The Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37)

I’ve heard it said that charity means caring for our neighbors who have been beat up and left by the road, and justice means going one step further: finding out who or what keeps beating up our neighbors and trying to do something to stop it. Charity is almost universally praised, but taking that step toward justice can be controversial.

This past week a state-wide organization of faith communities called WISDOM organized a rally at the State Capitol to protest the overuse of solitary confinement by the Wisconsin Department of Corrections. Although the United Nations says keeping a person in solitary confinement for more than 15 days amounts to torture, our state DOC routinely punishes violations of prison rules by sending inmates (many of them mentally ill) to what it calls “segregation units” for periods of six months, a year, even longer. In such conditions– cut off from all normal human contact, kept for 23 hours or more a day in tiny windowless cells where the lights are never turned off and the noise from other desperate prisoners rarely stops– mental illnesses inevitably get worse, and even healthy prisoners have a hard time maintaining their sanity.

The closing speaker at the rally, an elderly minister from Milwaukee who once marched with Martin Luther King, reminded us of what Jesus said about caring for “the least of these”– including those in prison. And he invited us to share his own commitment to two basic premises of the Christian faith: Prisoners are people, and Every person is redeemable.

Can we give a wholehearted “Amen” to those premises, or do they seem too controversial, too risky, for us to embrace? Do prisoners count as neighbors for us? If so, can we care for them without questioning the conditions in which they are being held?