In their timely book, Joshua Dubler and Vincent Lloyd identify the “abolition spirit” as “both a spirit of righteous protest and a concrete, grassroots organizing practice” that pushes “us to envision the impossible [that all prisoners be free], and to have faith in our power to make the impossible a reality” (17). This spirit animates “the collective projects of those who struggle to dismantle [the ruling American order]” (2) and transform our “prison nation” (1). Dubler and Lloyd maintain that these projects will need to resuscitate a “fully transformative vision of what justice is and must become” (8). This vision, they suggest, can be gleaned from religious traditions.
Whereas prison abolitionism has been largely secularist, Dubler and Lloyd argue that “only by getting religion can the movement against prisons sufficiently empower itself to break the prison's stranglehold on ‘justice’ in America” (8). They document how religion (alongside racial, economic, and political factors) contributed to mass incarceration as, beginning in the early 1960s, liberal Protestantism retreated, leaving room for an “evangelical piety” that is unconcerned with collective life, where justice is identified with law and criminal justice systems. With the religious left weakened, “divine justice was cut off from American politics” (7), and mass incarceration was permitted to explode without a religious or moral check on its expansion. Their answer is not to reject religion, but to harness its alternative spirit and vision of justice for prison abolition.
Dubler and Lloyd are correct that a broad-based, inclusive coalition lit by a fiery desire for justice is necessary to abolish prisons and transform our society. This commitment leads them to make two important moves: first, to welcome “nonreformist reformers” under the abolitionist tent, and second, to leave their meaning of “justice” fluid. I welcome the first move, but wonder whether clarity about the meaning of justice might rather strengthen the possibilities of coalition building, especially with secularist partners.
In the first case, in contrast with some abolitionists who worry about “cooptation and enervation” (225), Dubler and Lloyd are willing to bring into the fold people who might not explicitly identify as prison abolitionists. Although they criticize prison reformers for having “absolutely no appreciation of just how massive the problem is,” they also seem to recognize that not everyone who eschews the prison abolitionist label is a mere reformer. They write, “Whether you call yourself an abolitionist or not matters little. So long as you are committed to ridding your community of systemic forms of state violence … then you are already allied with the abolitionist struggle” (53). Writing as someone who has published my doubts about abolitionism, but also about mere reformism, this concession is a welcome invitation to collaboration.
Second, Dubler and Lloyd do not flesh out their own vision of justice because they want “to allow for the broadest possible coalition” (17). They are clear that identifying justice with the law or with criminal justice systems is a stunted conception of justice and that “the existence of something ‘beyond’ [legal justice] must be affirmed” (17). At times, Dubler and Lloyd refer to “divine justice” or a “higher moral law.” They provide some discussion of justice as understood by restorative justice advocates, especially covenant justice. But they never advance their own vision of justice. Although I appreciate wanting to generate grassroots theories and practices of justice that are inclusive of all possible coalition partners, I wonder whether vagueness about justice might work against their purpose of coalition building. A secularist activist on the political left might be skeptical because one does not have to look far in the culture wars to find people on the religious right appealing to “divine justice” to impose their standards on the personal lives of others. Because of this risk, Dubler and Lloyd ought to spell out their understanding of justice more fully.
Overall, Break Every Yoke makes important contributions by illuminating the religious dimensions of mass incarceration, by inviting especially its religious audiences to “riskier and more exacting, but also more comprehensive, movements toward justice” (16), and by clarifying the possibilities of religion in the work of justice. It is a suitable text for university libraries as well as for classroom use, particularly in graduate or seminary settings.
