Private Prisons, Black American Liberation Theology, and Overpopulation

In reading James Cone's black theology, the subject of private prisons inevitably appears. “Through private prisons," he writes, "whites have turned the brutality of their racist legal systems into a profit-making venture for dying white towns and cities throughout America. One can lynch a person without a rope or tree.” Crucifixion and lynching can occur in systems as well as in oppressive acts committed by human agents. That's one of the fundamental claims liberation theology makes. Sin is systemic as well as personal.

Liberation theology in an American context means not only recognizing the lynching tree in relation to the cross and the gospel, but also in identifying and working to overthrow the oppression of a criminal justice system that objectifies human beings as products in an emerging industrial enterprise.

The haunting thought I'm left with is this: human overpopulation has grim anthropological consequences. Fill the earth with human beings, some rich and most poor, and the gaze of corporate entities will inevitably fall upon the poor with terrifying indifference and detached avarice: in greed, they will look upon a vast field of human beings and think to themselves “This is a crop waiting to be harvested. This is a market waiting to be tapped. This is a world of objects from which I may profit.” The preciousness of every human life falls to the wayside as people are slowly cut down like stalks of wheat to be processed and sold. Under the pretense of even the slightest infraction, the black person is cut from the earth of their own lives and sold to private prisons that profess to "correct and reform." But when literally millions of people are behind bars, many of them unjustly so, how much correction and reformation could there be occurring in reality? You don't correct or reform products.

In a world where humans are everywhere and more are born every day, they will inevitably be seen as little more than resources for the ever-growing corporate bodies that choke the skyline.

In a world where the accumulation of capital is Lord and human beings number in the billions, human life will be monetized. That is the consequence of systemic sin.

To borrow from Orwell, if you want an image of the future, imagine a field of boots, stamping on a field of human faces, hauling them up from the dirt, and selling them to someone else to stamp on....forever.