Kevin Hargaden

Introduction: justifying the question

‘What does the Bible say about prisons?’ appears at first glance to be a question that, we could only charitably grant, has a relatively niche interest. It would be an understandable response to assume that this question only has relevance for the diminishing numbers of people who read these texts devotionally, and even then it is hardly a central hermeneutical lens through which to consider their tradition.

In exploring the place of the prison in the Bible, I propose that we find a perspective that is of relevance for those who read these texts as Scripture and also a perspective that can constructively inform readers who approach the question of criminal justice without any consideration of religious or theological angles. Exactly because the biblical texts are composed as if in a strange, old world so different from ours, we find in, that distance, a clarity for our present situation through how earlier civilisations perceived the penal institutions of their day.

What we discover is that the critical disposition towards the prison deployed by the peoples who assembled the Hebrew Scriptures and the Greek New Testament are at least as sophisticated and cutting as that of contemporary criminologists. This is a significant finding, because it offers historical and cultural support to critical criminologists. One need not invest the Bible with any ‘scriptural’ authority to grant that it is an important insight if we find that the texts are ambivalent or, indeed, at times deeply hostile towards the prison.

In this essay I will establish this case. First, I will offer a methodological comment on how biblical theologians read the texts, especially keen to protect against anachronistic readings. Then, I will offer a survey of the major texts engaging prison found in the Bible, particularly focusing on the older Hebrew Scriptures. The pinnacle of the argument concerns the relationship that Jesus of Nazareth had with prison. It is much too rarely recognised that the one that Christians insist is God spent his last night unjustly detained in prison. By attending to the gospel accounts of this historical event, we see clearly that there are profound objections to the prison implicit within the biblical tradition. In conclusion, I will suggest how some of these readings could serve to advance conversation about criminal justice.

Against anachronistic readings

It is appropriate to begin by stating assumptions and issuing some qualifying clarifications. The core of this argument consists of an overview of biblical material relating to imprisonment. These are necessarily brief descriptions of texts that have been commented on and studied for millennia. Entire monographs could be written on each textual reference in the argument that follows. So, the first thing to note is that this essay is a mapping exercise, an attempt to sound the depths of this hermeneutical perspective.

The readings extended here seek epistemic neutrality on the questions of faith and devotion. The Bible is a sacred canon, and the texts are handled with appropriate respect, read in context, and alert to how they have been received in the tradition. But this particular argument neither assumes nor requires religious faith or the investment of any particular authority in these texts. It is sufficient to grant the historical and sociological reality that this collection of texts has had a decisive impact on cultures across the globe and continues to have a formative influence on the lives of billions of people.

The most important qualification required is to recognise the sheer distance between our contemporary society and the world in which the Bible was composed. The socio-historical gulf that is spanned when we read these texts for contemporary relevance is vast and real and cannot be forgotten. Turning to accounts of ancient Israelite society to inform contemporary Western European societies is a suspect move.

What is proposed here is not that we can read the Bible on prisons and translate it into policy today. It is anachronistic to try to read a text from 3,000 years ago as a basis for our policy design today. It is to mis-read the text.

Instead, a sort of imaginative resonance can be established, as we read these stories written by people very different from us, facing radically distinct challenges, who nonetheless intuit that the prison is a tool of oppression. In this reading, the benefit we find in reading the biblical texts is exactly their foreignness. The Law of Moses that guided the Hebrew people had 613 separate regulations, and not once do we find any reference to a penitentiary. Being alert to how different societies in different places at different times construed criminal justice differently informs that very contemporary instinct that another world is possible. Turning to the Bible on criminal justice does not imply we have to enshrine the lex talonis in our legal code any more than it suggests we should implement a Jubilee year every half-century. But it does allow us to see, through difference, a commonality around justice. The prison – even granting that the Roman prison is not the same as the Babylonian prison and neither is the same as a modern EU prison – is a technology ripe for corruption.

A final assumption, implicit in this essay, is that Christians have a particular responsibility to the prisoner. There is a clear, indeed unavoidable basis for ministry to the prisoner, sourced in Jesus’ very last parable: ‘I was in prison and you came to visit me’ (My 25:36b).¹ But Christians have no particular obligation to the prison. For those who do read the Bible as Scripture, there is an implication in this argument that the Church must be a much more articulate critic of the penal institution. For those with ears to hear, let them hear.

The ‘prison’ biblical texts

What is the perspective of the prison as an institution that we find in the Scriptures?

The first person who is imprisoned in the Bible is Joseph. It is important to note that this is not the first crime recorded in Scripture. Indeed, Joseph committed no crime. He was imprisoned after rebuffing the sexual advances of his boss’ wife. It is corruption that frames the first engagement with prison. The first criminal act recorded in the Bible is the murder of Abel. Cain did not get sent to prison. As Lee Griffiths puts it, ‘Cain is as guilty as sin, and yet in violation of all human “justice”, God protects him.’² There are many other crimes to be found between Genesis 4 and Genesis 39, but the prison is clearly not part of the biblical perspective on how to restore justice.

Joseph suffered in prison for two years until he was liberated. We find in this first text a motif that re-occurs throughout the rest of the biblical texts – that God has a particular concern for the prisoner. We read, ‘while Joseph was there in the prison, the Lord was with him’ (Gen 39:20b–21). As the pages turn, this is an idea that is repeated. God attends to those behind bars. Isaiah tells us that the Lord intends ‘to free captives from prison’ (Isa 42:7). The Psalmist cries, ‘Let the groans of the prisoners come before you Lord’ (Ps 79:11), and rejoices that ‘He upholds the cause of the oppressed and gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets prisoners free’ (Ps 146:7).

As we scan the Scriptures to find actual prisoners, a remarkable picture emerges. Micaiah is imprisoned for telling politically uncomfortable truths (1 Kgs 22:13–28). Hanani meets the same fate (2 Chr 16:10). Jeremiah is imprisoned for being a complete hassle for the king, Zedekiah (Jer 32:3–5 and 37:15–16). In time, this same Zedekiah was a prisoner of war (Jer 52:11), as was Jehoiachin (the King of Judah), whose unexpected release after thirty- seven years had a symbolic significance for the restoration of Israel (Jer 52:31–34). Daniel is imprisoned as part of a conspiracy set against him by his jealous peers (Dan 6:16–28), while Shadrach, Mishnach, and Abednego are detained for their civil disobedience (Dan 3:1–30). The bulk of the texts – and the most significant texts – depict the prison as a means by which the state disposes of population groups it finds inconvenient. In the Bible, the prison is corrupt.

There are some cases where the moral status of the imprisoned person is located closer to a scoundrel than a saint. Samson was certainly imprisoned as an act of political vengeance at the hands of the Philistines, but his own final actions seem to disregard the Mosaic law’s limitation on violence and vengeance, as he becomes a sort of suicide terrorist (Jud 16:21). The prison is not just corrupt; it corrupts. There are other more ambiguous cases. Hoshea was the king of Israel in Samaria who conspired against the Assyrians with the Egyptians and ended up in prison (2 Kgs 17:1–5). Jehoahaz was imprisoned by Pharoah Necho after three months of incompetent and corrupt rule (2 Kgs 23:31–34). And there is at least one biblical narrative where the story maps onto the contemporary political rhetoric around prison. The wicked King Manasseh is imprisoned in 2 Chronicles 33:1–13 and faced with the difficulty of his captivity, he repents. This seems true to life – we can expect prison to work about 10% of the time!

However, perhaps the most significant factor at play here is that the Mosaic law at no point references prison as part of the criminal justice system.³ And even where we do find imprisonment occurring, it often seems ad-hoc. We are told in passing that Zedekiah had no prisons in which to hold Jeremiah, so a temporary detention centre was established in the home of his secretary Jonathan (Jer 37:15). In so many of these cases, the prison is a device operated by a foreign power or by a Hebrew king who was close to a vassal. It is not until Ezra 7:26 that we find the prison established on some legal footing: ‘Whoever does not obey the law of your God and the law of the king must surely be punished by death, banishment, confiscation of property, or imprisonment.’ The words ‘your God’ should be noted. The person establishing the law is the Assyrian king, Artaxerxes II.

Of course, things do not improve in the New Testament. John the Baptist is detained as a political prisoner (Mt 14:3–12). The violent insurrectionist, Barabbas, is that rare case – someone who is imprisoned for a reason that aligns with contemporary legal thinking. And he is released (Lk 23:18–25). The apostles endure some kind of detention at the hands of the high priest and his associates (Acts 5:17–20), though an angel sets them free. Peter is imprisoned as part of Herod’s persecution (Acts 12:1–19). Paul and Silas find themselves imprisoned because they got in the way of the untrammelled market activities of human traffickers (Acts 16:16–40). This is a critical text to consider, because it is God’s dramatic intervening action that opens the prison to the world and the jailor is among those who are liberated. And we must not forget that Paul spends much of the end of his life imprisoned and the dignity with which he faces this indignity testifies to what chaplains maintain – the intrinsic worth of the prisoner (Phil 1:12–30).

Jesus’ last night

Jesus spent his last night before his death incarcerated. The technical term for a reading of a biblical text that places Jesus as the hermeneutical centre is ‘Christological’, and it has a longstanding validity as a means to interpret texts.⁴ A Christological reading of the prison is an obvious approach from which to consider the meaning of the prison in the Bible, a means to draw these disparate threads together. It is clear that behind the walls of the detention centre, Jesus is sexually abused, publicly humiliated, and tortured by a crowd. If this is what the prison allows humanity to do to a person presented as perfectly full of life, it is fair to conclude that the biblical view of prison is as negative as possible.

Jesus is tried and convicted – procedures of a sort were implemented before he was detained. But the entire pursuit is a sham. He is successfully prosecuted for sedition; a crime he clearly did not commit. The whole process is presented as a conspiracy to serve political aims. The prison is never more central in the narrative logic of the Scriptures than here and it is never more transparently a tool of oppression.

If the controlling prison narrative in the Bible is going to be the story of Jesus’ captivity, then it is important we attend to the detail that is only visible below the text. The work of drawing that out has been done recently by the Aotearoan biblical scholar, David Tombs, among others. Tombs begins his work by reminding us that the crucifixion was ‘more than the punishment of an individual’ but ‘were instruments within state terror policies directed at a wider population in the ancient world’.⁵

The biblical text does not say that Jesus was raped. It does report that he was stripped naked in public in at least two instances, clearly a form of sexual abuse. But as Tombs demonstrates, rape as a form of discipline against detainees in Rome was commonplace, as evidenced by ‘the close connection between rape and capture … in the Latin verb rapere’.⁶ Both the Gospels of Mark and Matthew underline that the torture in the Praetorium involved ‘the whole cohort of soldiers (normally 600 men)’.⁷ The Greek preposition that Matthew deploys indicates that this was not a crowd of men dispersed with some small sub-section taking responsibility. A good translation of ep’ auton is that the soldiers are called and respond to gather around him. There is proximity here. It is a mob. They have stripped him naked, and they are beating him with rods (Mt 27:27–31). ‘After they mocked him’, they took him to be crucified.

Tombs details painstakingly how we can interpret these sparse sentences in the light of studies of sexual assault in prison cultures across the globe. He is clear that there is no mention of rape in the gospel texts – we would expect, for a range of reasons, for them to be silent on that topic. But in the scene depicted, it is hard for a critical criminologist to not recognise that what we are being presented with here is a scene of profound and unjust violence. Within the Bible, the prison is corrupt.

Summation: what we can conclude about the prison from the Bible Tombs notes that ‘stripping and nudity are first steps towards other forms of sexual abuse’.⁸ This is not what happens (habitually) in a modern prison. But every prisoner in the Western world is stripped and searched upon arrival and regardless of whatever processes might be put in place and whatever professionally might be displayed, what occurs here is that the prisoner is from that point ‘stripped of autonomy and under the complete control of guards’.⁹ And even the most progressive and enlightened of penal institutions exists to deter and to punish. ‘Stay out of trouble, or we will do to you what we do to this criminal.’ There is more than a family resemblance between what Jesus endured and what any single prisoner could endure. Whether justly convicted or not, the prisoner is at the mercy of an institution granted unique exceptions to violate and trample their natural rights.

There is an emerging approach to reading the Scriptures from within the prison. These ‘carceral hermeneutics’ seeks to take seriously that even calculating conservatively, ‘twenty-four of sixty-six biblical books are written from prison, from exile, or about prison and exile’.¹⁰ Bob Ekblad had an earlier and more popular version of this argument in his Reading the Bible with the Damned. Ekblad found his middle-class, Anglo-framed, seminary-formed interpretation of the Scriptures constantly challenged as he read the Bible with prisoners and immigrant communities. Only by going to the prisoner could he come to see Jesus as the ‘good coyote’ who smuggles people into the true promised land.¹¹

What I have proposed here is, in some senses, the inverse of these projects. To Christians, I strongly recommend as a practice going to the prison to read the Bible. But I think it is also useful that we go to the Bible to read the prison. There we find a deeply morally conflicted institution which is, as a matter of course, sliding always into corruption. A pillar of justice, that ends up intensifying injustice.

Dr Kevin Hargaden is Director and Social Theologian at the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice, Dublin. He is the author of several books, most recently Theological Ethics in a Neoliberal Age (Eugene, Oregon, US: Cascade, 2018).

Notes

1. Naomi K. Paget and Janet R. McCormack, The Work of the Chaplain (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 2006), pp. 5–8.
2. Lee Griffith, The Fall of the Prison (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993), p. 88.
3. There are cases of ‘custody’ being implemented during the Exodus wandering. There is a son of an Israelite mother and an Egyptian father who gets in a brawl and who blasphemes the name of God in Leviticus 24 who gets placed ‘in custody’, but this is explained in the text as a temporary arrangement as the people waited upon clarity from the Lord about what to do with them (Lev 24:10–12). A Sabbath breaker is put to death in Numbers 15:32–34, and again we find that he is held as if under ‘remand’ as they waited for the Lord’s verdict.
4. This interpretative tradition can be traced by to the earliest Christian thinkers. Writing about Augustine of Hippo’s tendency to read the texts Christologically, theologian Michael Cameron writes, ‘Like the sightings of the risen Christ after his resurrection, he [Christ] comes and goes every-where in the old books. In Joseph’s fiery trials, in Moses’ burning bush, in Passover’s slain lamb, in Israel’s flowing rock, in Joshua’s brave exploits, and in hundreds of other people, events, and images he dazzles readers with kaleidoscopic visions that excite their spiritual love.’ Michael Cameron, Christ Meets Me Everywhere: Augustine’s Early Figurative Exegesis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 281.
5. David Tombs, ‘Crucifixion and Sexual Abuse’, in When Did We See You Naked?: Jesus as a Victim of Sexual Abuse, ed. Jayme R. Reaves, David Tombs, and Rocío Figueroa (London: SCM Press, 2021), p. 16.
6. David Tombs, The Crucifixion of Jesus: Torture, Sexual Abuse, and the Scandal of the Cross (London: Routledge, 2023), p. 31
7. Tombs, Crucifixion of Jesus, 35.
8. Tombs, Crucifixion of Jesus, p. 29. Emphasis original.
9. Tombs, Crucifixion of Jesus: Torture, p. 8.
10. Sarah Jobe, ‘Carceral Hermeneutics: Discovering the Bible in Prison and Prison in the Bible’, Religions, 10:2 (2019), p. 2.” the art of interpreting Scripture from within prisons as, or alongside, incarcerated persons. Reading the Bible in prison reframes the Bible as a whole, highlighting how the original sites of textual production were frequently sites of exile, prison, confinement, and control. Drawing on the work of Lauren F. Winner, the author explores the “characteristic damages” of reading the Bible without attention to the carceral and suggests that physically re-locating the task of biblical interpretation can unmask interpretative damage and reveal alternative, life-giving readings. The essay concludes with an extended example, showing how the idea of cruciformity is a characteristically damaged reading that extracts Jesus’ execution from its carceral context. Carceral hermeneutics surfaces a Gospel counter- narrative in which Jesus flees violence and opts for his own safety. Jesus as a refugee (Matt 2
11. Bob Ekblad, Reading the Bible with the Damned (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2005), pp. 179–196.