What did Jesus say about prisons and the police?

At a Glance

What I said: I was in prison, and you came to me (Matthew 25:36). I said I was sent to proclaim release to the captives (Luke 4:18). When an officer struck me, I asked him, why do you beat me? (John 18:23).

What the rest of the Bible says: The law of Moses had almost no prisons. A thief paid back what he took, and more, up to five times over (Exodus 22:1–4). The prophets called God’s people to let the oppressed go free (Isaiah 58:6).

When today’s view appeared: Locking people away for years as a punishment is mostly a modern idea, from the late 1700s. The United States now holds nearly two million people, at one of the highest rates in the world.

The short answer: I told you that I am the one inside the prison, and that you will be judged by whether you came. A nation that locks away more of its people than almost any other has not been visiting me.

I know the inside of a cell.

They came for me at night, with swords and clubs. I said to them, Have you come out as against a robber … ? I sat daily in the temple teaching, and you didn’t arrest me (Matthew 26:55). They wanted me where there would be no crowd to see.

They took me to the high priest’s house. When I answered his questions, one of the officers standing by slapped Jesus with his hand. I did not hit him back. But I did not stay silent either. If I have spoken evil, testify of the evil; but if well, why do you beat me? (John 18:22–23).

I was held overnight, beaten, mocked, and handed to the governor in the morning. Within a day I was dead.

My cousin John was arrested for criticizing the king and was beheaded in his cell. Peter was jailed. Paul was jailed again and again, and wrote some of his letters in chains. The first generations of my followers knew the inside of prisons better than most people ever will.

What I taught

When I stood up in the synagogue at Nazareth, I read from the scroll of Isaiah and said it was coming true that day: The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me … to proclaim release to the captives … to deliver those who are crushed (Luke 4:18).

And when I told my friends how the nations would be judged, I said the King would say: I was hungry, and you gave me food to eat … I was sick, and you visited me. I was in prison, and you came to me (Matthew 25:35–36). When they asked when they had ever seen me in prison, the answer was: because you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me (Matthew 25:40).

And to the others: sick, and in prison, and you didn’t visit me (Matthew 25:43).

I did not ask whether the prisoner was guilty. Some of them were. I said I was there, with them.

I spent my life with people the respectable called sinners. This man welcomes sinners, and eats with them, they said of me (Luke 15:2). I answered, Those who are healthy have no need for a physician, but those who are sick (Mark 2:17). When Peter asked how many times he had to forgive, I said, until seventy times seven (Matthew 18:22).

What the rest of your Bible says

My people’s law had punishments, some of them harsh. But it did not lock people away for years.

When a man stole, he paid it back, and more: If a man steals an ox or a sheep, and kills it or sells it, he shall pay five oxen for an ox, and four sheep for a sheep (Exodus 22:1). The point was to repair the harm to the one who lost it. When the tax collector Zacchaeus met me, that is what he did on his own: If I have wrongfully exacted anything of anyone, I restore four times as much (Luke 19:8).

The prisons in my Bible are mostly the tools of kings: the dungeon Joseph was thrown into, the cistern Jeremiah was lowered into, the cell where Herod kept John. In my own stories, prison is where a man went who could not pay a debt (Matthew 5:25–26; 18:30).

And the prophets said what God wants: to release the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free (Isaiah 58:6).

What came after

For most of history, jails held people waiting for trial, waiting for punishment, or waiting to pay. The punishment itself was usually something else: a fine, a flogging, exile, or death.

Making long confinement the usual punishment came later. In Philadelphia in the 1790s, Quakers and other reformers who wanted something gentler than the whip and the gallows turned the Walnut Street Jail into one of the first places of its kind. In 1829, after years of their urging, Pennsylvania opened the Eastern State Penitentiary, where prisoners were kept alone in their cells so they could reflect and repent. The word penitentiary comes from that hope: penitence.¹ They meant it as mercy. Many of the people kept alone for years lost their minds.

In the United States, the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery in 1865 except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. In the South, states used that exception to arrest freed Black men for small offenses and lease them out as labor to mines, farms and railroads, where many of them died.²

Today the United States holds nearly two million people in its prisons, jails and detention centers, including more than 450,000 on any given day who are in jail waiting for trial and have not been convicted.³ Its rate of incarceration is higher than that of any other independent democracy.⁴ Black Americans are held in state prisons at nearly five times the rate of white Americans.⁵

The ones who went

I will give my followers their due here. They have been going in for a long time.

Christians have visited prisoners since the first century. Remember those who are in bonds, as bound with them, one of the early letters says (Hebrews 13:3). In the 1810s, a Quaker woman named Elizabeth Fry began visiting the women in London’s Newgate prison and changed how Britain treated them.⁶ In 1976 Charles Colson, who had served seven months in federal prison for a crime tied to the Watergate scandal, founded Prison Fellowship, which still sends volunteers into prisons across the country.⁷ Every week, in every state, church people walk into jails to sit with men and women everyone else has forgotten.

That is exactly what I asked. Keep doing it.

But ask also why so many are there, for so long, and who they are. Visiting a prison and building a bigger one are different things, and it is easy to vote for the second without ever doing the first. Even Colson’s Prison Fellowship came to press for shorter sentences.

What You’ll Hear Back

“Romans 13 says the authorities are God’s servants. Support the police.”

Paul wrote that rulers are not a terror to the good work, but to the evil (Romans 13:3). That is what a ruler is for. When the authorities do that, it is right to honor them, and many police officers do hard and dangerous work for their neighbors.

But Paul wrote it to Christians who would soon be jailed and killed by the same authorities. And the officer who struck me was an authority too. I did not tell him he was wrong to exist. I told him he was wrong to strike me. You can do both: honor the work, and refuse to excuse the blow.

John the Baptist said the same thing to the soldiers who came to him, men who often acted as police in his time: Extort from no one by violence, neither accuse anyone wrongfully (Luke 3:14).

“Criminals deserve to be punished.”

Many of them have done real harm, and the harm is real. My people’s law said so, and so do I. But the law I grew up on aimed at repair: paying back the one who was hurt. Ask whether the punishment you want repairs anything, for anyone.

And remember what I said in the parable: the servant who was forgiven a great debt, and then threw his fellow servant into prison over a small one, was the one condemned at the end (Matthew 18:30–34).

“Prisons keep us safe.”

Some people are dangerous, and others need to be kept from them. I do not deny that. But a society that locks away more of its people than nearly any other on earth has to ask whether it is keeping itself safe, or only keeping itself from seeing.

“Matthew 25 is about visiting Christians in prison, not all prisoners.”

Some readers do take the least of these my brothers to mean my followers, especially missionaries jailed for preaching. Others take it to mean anyone in need. Even on the narrower reading, the people in that passage did not ask who was guilty before they went in. And they were surprised to learn whom they had visited.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Matthew 25:31–46.

You will find: the list of the people by whose treatment the nations are judged, and the prisoner is on it twice.

Then read Luke 4:16–21 and John 18:19–24, and notice what I said to the officer who hit me.

The Short Version

• I was arrested at night, struck by an officer, held overnight and executed by the state.
• I said I was in prison, and you came to me, and that I came to proclaim release to the captives.
• The law of Moses had almost no prisons. A thief paid back what he took, and more.
• Locking people away for years as the punishment is mostly a modern idea, from the late 1700s.
• The United States holds nearly two million people, more than 450,000 of them not yet convicted.
• My followers have visited prisoners from the beginning. I ask you to keep going in, and to ask why so many are there.