Trinity IX, Sunday 17th August, by Edward Smyth of the Prison Reform Trust

Isaiah 5.1-7
Hebrews 11.29-12.2
St Luke 22.49-56

‘And he looked for justice, but saw bloodshed; for righteousness but heard cries of distress.’ 

I ought, really, to begin this slot as a guest preacher by thanking Fr Jack for the invitation to this splendid church which is, as it happens, mere moments from the office of the Prison Reform Trust where I am the Head of Development. 

 And indeed I fully intended to do so...until I looked at today’s readings and realised that Fr Jack had, in fact, quite royally done me over. 

 Because this is a bracing set of readings for a quiet summer Sunday in central London. The compilers of the lectionary, I can only assume, feared that our concentration may have lapsed in the heat – that we had perhaps become complacent...yep, God is Love, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, love your neighbour – got it. What time’s lunch? 

 I confess, I quite like my Jesus Victorian. Meek and mild; no crying he makes; cherubic and squidgy. ‘I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled. Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division.’ 

 Ah. 

 About three months ago I travelled – for the first time – to HMP Swaleside, a high-security men’s prison on the Isle of Sheppey. Swaleside is a troubled place – what some in my world would call a ‘proper prison,’ holding mostly prisoners serving very long sentences for some very unpleasant crimes – and it is a prison which has chronic issues with drugs being delivered by drone, violence, and genuinely shocking levels of self-harm and suicide. 

 I am not a Londoner by upbringing, and I am therefore not one of those people for whom the world outside Zone 1 is a terrifying place, and comes to an end entirely as one reaches the M25. But the trip to Swaleside was striking. I often describe prisons as society’s ‘dark places,’ – places where we send people at least in part to forget about them – but I have rarely had that sense of a division from society so starkly demonstrated. There was something genuinely disconcerting about that trip: crossing the Kingsferry Bridge onto the Isle of Sheppey, rain beating down on the windscreen; following the map away from civilisation down roads of increasingly loneliness before, finally, turning into a gloomy lane which ran a mile towards the three forbidding prisons of the ‘Sheppey Cluster.’ Other than a few wind turbines there was nothing else so far as the eye could see. As I arrived a bus disgorged its passengers. There are very few sadder sights than arriving at a prison as a ‘family visit’ is about to take place: the vision of a handful of – mainly – women with small children inadequately wrapped up against the horizontal rain was a sobering one. 

 This kind of ‘out of town’ prison is now the norm. There are obvious economic and practical arguments in favour of putting prisons in the middle of nowhere; but more fundamentally this is a direct consequence of a shift in society’s philosophy of punishment which we can date roughly to the eighteenth century. It is at that point, as any of you who know your Foucault will – gorily – remember, that the state’s response to criminal behaviour began to shift from the body (deterrence) to the mind (rehabilitation). Before that – indeed for many thousands of years – prison was where you went to await your punishment (execution, flogging, deportation etc); after this prison was your punishment. And so with more and more people spending longer and longer in prison as an end in itself, more and larger prisons were required...and today we find ourselves with massive warehouse-style prisons – such as the new HMP Millsike in Yorkshire, the opening of which I attended in March – built on land sold to the Government by now extremely wealthy pig farmers. His attendance at the ribbon-cutting at Millsike was an odd sight indeed. 

 A common response to the kind of things I have just said – about the terrible conditions at HMP Swaleside and about the shift towards out-of-town prisons – is ‘Who cares?’ – and I don’t know, perhaps there are people here this morning thinking the same thing. Prisoners are hardly a sympathetic group, an observation borne out by successive governments’ handling of issues of criminal justice: anything other than ‘more punitive’ and ‘more prisons’ is a guaranteed vote-loser. 

 A vicar friend of mine once told me that the moment a preacher says ‘as T.S. Eliot wrote...’ he immediately switches off and starts thinking about the football. In my line of work the equivalent is ‘as Churchill once said.’ As Churchill once said... well...actually, he didn’t say what usually comes next, which tends to be that ‘you can judge a society by how it treats its prisoners.’ That was Dostoyevsky. And it’s a decent sentiment in my view, but it’s not as good as what Churchill actually said which I am going to recount, with apologies both for its length, and for the inevitable moment I slip into a Jim Hacker-style impression – surprisingly difficult not to do. 

 The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country. A calm and dispassionate recognition of the rights of the accused against the state and even of convicted criminals against the state, a constant heart-searching by all charged with the duty of punishment, a desire and eagerness to rehabilitate in the world of industry of all those who have paid their dues in the hard coinage of punishment, tireless efforts towards the discovery of curative and regenerating processes and an unfaltering faith that there is a treasure, if only you can find it in the heart of every person – 

these are the symbols which in the treatment of crime and criminals mark and measure the stored up strength of a nation, and are the sign and proof of the living virtue in it. 

 There’s a reason I began this sermon with a line from today’s Epistle. Because if you go into a contemporary British prison looking for justice, you will all too often find bloodshed instead. And if you go into a contemporary British prison looking for righteousness you will all too often – always, in fact – hear the cries of distress instead. Our prisons are a disgrace, and I maintain this: 

-  It is perfectly possible to believe that prison is an appropriate expression of society’s censure of an act and be a Christian

-  It is perfectly possible to believe that there are some people who quite simply cannot ever be released from prison and be a Christian

-  It is perfectly possible to believe that one of the functions of prison is to deter others from behaving in a similar way and be a Christian

- But it is not possible to be a Christian and to think that prison should be a place where hope is extinguished, where people are and should be harmed and, all too often by their own hand and by the hands of others, killed, and where rehabilitation is all too often not even attempted. 

And that is the reality of our prisons today; and that is why we should care.

There are plenty of people in my world who advocate for the abolition of prisons. I am not one of them; and nor is my employer. Plenty of people in prison believe the same thing, incidentally: that their sentence is entirely justified and, in fact, that serving it is part of their process of atonement. I think I can take as read that, as Christians, we cannot condone a blanket throw-away-the-key approach. As such, most people will be released from prison one day and it is in society’s interest to ensure that they emerge better, not worse, than they went in. But more than that, it is simply the right thing to do. To do otherwise is to scapegoat; to condemn; to hate the sinner and not the sin; to refuse to see that treasure in the heart of every man and women, if only we can find it. It is the state’s job to punish. It is our job to look for the treasure. Those two things can happen at once and they should happen at once. All too often we won’t find it. But to look is our calling. To allow prisoners’ appropriate and justified division from society to serve as an excuse not to look – not to care? Then we deny that calling. 

 The end of our Gospel reading today has Christ admonishing the crowd as ‘hypocrites!’ for being able to interpret signs of the weather, but failing to interpret – or, rather, choosing not to interpret – the signs of the times. Too often we fall into the trap of allowing our interpretation of God’s call on us and our lives to ossify: we find an interpretation we’re happy with, and we stick to it, living our lives comfortable under the misapprehension that we’re doing what’s asked of us. But God’s call is a living thing, and it is whispered into our ears all our lives long. God will sometimes ask new, difficult things of us. Our views on people in prison and our attitude towards them I think similarly ossify. But that Epistle passage is for me – and perhaps, I hope, for you – a whisper worth listening to and, crucially, responding to. 

 And he looked for justice, but saw bloodshed; 

For righteousness, but heard cries of distress. 

Amen.