Event Details
- Date & Time:
Sunday, January 25, 2015 | 9:30 a.m. - Location:
100 Tarry Road, San Anselmo, CA 94960
Forgiveness is at the heart of the Christian tradition. In the Lord’s Prayer, we pray that we might be forgiven as we forgive others. This Sunday, January 25, 2015, Criminal Justice Sunday in the PCUSA, at 9:30 a.m., we’ll examine our commitment to practicing forgiveness, and explore the intersection of our identity as a forgiving people with our attitudes towards those in the criminal justice system.
Our country has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The prison population has increased from 300,000 people in the early 1970′s to 2.3 million people today. One in every three black males born in this century is expected to be incarcerated. Hundreds of thousands of nonviolent offenders have been forced to spend decades in prison. There are more than a half million people in prison for drug offenses today, up from just 41,000 in 1980. Thousands of innocent people are imprisoned because they are too poor to afford adequate legal representation. Spending on jails and prisons by our state and federal governments has risen from $6.9 billion in 1980 to nearly $80 billion today. This is a broken system; this is a system based on retribution and cruelty, not a system based on fairness, restoration, and rehabilitation.
Scripture reminds us to care for, visit, and minister to the prisoner, as if the prisoner is our Lord (Matthew 25:36). We can start by learning about the work of the Insight Prison Project at San Quentin, and the Equal Justice Initiative (Bryan Stevenson), and become inspired to change the narratives and norms that have taken our criminal justice system so far down the wrong road. Our SHPC Singers will inspire us, too!
