued to experience periodic bouts of affliction and claimed to be re-assaulted. They blamed Rebecca’s witchcraft for the recent deaths of a pig, a child, and a man in a roadside accident. She was strip-searched by a committee of local women, who found a “supernatural mark” in her genitalia.

The evidence was presented to a jury, which found her not guilty. But the chief judge mentioned a previous comment supposedly made by Rebecca to the effect that other confessed witches were “of our company.” When Rebecca was not able to adequately explain her alleged comment—she was elderly, deaf, distraught, confused, and cornered—the jurors reversed their decision and found her guilty. The judges condemned her to death by hanging. She met her maker three weeks later on what came to be called Gallows Hill.

Puritans saw witches as entering into a compact with the devil in exchange for certain powers to do evil. Witchcraft was considered a sin because it denied God’s superiority and a crime because the witch could call up the devil in his/her shape to perform cruel acts against others. Many individuals suffered grievously because of these beliefs. In addition to those directly affected, communities were split, and families were set against one another, ripped apart, or had their reputations destroyed at the hands of a system that now seems so misguided. John Hale, a minister directly involved in the trials, explained five years after the fact that God had allowed the devil to orchestrate the “awful tragedy,” with all its errors and mistakes.6

Historians have speculated over what really happened at Salem: whether it was divine retribution, fraud, class conflict, mental illness, political repression, actual witchcraft, or other possibilities. John Demos, in The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World, suggests a combination of causes, prominently cultural factionalism, or the interplay of subsistence farmers, more prosperous farmers, tradesmen and artisans, merchants, and other distinct factions; social and economic change, largely involving erosion of self-governing traditions and challenges to the religious establishment; and fear of Indian enemies in the area that created an overwhelming and highly toxic climate of fear.7 All combined led to irrational behavior by one group against another.

I spend time and ink on this subject now because I sense that what goes around comes around. In later chapters I will question whether, or to what extent, the get tough on crime and war on drugs attitudes of our times are modern-day reincarnations of the witchcraft experience of the colonial period.

•

The community and church continued to be central features of the criminal justice system throughout much of the 1700s. Notwithstanding their influences, the 1700s saw continually escalating crime levels as populations increased and became more mobile. The day’s newspapers reported counterfeiting, thievery, housebreaking, burglary, highway robbery, rape, assault, and murder. Shaming, banishment, and other community activities began to lose much of their force in the increasingly mobile society, so other measures came into more common use. Most involved a continuing adaptation of the exceptionally cruel and barbaric English law. In addition to burning the hand or forehead with a hot iron and cropping of the ears, flagellation with a cat-o-nine tails was not uncommon. English law that imposed the death penalty for over three hundred offenses—including petty treason, burglary, housebreaking, horse-stealing, and stealing to the value of one shilling—was generally in force. While colonial juries were generally reluctant to impose such penalties, hanging for property crimes such as counterfeiting and larceny was not uncommon. Debtor prisons continued to warehouse many of the poor and downtrodden. Prisons were generally intolerable—unbelievably overcrowded; freezing in winter and stiflingly hot in summer; disease ridden; with all ages, sexes, and levels of offense housed together.

The Revolutionary War destabilized what had been a relatively steady economic and social system. This interruption, and an increasing number of male immigrants, caused crime to shoot up after the war ended. At the same time, the American Revolution tended to accentuate the differences betw...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Prisons
• Part 2: Prison Ministry
• Conclusion
• Bibliography