I sit across from a woman with more tracks on her arms than I have freckles. I focus on her face. She just wants out of here, she says. But she doesn’t know where she can go.

I listen to a man tell me why he taught his niece to steal. She needed a skill to get by in this world, he says. After all, she was a dirty little girl.

Outside the visiting room, a fight has broken out. I fold my hands on top of the table and try to remember what I meant to say about Nicodemus. Someone is cut. The deputies are yelling. I try to remember what I meant to say about Nicodemus.

I’ve started wearing a cross because I need a uniform of some kind. In the maximum security module, inmates talk at me through the glass. They want to know what I’m doing there. Lawyer? Mental Health? I say "Chaplain" but they don’t seem to understand. I lift the small, wooden cross with a dove perched on the top in silent self-explanation. They back away apologizing. I let go of the cross and realize I’ve just flashed it like a badge.

The kind of relationship I want I can only find in prison, he says. But I’m not gay, he is quick to add. I’m not gay because I like to dominate. He nearly sums up the history of Christian marriage but I make no comment.

I love my mother, he says. It must break her heart every time you go back to jail, I reply. It does, he admits. I always get out long enough to take care of her business but she always knows when it’s time for me to come back. I know how to live here and I do it well. When she dies, I’ll become a lifer.

My babies miss me and so does my husband, she cries. I don’t belong here. I’ve never been in trouble. But then she tells me about the news that her liver is failing. And I know that she’s been in trouble for a lot longer than she’d like to admit.

What is prison ministry? I’ve been asking myself that question as I adjust to the routine and challenge of my chaplaincy internship at a county jail in the San Francisco Bay Area. As with most theological questions, I realize that I can answer more of what prison ministry is not than what it is.

For example, I know that prison ministry is not easy God-answers blanketed in religious pamphlets. But confessing what I do not know exposes the shallow depths of my understanding and places me in the mouth of Elijah’s cave, where I must wait for God to pass by or be abandoned to myself in the dark.

Either way, I still have to sit with an inmate for whom I have no easy answers. Like a child, I must listen to stories I simply wish were not true. And I still have to struggle with moments when I am simultaneously moved to compassion and repulsion as I sit with people whose crimes horrify and sadden me.

I’ve looked at the volunteer sign-up sheets that pass through the chaplain’s office. There is a relatively high percentage of Seventh-Day Adventists on that list. On one hand, I am proud of my denominational brothers and sisters for being present when so many other Christians are not. There is a shameful lack of programming in prison and many inmates who crave something to do appreciate any Bible study or worship service.

On the other hand, when I compare the Adventist presence in prison to the presence of the prison in Adventism I wonder if American Adventists have let themselves be affected as deeply by the almost two million people incarcerated in the United States as those who participate in "Prison Ministry" hope to affect the inmates they visit.

My own understanding of the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) has only begun to develop in the past year, but I am trying to act responsibly with the knowledge I now possess. I have no delusions about my role as a jail chaplain. The best I hope for each day is to be present with people wherever they are and that God might always pass by.

I have witnessed powerful Spirit-filled moments that have left me shaking and knowing that God is at work in the most bewildering places. But I have also left visits feeling nothing but a frightening, God-forsaken void.

Regardless of my religious experiences, I do not have any plans for subverting the PIC from the "inside," nor do I expect my views on criminal justice and its intersections with Christian theology to be simplified.

My time at jail has begun to paint for me an intricate mural of human faces and stories that yields no easy finger pointing. Knowing that this mural is a part of the American landscape that few on the "outside" allow themselves to see, I am confronted with the challenge of conveying to my own church the necessity of becoming realists; if we only minister to the individual without also ministering to the system, then the gospel we proclaim will never be the gospel Jesus lived, a gospel characterized by radical love and radical politics.

If our prison ministry is to be rooted in the reality of jail and prison life, we will need to engage in some hard, transformative lessons. More specifically, Anglo Adventists will have to speak frankly about their own racist proclivities if they are to listen with honest openness to the maddening statistics concerning the incarceration of ethnic minorities in U.S. prisons.

For example, African-American men comprise less than 7 percent of the U.S. population, yet they represent almost half of the incarcerated population.1 How we explain this statistic reveals volumes about ourselves.

Addressing issues of privatization, inmate labor, and supermax prisons, Angela Davis writes, "the overwhelming numbers of black men imprisoned in the United States makes them by far the most threatened members of our society when it comes to the new form of enslavement being implemented through the prison system."2

If we take seriously the work of activists like Davis, Adventists will reflexively become the abolitionists of our heritage and once again protest the grossly disproportionate incarceration of African-Americans in the United States.

Further, as a body of believers all of us Adventists will have to work through our collective homophobia if we are to begin to speak out with com/passion against the culture of prison rape. By doing so, we will move our ministry inward, to our own congregations—to ourselves.

In our churches, we will have to examine how the Adventist conceptualization of gender roles belongs to the tragically linked histories of Christian patriarchy and family violence. In time, Adventist prison ministries will be transformed by critical reflection.

The result will mean that we will also have to reject the privatization of prisons—including Adventist affiliated facilities like Maranatha Corrections—as an acceptable practice, because our consciences will not allow us to support the conjoining of corporate interests and a criminal justice system proven to work against the interests of people of color and the poor.

Even as I write this article I know that I am saying things I have never heard inside an Adventist church. But then, my experience has been largely shaped by white, middle-class Adventism. I don’t know what is said elsewhere. Perhaps this will be my next lesson depending on who reads this article.

Regardless, I know that I have been changed by what I have learned and continue to learn. I do not want to minister with blinders on, oblivious to the systemic realities that make ministry necessary at all.

Thus, my prayer for my denomination and for all Christians is that we begin to bring the fullness of the gospel not only to the individual, but also to the social, political, and religious institutions that form and deform human beings, and then throw them away only to euphemize their disposal as an act of "reform."

Notes and References

1. Steve Donziger, ed., The Real War on Crime: The Report of the National Criminal Justice Commission (New York: Harper Perennial, (1996), 102.
2. Angela Davis, "Race, Gender, and Prison History: From the Convict Lease System to the Supermax Prison," in Prison Masculinities, eds. Don Sabo, Terry A. Kupers, and Willie London (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).

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