IF YOU WANT TO inspire someone to start thinking—and hopefully caring—about our criminal justice system in the United States, one of the best things you can do is get them into prison. I have had the privilege of bringing some of my undergraduates behind bars and I have watched as they wake up to the devastating reality of mass incarceration, a reality they had either been oblivious to or taken some comfort in up until that point. There is no substitute for introducing human beings to other human beings. It is a point not lost upon Amy Levad, author of Redeeming a Prison Society: A Liturgical and Sacramental Response to Mass Incarceration. Levad suggests that her own journey of concern had its origins with the experience of a loved one who was incarcerated. Yet, for those who may not have a close connection to mass incarceration, Levad’s book is the next best entry point, particularly for those who take their faith seriously.

Deftly engaging the signs of the times, Levad offers a comprehensive portrait of the cotemporary United States as the first true prison society. In doing so, she cites all the most important and influential scholars and sources. Yet, the real engine behind her discussion is the identification of resources of the Catholic tradition that can positively address the nation’s criminal and social justice crises. And in this she excels again, developing an expansive account of sacramental and liturgical ethics that can provide the foundations for an interreligious and multiracial movement that might eventually dismantle mass incarceration. Levad is a careful and disciplined writer who utilizes a handful of key linguistic formulations throughout the book to make the consistency of her analysis visible and easy to access. The prime example of this can be found in her articulation of criteria for an adequate response to mass incarceration. Beyond reforming our responses to crime and individual wrongdoing, there must be attention to the ways social injustices have helped create our criminal justice crisis and, furthermore, how mass incarceration itself helps sustain social injustices. This sensitivity to the interconnection between social justice and criminal justice is absolutely crucial and, as Levad notes, it is one she and I share. However, as she also notes, this sensitivity is sorely lacking in theological considerations of criminal justice, particularly those out of the Catholic tradition. Levad’s critiques of the U.S. Bishops and the work of Andrew Skotnicki are right on point. The alternative vision that she develops in the book represents some of the most responsible and promising theological thinking on mass incarceration to date.

In this essay, I wish to focus on three elements of Levad’s argument: the relationship between criminal justice reform and efforts to address social injustices, the variable meanings of justice, and the naming of social sin. I suggest the first two would benefit from further development while the third warrants further emphasis.

Reforming Criminal Justice and/or Addressing Social Injustice

Levad asserts that “[s]ocial and criminal justice in our society are fundamentally intertwined, so any effort to address either must address both” (41). There are many claims made in the book that commend it to readers but this claim is by far the most important. Yet, despite the legitimacy—and urgency—of this statement, there is a significant practical complication. I expect that many people, especially those coming to the issue for the first time, will find it quite difficult to keep social and criminal justice intertwined in their minds. Levad demonstrates the challenge of this herself by splitting into separate chapters her treatment of criminal justice reform and social justice recommendations (chapters 4 and 5, respectively). In the introduction, Levad makes a strong stipulation that readers “should not read chapter 4 separately from the preceding or following chapters.” It is a worthy stipulation but at the end of the day its effectiveness is unclear. For many in our society (and in the faith community), questions about guilt and punishment lead down a very distinctive road, one that does not intersect with the questions of social justice. Despite the more-than-compelling case that has been made by Levad in chapter 1 and by a number of scholars of mass incarceration in recent years, there remains an assumption among many fellow citizens that discussion of social justice in the context of crime is little more than an attempt to excuse and deflect attention away from the personal guilt of offenders. This tendency reveals our general proclivity in the United States for measuring everything in the key of personal responsibility, with other social factors merely leading us toward a spectrum of potential mitigation (or amplification) of culpability. Does a history of untreated mental illness reduce responsibility for the criminal actions? Might an environment of scarcity and blight influence the rational choices of an offender? On our good days, we may be willing to entertain these queries but, as a nation, we seem far less likely to inquire about the conditions that led to the possibility of untreated mental illness or the policies and social responsibility that are implicated in the scarcity and blight. My impression is that our society tends to lack the imagination that is required to perceive its members with multiple identifiers. An offender can simultaneously be victim without one reality usurping, or merely tempering, the other. Our avoidance of this sort of complexity contributes significantly to the prison society we have become.

Levad cannot miraculously transform these predispositions of potential readers, of course. And she does a superb job of laying the scholarly ground to challenge them. However, as she applies her sacramental and liturgical resources to chapters 4 and 5 (criminal justice reform and social justice recommendations, respectively), the two main sacraments are split between the two chapters. Outside of a few mentions of the Eucharist in chapter 4, Penance/Reconciliation is the primary lens through which Levad proposes the reintegrative and restorative reform of current approaches to crime. Outside of a few mentions of Penance/Reconciliation in chapter 5, Eucharist is the primary lens through which Levad proposes the radical inclusiveness of a truly just society. It makes perfect sense why each sacrament is emphasized in this manner, but there is need to contend with an asymmetry between these two sacraments in the contemporary ritual lives of U.S. Catholics.

Levad pursues a sacramental and liturgical approach in this book since it exists at the core of Catholic tradition and since the ritual lives of Christians ought to shape them toward the justice disclosed in God’s reign. She is careful to note the various challenges that can arise, including the difficulty of translation within a pluralist society. In addition, she notes briefly that the formative power of sacraments may be limited by our own weaknesses in terms of participation. However, this latter point needs considerably more attention, particularly in light of the fact that Penance/Reconciliation is no longer a regular practice of the vast majority of U.S. Catholics. Despite referencing three new penitential rites introduced by Vatican II, Levad leans heavily on the penitential practices of the early Church. And for good reason. These practices are oriented clearly toward reintegration and exist within a deeply communal context. Still, the fact remains that these are not the ritual practices that are currently shaping U.S. Catholics. While early Christianity’s model of Penance and Reconciliation demonstrates theological support for reforms of our criminal justice system, we lack a basis to expect that believers have internalized this disposition. I agree wholeheartedly with Levad that we must recognize the ways that criminal justice and social justice are intertwined. Yet, I am deeply concerned if our resources to address these crises of justice—the sacramental vision of Penance/Reconciliation and the Eucharist—are not themselves essentially intertwined in the lives of U.S. Catholics.

The result of this ritual disassociation can reinforce the skepticism about bringing social justice into the conversation with criminal justice. With Eucharist more accessible, this vision has potential to lead Christians to have concern for the poor and marginalized. Yet, with reintegrative penitential practices feeling somewhat foreign, people of faith may remain unshaped by God’s vision when it comes to matters of guilt and wrongdoing. As a result, Christians can care for the innocent victims of social injustice, but once a person bears significant and public guilt, they are no longer fit for our vision of mercy and inclusion. Truth be told, I have found this very disposition time and again among people of genuine faith. The logic of God’s justice takes them only so far when it comes to the suffering and outcast of society. Once a person has violated a law, a punitive logic enters as if God’s vision ends where the legal system begins. This feeds itself back on the challenge of recognizing social justice as relevant for criminal justice because they appear to operate in such separate spheres. Theologically, Levad’s argument is deeply compelling; the visions of Penance/Reconciliation and Eucharist and most closely related and point in the very directions she indicates. But the community of faith needs to reckon with the fact that we are not being ritually shaped by both of these visions. If Catholics will find a way to the take the sort of prophetic stance that Levad rightfully finds lacking in the U.S. Bishops’ approach, we may have to find new rituals to shape us.

Defining Justice

The temptation to treat criminal justice and social justice as if they occupied entirely separate spheres does not only align itself with a split in sacramental practices, it also tracks to the way we use the term “justice.” Over the course of the book, Levad magnificently captures a vision of God’s justice that is committed to the flourishing of every person and does not abandon us to our sin and guilt. Yet, while she notes that this vision exists in contrast to our worldly assumptions regarding justice, there is no clarification about the content of this latter perspective. The book would benefit from a more precise account of the variable meanings of justice so that readers can see laid bare before them the contradictions they may very likely harbor. This is particularly pressing if, as I suspect, many readers of faith subscribe to religious thinking (e.g., forms of penal substitutionary theories of atonement) that supports the maintenance of one understanding of justice in the context of crime and a completely different understanding when it comes to social inequalities.

In her discussion of a Eucharistic vision of justice, Levad notes that such a world-picture “is particular to God’s reign and opposes the reign of the principalities and powers of this world and their understanding of justice” (151). With such an important contradiction at stake, I was surprised that Levad did not give space to defining worldly notions of justice. This became especially unnerving in her discussion of restorative justice (which precedes the Eucharistic elaboration by two chapters). She presents a restorative notion of “doing justice” that includes attaining satisfaction of all stakeholders that justice has been done (114). Yet, if there are such different understandings of justice roaming about, ought we to construct this satisfaction of justice in such a subjective way? There are other indications in the text that Levad is not actually suggesting stakeholders get to define their own sense of justice. Still, the “doing justice” definition she presents does seem problematic and alternative language from restorative literature may be better able to prevent confusion. However, most effective in dispelling confusion would be a direct confrontation with some of the versions of justice that need to be rejected.

Simply put, we cannot redeem a prison society if justice is understood as getting what one deserves, particularly when desert in the context of crime is considered proportionate suffering. We use this idea of justice quite often when we stand outside the courtroom doors and decide whether “justice has been served” depending on the length of the prison sentence a person has received for a particular crime. Two years for murder would be a “miscarriage of justice,” as would thirty years for shoplifting. If justice is simply about balancing scales and finding a punishment that fits the crime, then it does indeed seem rather different from a social justice that proclaims equality, dignity, and radical inclusion. They seem to be utterly separate conversations. But justice ought to be justice—whether in response to social inequity or individual wrongdoing. To merge the conversations, we need a notion of justice that speaks of criminal justice and social justice with the singular voice of dignity, inclusion, mercy, and an unwavering commitment toward continued and increased participation in the community. This is, of course, a gesture toward God’s justice that both Levad and I take to be central for responding to mass incarceration. The trajectory of her argument is exactly right in my view. I simply suggest that along the way, we spend more time unpacking the definitions of justice that can so often take people off the path. Ultimately, the danger of leaving contradictory notions of justice unexamined is that we have yet another obstacle in place to disassociate criminal and social justice. For justice to be credible, however, it cannot mean one thing when we are talking about innocent victims of marginalization and another thing when we are talking about those who are guilty of harm. And not least because they are so often the same person.

Mass Incarceration as Social Sin

It had been a thought before, but after the opportunity to meditate further on these matters through Levad’s excellent work, I am now convinced that the U.S. Catholic community could benefit from a more explicit articulation of our moral crisis. In short, mass incarceration is a social sin in which every U.S. Catholic is complicit. Imagine a pastoral letter from the U.S. Catholic Bishops beginning with this thesis. I don’t expect to see the missive anytime soon, but it would be significant . . . and overdue. Levad uses the language of social sin at various points in the book, and I don’t have any reason to believe that she would disagree with my assertion. However, the specificity of the statement—both in naming mass incarceration as the sin and in naming every U.S. Catholic as bearing guilt—confronts individuals and communities with a force and urgency that seems appropriate in our moment. Levad is a bit more diplomatic, inviting Catholics to put their sacramental vision into practice through any number of efforts and initiatives that would reform our criminal justice system and challenge our social justice crisis. I fear, however, that some readers could put the book down convinced of the legitimacy of Levad’s claims but lacking the will to join the movement for justice that she outlines. Readers might assent to the abject failures and injustices of our criminal justice crisis. They might assent to the dignity of all persons, the preference for restorative justice, and the need to eliminate the racial, social, economic, and political factors that sustain and reflect this human tragedy. But at the end of the day, isn’t mass incarceration just one more way in which the world is different from how it ought to be? Sure, some who are particularly inspired can join the fight, but the rest may just have to throw up their hands and sigh heavily at the large and complicated mess that’s been made. That’s my fear. Thus, what I think needs to be emphasized is that mass incarceration is bearing down on each of our souls. Millions of Americans are either caged or let out on a short leash (i.e., parole, probation) and it is all done in our name.

Mass incarceration is able to exist because we need order, safety, and protection. Levad notes (164–65) that we can do nothing else for social justice without first ensuring safety. Thus, it is essential and relevant for every member of the common good that there is security. We must admit that, broken as they are, we derive some benefit from the criminal justice systems that protect our rights and give us a sense of safety. If at night I hear a loud noise downstairs, a phone to call 9-1-1 is just inches away. Quite a few people have had to pass criminal background checks in order to care for my daughter. When my car was broken into and property destroyed, there was someone to take the report and acknowledge the violation. If I were to be a victim of a personal assault or business fraud, there would be someone to investigate and try to prevent it from happening again. Without these and many other assurances and protections, it would be very difficult indeed to live my life as I do. Even as I perceive the monstrosity of our criminal justice system that dehumanizes and destroys under the cover of purposes that are only sometimes legitimate, I also depend upon that system. This is my monster. And I contend that each one of us in the United States, even those caught up in the system, do depend on it in some way. This is your monster. So then, let’s be clear about the moral implication of our inevitable participation in this monstrosity. We are each guilty of the sin of mass incarceration. It is a sin we carry with us every day and we consent to the sin—deepening and deadening—unless we take responsibility to resist it.

It is not just U.S. Catholics who are guilty of this social sin, but it would behoove our community of faith to be most explicit in including ourselves. Levad’s worthy project is directed primarily though not exclusively to Christians and especially Catholics. The book intends to show why Catholics should participate in an interreligious and multiracial coalition and why they could be particularly good partners in it. My desire is to add even a bit more vigor to this goal. Does living in the world’s first prison society make any urgent difference for how Catholics understand our moral responsibility and for the way we live out our faith? It should.

Levad calls for the Catholic community to be more welcoming and inclusive. To this, I would like to add being more proactive. We must develop accessible rituals that demonstrate the restorative and reintegrative impulses of our tradition. What would a Catholic liturgy of reentry look like? Taking the notion most literally for the purposes of mass incarceration, I can imagine designated monthly reception masses for those who have been recently released from prison. Instead of coffee and donuts in the parish hall afterwards, there would be a gathering of community members and various resources to translate the welcome into concrete material services and offers of sustained relationship. But are our best resourced parishes largely isolated from those who might be returning from prison? There is ever a need for mixed parishes that defy socio-economic enclaves. Or at the very least, instead of a suburban-urban sister parish relationship, why not one between a parish on the outside and the parish of sorts on the inside? And imagine the outside parish regularly celebrating an open-air mass near the prison, highlighting how this crisis makes genuine community impossible. These are just a few of my musings after reading Levad’s book and wondering what U.S. Catholics might do with their sacramental and liturgical life if they take serious their social sinning. The answers are not actually internal to the Catholic community, of course, and interfaith partnerships (and rituals) are highly desirable. What is not desirable is thinking we can opt out of efforts for the millions upon millions of Americans who are seriously harmed by our criminal and social justice crises. Indeed, mass incarceration is a social sin in which we are all complicit. And Levad’s book is the most complete and compelling examination of conscience available.

AMY LEVAD HAS WRITTEN a helpful book on one of America’s most important social issues today—mass incarceration. In major ways this problem has appeared on the agendas of courts, legislators, local communities, governments, academics, activists, churches and other ministries, along with various shareholders and beneficiaries of the current status quo. While voices ambitiously clamor to address the issue, the weight of the problem is both complex and overwhelming. On one hand, Levad’s acknowledgement that America is the first genuine “prison society” is no new discovery; that she’s given us another book on prisons is not novel. Yet how she opens the hatch with her book Redeeming a Prison Society: A Liturgical and Sacramental Response to Mass Incarceration—framing the problem of criminal justice in its relationship to social justice1—is not only very helpful, but also very important. Mass incarceration is locked into a vicious cycle that contributes to and is fueled by social justice issues that disproportionately harm racial and ethnic groups that are already socioeconomically disadvantaged, especially blacks and Latinos. This much is clear, and beyond dispute. What’s not clear is how to address the matters, both of them, with meaningful and workable solutions that labor toward a better common society. Levad sets forth her proposal in this book, arguing for “an expansive view of liturgy and sacraments as the public service of the church in making the grace of God perceptible to us, thus consecrating our lives in the world” (5).

Such talk may sound awkward to many criminologists and others staking claims in the current, very lively, conversation about these issues. But it shouldn’t sound awkward at all when it’s understood that Levad is harnessing rationale from her own field of Catholic social ethics and moral theology to give a properly interdisciplinary response to the problems as she sees them.2 On her account, this book considers the criminal and social justice crises in America and aims to chart a more “adequate response” than what others are giving. Levad aims at both mass incarceration and social justice, reasoning that when the problems of both criminal and social injustices (whether known or unknown) are not simultaneously treated, neither is properly addressed. As the book builds its argument, Levad aims to provide theological rationale for the Church to respond sacramentally and liturgically to the problems, and does so in conversation with contemporary criminology research, especially in the final two chapters (chs. 4–5).

After a compelling introductory chapter loaded with virtually all the relevant data3 needed to get up to speed on America’s shameful and tragic incarceration problem, Levad gives a survey of Catholic responses to the issues. Starting with a recent monograph by Peter Koritansky and the 2010 Boston College PhD thesis from Kathryn Getek-Soltis, another participant on the present Syndicate panel. Each of these draw from Aquinas and that punishment is teleological or “medicinal,” serving a greater purpose at the end. Soltis herself served as a Catholic Chaplain for two years. Levad then engages the 2000 work of the US Conference on Catholic Bishops, Responsibility, Rehabilitation, Restoration, building upon Pope John Paul II’s message earlier that year, Jubilee in Prisons. And finally, Levad considers a serious critical proposal from Andrew Skotnicki, who argues that the role of prisons serve a good by reconciling offenders both to God and neighbor through penal discipline. Levad strongly disagrees with each of the Catholic contributors save Soltis for the integrative role justice plays in her proposal, and since she recognizes the link between social and criminal justice (55–56). But each of the other approaches she either finds weak (e.g., on this point Soltis sees), or not engaging in criminological research well enough, or else simply wrong. While affirming human dignity, rather than arguing for a “penitential” place akin to a monastic and ecclesial prison, Levad looks for solutions in the sacraments and liturgy, the heart of Catholic moral and theological tradition.

Levad argues that theological and ethical reflections that begin with the liturgy of the sacraments provide resources for Catholics to adequately response to today’s criminal and social justice crises, which have found Catholic voices largely absent from these conversations (47). Accordingly, this book is written by a Catholic, and for Catholics (176), for whom Levad owns an irresponsibility and failure on the part of Catholics to take social ills seriously (3). As such, the kind of proposal Levad sets forth not only aims to inspire and motivate Catholics toward a proper response to the tragic state of affairs, but she seeks to summon her largely Catholic audience to become more seriously involved, passionately calling them out on the basis of a Eucharistic vision that “awakens our eschatological imaginations in remembrance of Christ’s death and resurrection and in anticipation of God’s reign” (152). Here she invites Catholics (and others) not only to confront present social injustices but also to recognize the basis of this sacrament of the Eucharist, demanding moral transformation that is both “spiritual and otherworldly” (95). This transformation of the self and the relationship to others in response to divine grace is what takes place thorough the celebration of the Eucharist (81) which while done “in the world” (86) and indeed collapsing time so that its participants simultaneously experience God’s past, present, and future and thus “hear the call to seek social justice most loudly and clearly in our celebration of the Eucharist” (95–96).

In her exposition of the liturgical and sacramental approach to justice, Levad is cautious to avoid the dangers of the privatization and politicization of worship. The first instance is where either the liturgy changes nothing about the worshipper and therefore leaves her disengaged with the world and its decay; the second leaves the worshipper focused so much on the problems in our polis that we forget that worship is about what God has done in and through Jesus (81–82). Through this understanding, then, Levad is very careful to advocate the essential engagement with culture and society while shirking any notion of “Christianizing” it (83, 88, 100). Thus one of the challenges to “liturgical and sacramental ethics is to find ways to express the work of the church community in response to worldly problems while still respecting the individual consciences both of its members and of people outside of the church in a pluralistic world” (83).

In the above ways the church is not to impose its ethical (sacramental and liturgical, by Levad’s account) ideals upon others outside the church, nor ought it disrupt the natural pluralism within the church. In fact, Levad’s model creates space to work within the public space and, in true ecumenical and inclusivistic post-Vatican II fashion, to affirm the good work being done by other groups working there. In describing the work of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, “Healing Communities,” Levad notes, “It ought not matter whether a religious congregation is large or small, rich or poor, white or black, Catholic or Protestant, Christian or not—it has some capacity to offer material, emotional or social support to people who are incarcerated, returning citizens, and their families” (163–64; cp. also the other “communities” that offenders are to be reintegrated into after wrongdoers experience the sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation). There is something here, however, that seems to undercut the momentum of Levad’s ecclesial (sacramental and liturgical) vision amid the societal vision presented in this book. Of course, a number of the structures that may help people listed in chapter 5 are set forth as operative structures that themselves, at least on a Barthian account of the nature of revelation, cannot hear divine revelation, including the state itself. And yet Levad argues that even the Catholic “‘medicinal’ understanding of Penance and Reconciliation may serve as a basis for supporting rehabilitative efforts within criminal justice systems” (126). Whether this claim is true or not, surely some form of penitence and reconciliation or resumption will be ideally sought in the process of punishment.

Levad notes that the history of the sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation acknowledges wrongdoing as best understood as a violation of relationships which then leads the offender toward an effort to transform those relationships and the character of the offender in the process which was ultimately the reason for the preeminence of forgiveness, both recognizing our solidarity in sinfulness and also the forgiveness already ours through Christ (106). This, of course, raises issues about the role of forgiveness in penal policy; although, perhaps more importantly is the transformation of life and character this forgiveness brings about in the life of the member of the ecclesial community. Even still, it shows forth in a disposition that it’s not only people who commit crime that need social reintegration and internal reform; “the Eucharist reminds us that we are all called to these tasks, especially through the endeavor for social justice” (98). And this is so because everyone is both a victim and offender. Yet much more so when Christians have for their Lord the one who became a convicted criminal for us and who self-identified in solidarity with the prisoner.

The final two chapters of this book take on a slightly different voice and tone, with chapter 4 speaking almost as a juvenile counselor and chapter 5 speaking more like a social worker. I gather this has something to do with Levad’s conscious effort throughout both chapters to engage in dialogue with the discipline of criminology (110), seeming to suggest that this discipline may speak with one voice on any point. Levad’s engagement itself, however, far from adapting various conclusions offers her own conjectures and conclusions throughout. For example, she’s not unwilling to put a practice like restorative justice in its place, arguing for its best-suitedness for low-risk offenders. Levad, then, offers her own model for criminal justice reform (ch. 4) and then for a wider movement of social justice for all affected (ch. 5). Her response to the issues of incarceration, as well as to the wider societal issues at play that continue to feed the situation, show a contentment with nothing short of a full response to both matters. For a Catholic attempt, it’s brilliant. But more reformist Catholics will need to keep moving toward more localist ecclesiologies, which might have changed what Levad wrote a bit had they been considered. Her approach was clearly not meant to exclude other Christian groups (be they hierarchical and, by nature, paternalistic, or be they locally-constituted free churches).4

For my part, I do worry that there is a bit of patronizing that marks the work of those from eucharistic traditions (e.g., Timothy Gorringe, etc.), and often with a disposition lending toward a more colonialist style of mission.5 I will explain more in a moment, even though this is surely the “paternalism” that Levad wants to avoid (187). Yet I wonder if she can, or if her ecclesiology will let her. From the first pages of the book, I wondered who the “we” throughout the book makes reference to, who are “caring about people in prison” (2), helping to “provide resources” for “wrongdoers” to change their lives for the good (3), etc. The ambivalent spirit is also propagated by thinking that incarceration is only affecting whole groups of people (15). More patronizing approaches are also described in the restorative justice scenario (116), which bears similarities to the sacrament of Penance and Justice that Levad advocates, albeit fully aware of dangers in restorative processes. And again, a racist paternalism is the farthest thing from what Levad’s model advocates (187). But with every good intention I cannot get past the fact that this is a proposal from a responsible citizen genuinely trying to help, but which still may lack the conceptual tools (or at least the most fitting kind of proposal) needed to give an appropriately theological account of the entire situation. She provides few resources, for example, for the lifer inmate who may pick up her book and who will never be released, and risks maintaining a strong “us” over against “them” paradigm.

And what about the integrity of Catholic or other Christian persons in prison who will never be released, or those who find themselves in solitary confinement for weeks or months at a time? Who must administer the Eucharist both to him and to the others there? This is a question about ecclesiology, of course. If the one to celebrate is always and only the ordained priest (“ideally”), then it seems that this truly sacramental vision that Levad begins to sketch is undermined by a theology that in this way does not truly allow the incarcerated church to be what it truly is: the incarcerated body of Christ, already broken there within the prison for the sake of the world. And whatever benefit “we” might be able to offer in serving “them,” it seems that they not only have the ability to serve themselves in the most meaningfully beneficial ways, but that “they” may also instruct “us” on how best to help them (in complementary ways probably better than our proposals foreign to their indigenous context); and “they” may also offer “us” far more resources for our role and witness as the body of Christ than we could imagine. So rather than the peoples we are trying to “help,” as any missionary would in particular ways, perhaps the members of these incarcerated communities—the incarcerated church, if you will—are truly the salt and light of the earth, truly the sanctified body of Christ, celebrating the eucharistic table in precisely the ways that Levad describes this (185–86). And perhaps they can help us more than we might imagine (as the church and as a wider society) if we would build the kinds of structures that would allow us to listen to our brothers and sisters there.

I think Levad would want to see this happen; she wants to listen to the social ills on the ground. But perhaps this may best be done by listening to the voices within the prisons, either through her own ethnographic findings that she may drum up through further research, or perhaps by continuing to draw from the criminological and other work being generated to both cultivate and distribute voices within the prisons.6 Research like this will help to cultivate a listening ear rather than merely offering quite breezy criminological reflections, which prison life is anything but. Prison ministry and solidarity-building between incarcerated and non-incarcerated churches are also anything but simplistic.

Of course, Levad knows all this. But if she does, I wonder why her vision went for the “idealistic” (152; cp. 6n8). The prison church is not idealistic. And here may be where the ecclesiology that Levad offers is ultimately inadequate for what is happening in the context of the incarcerated church. More than mere ritual, the body of Christ is no longer spiritually, mystically, or idealistically about the life and death of Christ and that of his followers. The incarcerated body of Christ is, quite literally, about the life and death of its members who are joined in union with their Lord’s very life and death, or not at all. This is the essence of what it means to truly participate in the life of the church in prison. In other words, following Christ in the prison is not about the kind of transformation that is optional on the streets. There must be transformation or there is no church. And where there is church—which will by virtue of being by nature the one “new humanity” (Eph. 2:15), the interracial, intergenerational kind constituted as new creation by the Holy Spirit—it will often be met with worldly hostility.

But here is where a deeper understanding of the incarcerated church can help. As it currently stands, while offering very little direct help for the prison church suffering the pain from both issues of social and criminal justice, I am unclear whether Levad’s vision is a social or ecclesial vision (149–50). It seems to mix the two in ways that leave off deeper theological rationale and vision for strengthening the particularities of social justice in chapter 5. For example, where is the robustly theological rationale for economic inclusion (especially concerning the matter of forgiveness in penal theory)?; for involvement in political life, especially reckoning with gerrymandering and the matter of community-vice and development?; for repairing families and the theological vision given by the apostle Paul of the church as family?; along with safe and rebuilt communities and the privilege that Christians have of being salt and light in a broken world in need of the church’s presence? Each of these could summon explicit theological development and responses. And whereas Levad opts for the more sacramental notion for her ethical vision, I found myself throughout the book wondering what of the place of a theology of love.

In conclusion I would like to ask, where is this redeemed prison society? May I suggest that it is there within the prisons in ways that Levad’s proposal didn’t get around to quite fully acknowledging? She shows us glimpses of it in her sacramental and liturgical response to the social and criminal justice issues behind the dreadful reality of mass incarceration. Although perhaps she’s not even quite realized the full extent of her proposal for these other issues, and what it might mean ecclesiologically. Yet this deeper vision is something she highlighted at points—for example, in the case of the women described in the acknowledgments, those “living letters,” who were part of the prison church. One even helped Levad build a library for other women, leaving behind what she had for the good of the rest—broken for the sake of the world.

While we may always need prisons on this side of God’s reign in fullness, our use of prisons could be reformed to minimize the harm they cause both to the imprisoned and to those of us who are ultimately harmed by the loss of full relationship with all of our neighbors.
—Amy Levad, Redeeming a Prison Society

One should recall that the movement for reforming the prisons, for controlling their functioning, is not a recent phenomenon. It does not even seem to have originated in a recognition of failure. Prison “reform” is virtually contemporary with the prison itself: it constitutes, as it were, its programme.
—Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish

Forget about reform; it’s time to talk about abolishing jails and prisons in American society . . . Still—abolition? Where do you put the prisoners? The “criminals”? What’s the alternative? First, having no alternative at all would create less crime than the present criminal training centers do. Second, the only full alternative is building the kind of society that doesn’t need prisons . . . a decent sense of community that can support, reintegrate, and truly rehabilitate those who suddenly become filled with fury or despair, and that can face themselves not as objects—“criminals”—but as people who have committed illegal acts, as have almost all of us.
—Arthur Waskow, Institute for Policy Studies

I MUST ADMIT, I struggled with this book. Though when I thought about it, I realized that such a struggle was inevitable. To be a bit hyperbolic about it, my engagement with Redeeming a Prison Society was doomed from the start for a number of reasons, some of them being:

• I am not Catholic. While there are undoubtedly important ecumenical implications of Levad’s argument, the book is definitely directed to a Catholic audience, and rooted in Catholic theology.

• While, despite not being Catholic, there is much in Catholic theology that aligns with my own theological presuppositions and frameworks (i.e., various aspects of Catholic social teaching, Trinitarian theology, etc.), and though I share Catholic theology’s strong emphasis on the Eucharist and its theological significance, the ways in which the Eucharist functions in my theology differs quite significantly. Not only does my understanding of sacraments in general, and of the table in particular, differ, but my assumptions about what the Eucharist does—and, rather, does not do—is markedly more cautious. While this seems to be more of a methodological and practical/ethical matter than a doctrinal one per say, it nevertheless deeply forms and impacts the shape of my own theological arguments, as well as shapes how I engage with others’. Put bluntly, I have a visceral (negative) reaction to theological arguments that use the Eucharist as an answer to social problems. I’ll say quite a bit more about this later.

• Finally, perhaps the biggest underlying cause of my unexpected struggling with this text is that it was precisely that—unexpected. I had high expectations for this book, and high expectations rarely, if ever, are fulfilled, especially in scholarship, where critique is ingrained into our education and demanded of our reading practices.

Perhaps the best way to begin, then, is to give an account for these expectations by giving a little bit of context. Just as Levad begins Redeeming a Prison Society by explaining her own interest in the work, I too want to explain a little bit about mine, which will also begin to explain some of my unmet expectations.

I read this book with one of my best friends and housemate, Kayla, in mind. While I am not Catholic, Kayla is. Moreover, she happens to be the person that initially got me interested in and involved with prison advocacy work and theological engagement of such. After finishing her MDiv, Kayla began a CPE residency at Edwin, a maximum-security prison in Tennessee.1 From the beginning, Kayla fell in love with the work, and at the same time was quickly exposed to the deep injustices and painful realities of mass incarceration. I started getting involved at Edwin because a) Kayla was looking for more volunteers and I wanted to help, b) I was curious about and intrigued by the kind of work she was doing and wanted to learn more about it, not to mention that I wanted to put faces with all the names and stories that Kayla would tell me about, and c) to be completely honest, some part of me thought that working at a prison would give me some kind of theological street cred.

While getting involved definitely fostered my own interest in prison advocacy, it’s nearly impossible to disconnect my connection to the work from my friendship with Kayla. This is, in part, because in the midst of falling in love with the work, Kayla ended up also falling in love with one of the people she worked with. An insider. Or, in more common parlance, an inmate. A “criminal.”

Kayla was quite fastidious about boundaries in her work—given not only the delicate nature of the work and the ethics involved therein, but also because the work kept her very, very busy. Unsurprisingly, given the nature of the work, and especially her gifts for ministry, insiders would frequently ask to correspond with her to become “pen pals.” She would always politely decline, and connect them with volunteers who they could be pen pals with, who could have the kind of theological conversations and friendship that she couldn’t give them at that moment. Kayla eventually left her job at Edwin to take a position that let her do the same kind of work that she loved but in a different capacity (she now does more direct advocacy work, investigating capital [read: death row] cases). These requests for correspondence not only continued but became more common after she left Edwin—it made sense, people missed her and the work she did. She had been gone from Edwin for awhile, not even having time to serve as a volunteer anymore, when she got yet another request, the first one she ever said yes to. This one was from Chris, an insider she had previously had some deep and complex theological conversations with—conversations that had always challenged her and made her think. Surprisingly, on a whim, she agreed, and they began to write occasionally. Eventually, those letters turned into phone calls, and her and Chris found themselves becoming friends. It was somewhere along the way, long after, that she realized she was actually falling in love with him. He happened to be having the same realization at around the same time. While the details of their story are not mine to tell, nor do I have the space here to give it any kind of justice (um, pun kind of intended?), Kayla and Chris eventually began to date, “long distance” so to speak, and are now engaged.

I share all of that (with Kayla and Chris’ permission, of course) as a long introduction to explain 1) why this stuff matters to me in ways I never expected it would (because Kayla is family to me, and so now, Chris is family to me too); 2) why I had such high expectations for Levad’s text; and 3) as a way to try to begin to contextualize what specifically I struggled with in reading Levad, which is that I read her argument as simultaneously (and paradoxically) giving too much power, and at the same time not giving enough power, to the Eucharist and, subsequently, to sacramental and liturgical theology/ethics.

Before I get to the specifics of what I struggled with, there was a great deal that I appreciated about Redeeming a Prison Society. First and foremost, there’s the fact that this book exists at all, which is unfortunately more significant than it sounds or even should be. As Levad points out, theological responses to the vast and significant crisis of mass incarceration have been sparse, to say the least. This is even more so the case when Levad looks at the response of her faith tradition, Catholicism, in particular. Moreover, when there have been theological engagements, Levad points out how they have failed to take the broader systemic issues into account. Redeeming a Prison Society, then, is a great gift: Levad not only draws attention to the subject, but does the important work of contextualizing it—in relation to the broader crisis of criminal and social justice, in relation to her own faith tradition, even in relation to her own experiences. One of my own theological convictions is summed up quite well in Kwok Pui Lan’s assertion in her essay “Theology and Social Theory” that “we must see theology and politics not as two separate spheres, but as necessarily interacting with one another. The issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and colonialism are not added on or tangential to theology, as if they can be separated from discourses on God, Christology, ecclesiology, etc. Every discussion about God is also a discussion about power, about human relations, about sexuality, about our being in the world.”2 Or, as others have put it more bluntly, all theology is contextual.3 In this book, Levad expresses this reality, and for that alone, it is a deeply important and worthwhile text.

At the crux of Levad’s argument is the sacrament of the Eucharist (along with Penance and Reconciliation, but even that is rooted in a theology of the Eucharist)—that “the liturgy of the sacraments draws us more deeply into the world in anticipation of the ultimate mystery of God’s reign in which life, freedom, justice, love, and peace fully take hold in our existence” (5). As I noted above, this was one of the things that caused me to struggle with her book. Why? In short, because I have seen the sacrament of the Eucharist used as a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card (pun kind of intended again), as an action that absolves those who participate from doing further work on whatever social issue the sacrament is applied to in said situation—in this instance, the problem of mass incarceration and the injustices of the prison industrial complex.4 This is something that Levad seems to acknowledge herself, as she suggests that “our ritual lives in church communities ought to shape Christians toward the justice disclosed in the vision of God’s reign conveyed in worship” (5, emphasis mine). Yet, as Rachelle Brown Green aptly notes in her review of the text, “While [Levad] admits that there are injustices inherent to the practices of the Church that have historically prohibited [the transformation of Christians to live lives of justice] from occurring, she does not place enough emphasis on this dilemma. . . . If the Church cannot learn to act with justice within its own walls, can the practices of the church necessarily bring about the transformation for which Levad is calling?”5 Or, to put it another way, Levad doesn’t give justice to the reality that there are many of us who have been more hurt than helped by the church, often in the name of the church fulfilling it’s mission.

While I agree with Green that this is “the single most threatening aspect to her plan,” and that it demands more time and attention then Levad give it, as I continued to reflect on the text, I wondered if my frustration was more of a semantic one. If Levad is suggesting that the Eucharist somehow in and of itself does the work of transforming the injustices of the prison industrial complex, then I think it has serious limitations. However, Levad seems to instead use liturgy and the sacraments as theological resources for why we should care about the injustices of mass incarceration. Her assertion that “sacramental and liturgical ethics provide theological support for reforms of our criminal justice systems based in restorative justice,” well, I’m down with that (116)! Thus, the semantic frustration—I read this text not as a response to mass incarceration, but as a theological argument against it.

And therein lies the other side of my argument—I don’t think Levad goes far enough. To finally turn to the theme indicated by the epigraphs to this essay, Levad speaks to the need for prison reform, but is reform sufficient? In grounding her argument in the Eucharist, Levad speaks at length about how the sacraments “form who we are” (79), specifically about how the Eucharist, as a “real encounter with the Saving Lord and a central Catholic sign of justice and peace,” provides a moral vision for our lives6 (93). This moral vision “fosters visions of God’s justice,” and should make us aware of the injustices in our own communities and inspire us to “work for redemption, healing, and inclusion of all people” (97). Given her theological convictions about the Eucharist and it’s role in promoting justice, inclusivity, and grace, alongside her recognition of the injustices of the prison system, why then stop at reform? Levad even raises concerns about Andrew Skotnicki’s call for “better” prisons, suggesting that not attending to broader systemic social justices matters misses the point. And yet, she never even hints at the notion of prison abolition, and speaks only to the possibility of reform.

If, as Levad suggests, the Eucharist is such a “motivational force” to seek social justice, if it signifies the transformative justice and grace of God’s work in the world, does reform do enough? (96). If so, Levad doesn’t exactly indicate how reform functions as such, or what said reforms should look like.

As Foucault notes in Discipline and Punish, the idea of prison reform is embedded within the very idea of prisons themselves, evidence of the reality that prison is not only a form of punishment, but a disciplinary apparatus functioning to produce a particular type of identity, to produce docile bodies.7 Thus, though Levad speaks to the injustice of the system, in some ways she seemed to inadvertently perpetuate its existence—not only through limiting a response to the injustice through the language of reform, but also through the assumptions made—or, rather, not left unchallenged—about those who are incarcerated. While she repeatedly calls our attention to the injustices that contribute to and sustain mass incarceration, that create “criminals” that turn into prisoners, Levad nevertheless assumes the creation of something called a criminal, and in doing so reproduces an “us vs. them” logic that exacerbates the very problem she is trying to remedy.8 Within a Foucauldian framework, this view of the prisoner as the other—or, as he would put it, the move from the offender to the delinquent—is concomitant with the notion of reform as reification of the system: they are mutually constitutive, they operate with a circular logic.9 Renowned scholar and political activist Angela Davis points to this reality. She explains, “We take prisons for granted but are often unable to face the realities they produce. . . . We thus think about imprisonment as a fate reserved for others, a fate reserved for the ‘evildoers’ . . . The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers.”10 While this text does not make any effort at absolving us of responsibility—to the contrary, the text calls us to action—her un-interrogated assumptions about subjectivity and criminality do seem to do this to some extent, undermining her broader argument for social justice.

Finally, Levad seems to gesture towards something more than just reform, in the theological imagination she calls forth with the sacrament of the Eucharist and it’s function as “characterizing activity” and as “countersign”11 (84). The sacrament of the Eucharist, she argues, discloses “the in-breaking of God’s reign” (98). Is the in-breaking of God’s reign a shift in the current order of things, or is it, as womanist ethicist Emilie Townes puts it, “a new heaven and a new earth. One in which the dominant norms are challenged and debunked. One in which a new reality and project for full humanness emerge.”12 This moral vision seems to have far more deep resonances with abolition then with reform. In their essay in the excellent volume Captive Genders, Morgan Bassichis, Alexander Lee, and Dean Spade describe prison abolition as “not just about closing the doors to violent institutions, but also about building up and recovering institutions and practices and relationships that nurture wholeness, self-determination and transformation. Abolition is not some distant future but something we create in every moment when we say no to the traps of empire and yes to the nourishing possibilities dreamed of and practiced by our ancestors and friends. Every time we insist on accessible and affirming healthcare, safe and quality education, meaningful and secure employment, loving and healing relationships, and being our full and whole selves, we are doing abolition. Abolition is about breaking down things that oppress and building up things that nourish. Abolition is the practice of transformation in the here and now and the ever after. . . . To claim our legacy of beautiful impossibility is to begin practicing ways of being with one another and making movement that sustain all life on this planet, without exception. It is to begin speaking what we have not yet had the words to wish for.”13 Is this not precisely what the Eucharist signifies and calls us toward?

In summary, Levad’s argument that the Eucharist provides a compelling theological resource for a moral vision and response to the injustice of mass incarceration is a profound and important one; so much so that I can’t help but think that it is even more transformative and radical then she suggests, that it calls for and engenders not just reform but for something apocalyptic. In Notebook of a Return to my Native Land, the revolutionary intellectual, poet, and politician Aimé Césaire reflects poetically on the identity of black Africans in the midst of colonialism. He writes:

this attitude, this behavior, this shackled life caught in the noose of shame

and disaster rebels, hates itself, struggles, howls, and, my God, others ask:

“What can you do about it?”

“Start something!”

“Start what?”

“The only thing in the world that’s worth the effort of starting: The end of the world, by God.14

Perhaps this is precisely what the Eucharist calls for, and calls forth, in our response to the injustices of the prison industrial complex.

Christ has called us to “abundant life” and freedom. We can only begin our journey to that freedom promised to us in Christ from where we are. An important contextual element in our situation as prisoners must include “factual guilt.” We are not the innocent seeking justice but the guilty seeking redemption and reconciliation. Our status as prisoners is not the defining point of our guilt however, but rather it is our common heritage as “sons of Adam.” Yet in a particular way we are “guilty” because of those sins we have committed against others in our offences. In this light, we affirm that we have wronged and injured our neighbors by our crimes (sins) and our relationship with God and neighbor has been broken. We also assert that we have arrived at the point of repentance and have turned to God in Christ. In Him, we seek to realize the promise given in the gospel of St. John when Jesus tells us why he has come, “I come so that they [all of us] might have life and have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). As part of our “conversion” from “futility” and “death” to “abundant life,” we are committed to addressing the harms caused by sin (generally and our own particularly) and working for reconciliation. This is the path of Penance.1

SO BEGINS “A PATH OF PENANCE,” a program proposal that breathed into life a local chapter of the order of Secular Franciscans. The group’s location was, and remains, Pennsylvania’s State Correctional Institution at Graterford, a maximum-security prison outside of Philadelphia. The proposal’s author, an extraordinary man named Robert Altland, is, for the crime of homicide, serving the sentence of life in prison. Like all Pennsylvania Lifers, Altland is ineligible for parole, and barring a revolutionary turn in the law or in prison administration, Altland will die in prison.

Altland was not born a Catholic. Rather, a one-time religious seeker and a voracious intellectual, Altland chose to be baptized as a Catholic when he determined that of the many traditions he’d investigated, Catholicism best equipped him to access both the numinous and the mystical aspects of religious experience, and by extension, God. But, for Bob, it’s not solely about God. “A Path for Penance” also evinces Bob’s attraction to Catholic theology as a platform for ethical engagement. By melding Franciscan ideas and practices into a program for restorative justice, Bob is working to call the broken men with whom he lives to the abundant life. From Bob’s perspective, the imperative to be radically transformed is incumbent on each of us, not merely those who carry the stigma and supplemental burden of criminal conviction. As the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, we’re all broken. But between original sin and the sin of murder there lies an important mid-level sociological plateau, and it is on this plateau were you and I find ourselves. In “A Path of Penance,” the brokenness that concerns Bob most of all is the brokenness that attends being a principal of a criminal justice system—the American criminal justice system—that systematically violates, injures, dehumanizes. It’s not just offenders and victims that are broken by this machinery of vengeance and mutual debasement. We, the people, in whose name this systemically wanton violence is being done, we are broken too.

I begin with “A Path to Penance” for a couple of reasons. Secondarily I do so to show where I’m coming from disciplinarily. Under a pseudonym, Bob Altland appears in my book Down in the Chapel, a narrative ethnography that takes place in Graterford’s interfaith chapel. This connection to this material at hand also signals my limitations. I am an ethnographer of American religion and an engaged critic of mass incarceration, but to a discussion of Catholic theology and practice, I am very much an outsider. Primarily, however, I start with Bob’s proposal in order to flag my most important contribution to the present discussion, which is this: the Catholic response to mass incarceration is well underway, and its primary agents are incarcerated men and women. To grow this movement, and to grow it in a way that truly shatters the dehumanizing logic of mass incarceration, it’s imperative for conversations like this include people such as Bob.

For readers like me, Amy Levad’s intention with Redeeming a Prison Society is to “show that Catholics share [my] commitment to justice . . . and how they could be good partners in such a coalition” (9). In this regard, the book is an unmitigated success. Levad writes that “social and criminal justice in our society are fundamentally intertwined, so any effort to address either must address both” (41). This notion is absolutely right, and right in a way that should be equally compelling to secular readers and religious readers alike. The way that a particular society executes its criminal justice system is necessarily embedded in a set of other social institutions and practices, and any strategy to address the problem of prisons must also confront these other sites of injustice, oppression, and systemic neglect.

One place where Levad’s Catholic perspective has something valuable to offer secular readers is the religious language by which she manages to radically redistribute responsibility for the problems at hand. Simply, to sustain what, after sociologist Loic Wacquant, Levad calls history’s “first genuine prison society” (16) it takes a village, or rather, a nation. As Levad writes, “Everyone is complicit in social sin that creates the broader context of individual wrongdoing and that fosters the injustices that undergird poverty, marginalization, and oppression” (7). I find this religious language exceedingly appealing. Social sin. In thinking about the roles that we all play actively and lazily in sustaining mass incarceration, “complicity” seems too cold and flat. “Sin” better captures the burden, the urgency of the problem, and the costs of inaction, both collectively and individually. I happen to not believe in Levad’s God, but I whole-heartedly agree that we are all substantially living in sin. By means of our daily actions and inactions, each and every one of us works to sustain the disgraceful system that incarcerates so many, so unjustly.

If, especially from knowing men like Bob, I was not wholly unaware of what Catholics have to offer to a coalition to combat mass incarceration, I was nonetheless somewhat floored by just how progressive, under the aegis of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Catholic Church has truly been. Perhaps my surprise registers more than anything the abiding conservatism of our own era. Nonetheless, from the vantage point of today’s neoliberal common sense, documents like 1973’s “Rebuilding Human Lives,” which highlights the overrepresentation of the poor in America’s prisons (58), and 1978’s “A Community Response to Crime, which addresses the root causes of crime and proposes ways for local churches to combat the problem (60), read practically like Marxist tracts. To her credit, and because she has skin in this game, Levad doesn’t crow about these things. Instead, she goes after the Catholic Bishops from the left for having consistently taken “a less prophetic stance than is necessary to address our justice crises” (78).

As an outsider to this tradition, but, more significantly, as an ethnographer, my concern is somewhat different. How much, I wonder, does official church doctrine tell us about contemporary American Catholicism, or more to the point, the attitudes of contemporary American Catholics? Do the Bishops speak for them? What is the relationship between official missives from above and the vocabularies and attitudes that animate discussions about criminal and social justice on the ground? If a coalition is to be forged, such work will likely take place at the community level, and toward that end, insight into what my Catholic friends and neighbors are likely to think about these issues would be indispensible. If obliquely, Levad does provide a window into where contemporary Catholics are at, and this picture is less rosy. Levad criticizes the drift of Catholic ritual practice, the ways that it has been privatized, has turned other-worldly, and has studiously marginalized matters of politics (82). But for Levad, this sort of religious orientation that snugly accommodates itself to neoliberal politics and economics is to Catholicism something of an alien intruder. For Levad, for whom Catholic liturgy and sacraments properly rendered are antithetical to social injustice, this sort of privatized, depoliticized Catholicism is less Catholicism than it is Catholicism betrayed.

“Punishment,” Levad states unequivocally, “cannot be justified in utilitarian or retributive terms, from a Catholic perspective” (57). Again, I understand that Levad is a theologian, and that she is writing her book with a profound and clear sense of what Catholicism ought to be. I would be disappointed were she, in her rendering of the tradition, any less normative than she is. This would be the case whether or not I shared her politics—and I emphatically share her politics! But as an empiricist, I worry what Levad’s normative commitment to an idealized Catholicism might cause her to miss in Catholicism a set of historical and sociological actualities, full attention to which might complicate her picture. Levad writes that we must address the “social, cultural, economic, and political factors that led to the creation of the first genuine prison society” (4). Strangely absent from this list, however, is religion itself. Is Levad’s “bad” Catholicism, which is to say, privatized, otherworldly, apolitical Catholicism merely a secondary symptom of other causes? This strikes me as improbable. If true, moreover, then from the standpoint of political analytics, this fact would likely doom her project from the start. For if in the advent and maintenance of mass incarceration bad religion is merely a consequence, then how are we to believe that good religion is capable of effecting an ameliorative change?

It is an appealing and important insight that sees in religious ideas and practices a potential storehouse of tools for undoing the first genuine prison society. Given the power of hegemony to limit the moral imagination generally, and the pervasiveness of mass incarceration as a cultural phenomenon in particular, resources for effecting substantive change are necessarily in short supply. We must seize them wherever we can find them. But in order to do so, we must first account for the ways that American religion has not merely been accommodated to mass incarceration, but has contributed to it and actively sustained it from the start. That is to say, if religion is to truly play the role of liberator, we must also come to grips with the ways that it has played the role of captor and jailer. I will leave it to Catholics to do this genealogical work in their own tradition. Painting with a somewhat broader brush, however, I would like to remind people that in its advent, the penitentiary was a religious concept. That suffering is somehow redemptive is quintessentially a religious proposition. God may also forgive and save, but at the heart of the Abrahamic traditions one finds as well a punishing God from whom transgression tends to elicit overwhelming force. In secularized and in less secularized ways, such ideas are not merely symptoms of mass incarceration; rather, they were a significant precondition. Mass incarceration isn’t something that merely happened to American religion; religion underwrote mass incarceration. Both in the spirit of fair play and to ensure maximal effectiveness, as we move forward collecting and generating religious (and secular) ideas and practices for ending mass incarceration, we must also keep an eye trained for the ways that religion has and continues to underwrite the righteous infliction of excessive punishment.

Not only because of my ethnographic training do I foreground religious practices alongside religious ideas. For Levad, herself, this emphasis is crucial. Paraphrasing Iris Murdoch, Levad writes that religion “one way to alter consciousness.” (90). This transformation of consciousness is a profoundly material process. From Levad’s Catholic perspective, its medium is liturgy and sacramentality. Or to put it stronger, prayer and other sacramental practices become crucial technologies for shaping consciousness. As Levad makes clear at the outset: “I argue for an expansive view of liturgy and sacraments as the public service of the church in making the grace of God perceptible to us, thus consecrating our lives in the world. Rather than otherworldly, apolitical, or privatized religious practices, the liturgy of the sacraments draws us more deeply into the world” (5). This drawing in, and the attendant personal transformation, is as big as the self, as big as the world, and as big as God. Specific rituals and liturgies do particular work. In the Eucharist, the Catholic practitioner forges a covenant with God that is racially inclusive, where he or she becomes a servant to others, especially the excluded (95). In the practices of Penance and Reconciliation, the Catholic ritually remembers Bob Altland’s point that “people who commit crime are not the only people who need social reintegration and internal reform” (98).

Levad has tremendous faith in these practices’ performative power to effect personal and social transformation. “To participate in a communal and public discipline of bodies,” Levad quotes William Cavanaugh as saying, “is already to be engaged in a direct confrontation with the politics of the world” (88). Ergo, in Levad’s view, “Liturgy and sacraments are already political acts” (88).

Once again, my uneasiness reasserts itself. Are these practices truly “already political?” I can see how this might be true in theory, but what about in practice—how are they functioning there? To answer that question we would have to look not only in texts but also in the pews. We might discover that the sacraments are not particularly political. Or we might discover that their politics in which they participate favor exclusion over inclusion, and vengeance over mercy. Or, alternatively, we might discover that the politics are righteous, but that the rituals are merely rituals, and that the “world-picture rehearsed in liturgy and sacraments” (6) fails to make it out the church door and down the steps; or that it does make it out, but it makes it only as an idealized picture in the mind’s eye and not as a spur in the practitioner’s side..

In a way, this final possibility, that these rituals do manifest a world-picture but that this picture remains limited to the realm of ideas, strikes me as the most probable, and therefore the most worrisome, potentiality. This worry comes from the premium that Levad places in “caring” about prisoners. Care: the word appears six times in the book’s first eleven lines. But caring is the easy apart. Every good liberal cares. As properly diagnosed by Jonathan Kozol in The Night is Dark and I am Far from Home, we teach our children, (and therefore, in time, ourselves) “to look upon the cost-free exercises of ‘compassion,’ ‘care,’ and ‘concern’ as if they were real forms of ethical behavior. They take on the illusion of completeness. Little by little, they begin to stand-in for their own intended end-results.”2 Consciousness is shaped by this moral education, that is to say, but the change stops with consciousness. In the ethics that follow, care becomes not the precondition of action; it becomes instead action’s postponement, and eventually, action’s replacement. Ethical aspiration becomes its own form of action, and indeed, the preferred course of action. Meanwhile, those who take actual risks are written off as crazy people. When Kozol made this argument in 1975, the United States had 400,000 people in prison and jail. In the years since, that number has gone up six-hundred-percent. That the preferred mode of ethical action in response to injustice (on the left, especially) has been caring about injustice is not incidental to the rise of mass incarceration—it has been, rather, a constitutive cultural practice. And for this reason, it is important that we remember to tabulate care without attendant action among our social sins. Indeed, for those of us who already do care about the lives of prisoners, the self-satisfaction of caring, and merely caring, might be our most damning sin of all.

In no way is Levad ignorant of this pitfall. “I hope,” she writes, “that readers will come to care about people in prison as I have and to feel the same sense of urgency to act” (9). It is with this aim in mind that Levad’s normative, practically minded—and very appealing—portrait of Catholicism is to be read. In substance, the sacraments are to be what today’s Catholics will make of them. And what I hope they make of them is something profoundly and disruptively political, where politics is expressed not via a declaration of conviction or felling, but via the throwing of oneself into the world. By means of Penance and Reconciliation, I hope that Catholics in America come to foreground “not only personal sins, but also social sins” (107); that they assiduously work to demarginalize the excluded “criminal;” that they come to terms with their own social sins; and that they labor to destroy the disgraceful system we have collectively wrought. As Levad writes, “reform is not sufficient” (112). We must wield ideas that break hard toward justice, and we must shape our ritual practices to drive these ideas into practice.. This is precisely what Levad is doing in this encouraging book, and this is the critical work that we must all do in our communities, whether those communities be religious or secular, academic and otherwise.