"Jesus Saved an Ex-Con"

Political Activism and Redemption after Incarceration

Edward Orozco Flores

• Éditeur: NYU Press
• Année: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781479862467
• Sujet: Ciencias sociales
• Sous-sujet: Sociología de la religión

An examination of the efforts of faith-based organizations to expand the rights of the formerly incarcerated The use of religion to rehabilitate and redeem formerly incarcerated individuals has been a cultural touchstone of the modern era. Yet religious outreach to those with criminal records has typically been associated with an emphasis on private spirituality, with efforts focused on repentance, conversion, and restorative justice. This book sheds light on how faith-based organizations utilize the public arena, mobilizing to expand the social and political rights of former inmates. In “Jesus Saved an Ex-Con,” Edward Orozco Flores profiles Community Renewal Society and LA Voice, two faith-based organizations which have actively waged community organizing campaigns to expand the rights of people with records. He illuminates how these groups help the formerly incarcerated re-enter broader communities through the expansion of citizenship rights and participation in civic engagement. Most work on prisoner reentry has focused on how the behavior of those with records may be changed through interventions, rather than considering how those with records may change the society that receives them. Flores explores how the formerly incarcerated use redemption scripts to participate in civic engagement, to remove the felony conviction question from employment applications and to restrict the use of criminal background checks in housing and employment. He shows that people with records can redeem themselves while also challenging and changing the way society receives them.

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The Incorporation of Faith-Based Organizations into Criminal Justice Reform

With Jennifer Elena Cossyleon

On February 27, 2014, US President Barack Obama announced a new initiative to target Black and Latino incarceration: “My Brother’s Keeper” (White House 2014). President Obama made his announcement at the White House, flanked by young, mostly Black, men of color. The setting was formal—all the men were dressed in suits or ties—but the mood was casual and lighthearted. It opened with a personal testimony from a high school graduating senior from Hyde Park, located on Chicago’s South Side, who loved baseball and dreamed of going to New York University. The audience, all much older adults, responded with generous applause and laughter. Faith leaders—including the PICO National Network’s Reverend Michael McBride—had met Vice President Joseph Biden the previous year and demonstrated support for reducing gun violence through executive and legislative action.

My Brother’s Keeper was a public-private initiative that drew upon pastoral religious displays. The name of the initiative was biblical, drawn from Judeo-Christian notions of love and the role of a good shepherd. My Brother’s Keeper sought to reduce incarceration—especially among Black and Latino men—through top-down notions of social reform: encouraging localities and community leaders to address the school-to-prison pipeline. The initiative encouraged an ambitious focus on six strategies, including improving the health of preschool-aged children, advancing third-grade reading scores, increasing high school graduation rates, completing postsecondary education or training, and entering the workforce. It sought to reform the school-to-prison pipeline by building coalitions of elected officials, corporate businesses, large philanthropic foundations, and religious groups.

My Brother’s Keeper fell into a line of recent top-down “prisoner reentry” initiatives—such as the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative and the Prisoner Reentry Initiative—that attempt to stem incarceration through public-private partnerships, but ultimately absolve the elite actors, agencies, and organizations most responsible for mass incarceration. Obama declared that “nothing keeps a young man out of trouble like a father who takes an active role in his son’s life,” but stated that “government cannot play . . . the primary role” and ignored how existing legislation ensures a large prison population. Obama announced the “good news” that the private sector “already” knew the importance of his initiative, but admonished communities of color by saying “no excuses” and “it will take courage.” Obama blamed cultural pathologies and evoked government only to guide research into “what works” to create “better husbands and fathers, and well-educated hard-working, good citizens.”

Sociologist James Beckford (2012, 16) has conceptualized state government funding of faith-based groups and activities as a process of “interpellation,” one in which the “policies, mechanisms, and practices . . . recognize and summon religious identities.” In contrast to scholarship on “post-secularism,” which celebrates public-private faith-based partnerships as religious reenchantment, Beckford (2012, 16) argues that such institutional arrangements signal nothing new—they simply “extended the reach of long-standing arrangements between the . . . state and religions.” Obama, in his announcement, showcased the work of the South Chicago program Becoming a Man, touted the “evidence” behind it, and claimed he would not increase but make federal funding “smarter.” The evidence, however, a University of Chicago study, was very weak: statistical differences in arrest rates washed out a year after the study’s implementation (e.g., University of Chicago Crime Lab 2012). President Obama’s announcement functioned as a pastoral religious display advocating for existing public-private institutional arrangements.

Faith leaders, however, demonstrated grassroots resistance by challenging Obama’s claims about responsibility. While Obama claimed that government was not responsible for the crisis of missing Black and Latino fathers—and that the private sector represented the greatest promise for reform—faith leaders asserted that the government was responsible and called on the president to support incarceration and immigrant reform. The PICO National Network (2014a) published a press release quoting pastor Michael McBride as saying, “It is a moral contradiction that we as a nation expect the active presence of our sons and fathers, and at the same time deport fathers of citizen children, and incarcerate boys and men of color for nonviolent drug offenses.” PICO leaders not only participated in the My Brother’s Keeper announcement and initiative, but also used such civic engagement to articulate resistance and to foster grassroots activity—such as with LA Voice and the Homeboys LOC.

Recent scholarship has varied widely in its depiction of the broad, bipartisan support for anti-incarceration initiatives, such as My Brother’s Keeper. Some scholars have emphasized prisoner reentry as a key feature of criminal justice reform, labeling it as a “movement” (e.g., Toney 2007; Travis 2007). Others have suggested that “conservatives” should be credited for “leading” the prison reform movement, and that elite civic organizations—such as the Urban Institute, the Open Society Foundation (OSF), and the CSG—have played only supporting roles (Dagan and Teles 2016). Yet others have questioned the usage of the term “movement” to describe prison reform, pointing out that the CSG only facilitates top-down policy reform (e.g., Gottschalk 2015).

A social movements perspective examining 1990s-era probation privatization contests, however, provides a more complete framework for understanding the interpellation of religion in criminal justice reform. First, political opportunity theory (e.g., McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001; Tilly 1978) suggests that the openness of a political system shapes social movements—that the direction and effects of social movements are heavily influenced by “state structures, policies, balance of power, competing interests, and preexisting agendas of elected officials and various state agencies” (Whittier 2009, 15). The 1994 Crime Act and the 1996 Welfare Reform Act provided political opportunity—expanded institutional latitude—for the CSG and the APPA (one of its related organizations) to facilitate probation-community partnerships that deepened CBOs’ and FBOs’ position within the penal field.

Second, research on political “threat” (e.g., Almeida 2003; Prieto 2016; Reese, Giedraitis, and Vega 2005; Tilly 1978; Van Dyke and Soule 2002) has further suggested that perceived threats play a prominent role in explaining why some groups mobilize when others do not. For-profit privatization represented a threat against the stability of the probation occupation (often protected by state employment laws and high rates of union representation), and influenced APPA leaders to seek and embrace public-private partnerships with FBOs and CBOs. In turn, community-probation partnerships allowed probation administrators to outsource some of their activities, while also building support with locally influential organizations.

A social movements perspective applied to elite civic organizations in the penal field provides a fuller portrait of how FBOs and CBOs became more deeply incorporated into criminal justice reform. Political opportunity theory suggests that instability among elite alignments may create political opportunities for mobilization and that elite allies may offer resources for mobilization (e.g., McAdam 1996). Similarly, political contests between elite civic organizations on the right created the conditions for FBOs and CBOs to deepen their position within the field. While nationally elite civic organizations drew from the tropes of “broken windows” (Kelling and Wilson 1982) and “prisoner reentry” to design criminal justice reform partnerships as top-down—and based on elite-sanctioned, evidence-based practices—regional and local elite civic organizations adapted “prisoner reentry” in ways that allowed faith leaders and the formerly incarcerated to carry out prisoner reentry as a form of prophetic redemption. As they were invited to the table of criminal justice reform, faith leaders and formerly incarcerated persons reacted in unexpected ways: they rearticulated the meaning of prisoner reentry as grassroots and political.

While religious interpellation has given FBOs a platform for prophetic redemption, what is less clear is the nature of these recent reconfigurations. We now examine how 1990s-era probation privatization contests deepened the role of CBOs and FBOs in criminal justice reform, and how this inadvertently provided an opening for faith-based community organizing groups to resist top-down criminal justice reform and mobilize grassroots action.

Probation Privatization and the Incorporation of CBOs and FBOs

Neoliberal Age of Reagan criminal justice reforms underlie many changes in the penal field that have more deeply incorporated CBOs and FBOs. In the early 1980s, President Ronald Reagan’s administration heralded aggressive encouragement of public service privatization by releasing a list of eleven thousand government functions that could be privatized. In the spirit of Reagan’s advocacy for privatization, in 1986 the state of Kentucky provided the US Corrections Corporation a contract to run Kentucky’s Marion Adjustment Center—the first privately run adult state prison in the nation. Months after, the CSG released a federally funded study on prison privatization, drawing from the Marion example (e.g., Hacket et al. 1986). In response, conservative think tanks aggressively pursued prison privatization. The Heritage Foundation voiced support for wholesale prison privatization—from special needs populations to general offenders—arguing that privatization was inherently cost-effective (e.g., Joel 1988). As studies critiqued the idea that prison privatization was necessarily cost-effective, prison privatization tactics became increasingly aggressive, attacking the collective bargaining laws that protected employment in the public sector (e.g., Thomas et al. 1999, 24).

The APPA, a CSG-related organization, occupied a political position threatened by the aggressive promotion of for-profit privatization of probation. The APPA’s membership base was largely composed of well-paid civil servants protected by collective bargaining who felt that privatization endangered their job security (e.g., Bosco 1998). In turn, the APPA defended its members by taking a public stance against aggressive for-profit privatization of probation. In 1987, the APPA released a position statement that resonated with CSG’s nuanced stance—some privatization, in some circumstances, could be appropriate. The APPA’s statement created backlash as pressure mounted through other groups in the penal field. At the American Correctional Association’s annual meeting, president Perry M. Johnson (1993) delivered a keynote address in which he urged a rethinking of corrections—an “exchange rate for punishment”—in which alternative sentencing and offender fines could substitute for prison. In addition, the neoliberal National Center for Policy Analysis issued a report attacking the APPA, supporting legislation (the Conditional Post Conviction Release Act) to extend bail into probation and parole (e.g., Reynolds 2000); it argued that probation was broken, and that probationers were committing murders every day. The National Center for Policy Analysis framed probation leaders’ resistance to privatization as a “turf war” (e.g., Reynolds 2000, 9).

Two landmark legislative bills created a political opportunity for the APPA to reshape the penal field in ways that defended probation from for-profit privatization. First, the 1994 Crime Act opened a space for nonprofits and FBOs to participate in probation-related activities. The act provided a six-year, $8.8 billion grant for “community policing,” created the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services to administer such grants, and built probation-police partnerships by relocating some probation work to the neighborhood—alongside private, nonprofit organizations, such as FBOs. Second, the Charitable Choice clause of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act clarified religious organizations’ eligibility for federal social service contracts. These federal changes allowed FBOs—many of which were the last standing institutions in deindustrialized, low-income neighborhoods—deeper engagement in the probation and social service fields. In turn, the deepening engagement of FBOs in the fields of probation and social services placed the APPA in a political position to deflect for-profit privatization pressures by developing community-probation partnerships with FBOs.

The Boston Strategy to Prevent Youth Violence was illustrative of the new public-private, community-probation partnerships that incorporated FBOs. The Boston Strategy consisted of three significant components—Operation Ceasefire, the Boston Gun Project, and Operation Night Lights—and was carried out through collaborations with police, probation, and community groups (Reinventing Probation Council 2000). Operation Night Lights began before the 1994 Crime Act, and involved the sharing of information between probation and law enforcement, and probation officers’ evening visits to high-risk youth probationers’ homes. Operation Ceasefire utilized community groups, especially local clergy and community leaders—such as Boston’s Ten Point Coalition—in mitigating gang disputes. Collectively, the Boston Strategy produced the steepest US decline in homicides. From 1995 to 1996, homicides dropped from ninety-six to sixty-one, and eventually dropped to seventeen between January and August 1999 (Reinventing Probation Council 2000, 28).

APPA-affiliated leaders took a significant step in reconfiguring probation, top-down, by exporting Boston Strategy–influenced FBO partnerships. In 1997, John DiIulio facilitated a gathering at the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Civic Innovation, which led to the founding of the Reinventing Probation Council. The council aimed to nationally reconfigure probation and comprised fourteen persons—including five presidents and past-presidents from the two big national probation associations (the APPA and the National Association of Probation Executives). The first Reinventing Probation Council report, “‘Broken Windows’ Probation” (1999), noted that “widespread political and public dissatisfaction” with probation was justified (1999, 1) and emphasized the need for “active partnerships with community and neighborhood groups” (1999, 5). The report drew attention to a handful of localities’ efforts in implementing innovative probation models—in particular the Boston Strategy—while elaborating key strategies to reorganize probation.

The report—far from advocating for grassroots reform—warned of violent probationers and advocated for extending broken windows policing to probation. It encouraged community betterment activities with agencies, businesses, nonprofits, and FBOs—not for residents but to shore up probation’s legitimacy. A follow-up Reinventing Probation Council (2000) report plainly advocated for probation-community partnerships rooted in deception and the displacement of community leaders. Shortly thereafter, Rhine et al. (2001) published an article in Perspectives, the APPA’s flagship publication, explaining that seven cities had been selected to receive technical assistance for “broken windows probation” implementation; in turn, the APPA’s related organization, the CSG, continued the effort to expand broken windows probation through the implementation of initiatives much larger in scope.

Prisoner Reentry, CBOs, and FBOs

While the APPA led efforts at broken windows probation implementation, a few powerful civic organizations—such as the CSG—soon began top-down efforts to deepen CBO and FBO involvement in the penal field; the two efforts would dovetail to form what is now recognized as “prisoner reentry.” Starting in 2000, billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundation (née Open Society Institute) funded the Urban Institute and the CSG to produce research and develop public-private partnerships. These and other OSF recipients reframed the effort to deepen the role of FBOs, in the penal field, through the development of the concept of “prisoner reentry.”

Jeremy Travis (2005), who claimed credit for the popularization of the concept of “reentry,” recalled that usage of the term originated in 1999, when US Attorney General Janet Reno asked Travis (then director of the National Institute of Justice) and Laurie Robinson (assistant attorney general for justice programs) how to address the issue of the large number of people exiting and returning to prison. Following their discussion, in October 1999, Reno issued a call for proposals for partnerships to develop “reentry courts.” Travis claimed to have intentionally chosen the term “reentry” because he viewed it as politically neutral—in contrast to progressive efforts to abolish prisons or concerns with “superpredators” (Bennett, DiIulio, and Walters 1996) that had fueled dramatic prison growth in the late 1990s. Following its introduction, several presidential administrations, national organizations representing elected officials, federal and local agencies, policy think tanks, associations representing practitioners, and advocacy groups used the term “reentry” to mobilize prison reform advocacy around the issue of containing mass incarceration’s mounting economic and social costs. The term enjoyed broad bipartisan support for reducing incarceration, with scholars later referring to it as a social “movement” (e.g., Toney 2007; Travis 2007).

Collaborations between OSF, the Urban Institute, and CSG reframed criminal justice reform from broken windows to prisoner reentry, and expanded political opportunities to deepen CBO and FBO involvement in the penal field starting in 2000. That year, Travis left the National Institute of Justice to take a position as a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, where he and criminologist Joan Petersilia co-chaired a series of eight roundtables on prisoner reentry, convening academics, practitioners, civil servants, advocacy groups, funding agencies, and foundations. Susan Tucker, an OSF program officer, attended the Urban Institute’s inaugural Reentry Roundtable in 2000, and that year the OSF made a series of commitments to the field of prisoner reentry (Open Society Institute 2001). The OSF funded eleven nonprofits, some of which expanded broken windows probation—such as the Urban Institute and CSG—but also CBOs that expanded the definition of prisoner reentry to include collective and political action, such as Family Life Center, Critical Resistance, and the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights (Open Society Institute 2001).

OSF funding for many prison reform programs continued to 2002. In 2001, the OSF funded the CSG’s newly created Reentry Policy Council, which counted, in its initial meeting, several members of OSF-backed programs that played formative roles in early development of prisoner reentry, including Travis, Paparozzi, and Tucker (Open Society Institute 2002). Then, in 2002, OSF lured Eric Cadora away from the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services to work for Tucker, developed Justice Reinvestment, funded a Justice Reinvestment initiative out of George Washington University, and funded the CSG to provide states “technical assistance” implementing Justice Reinvestment (Open Society Institute 2003).

In 2001, President George W. Bush established the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI). John DiIulio, who had earlier facilitated the founding of the Reinventing Probation Council, served as the OFBCI founding director. The OFBCI sought to increase the capacity of FBOs by acting as a liaison and connected CBOs and FBOs—then dubbe...