Bonhoeffer and Incarceration

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Prison changes people, even people who only visit. For the past seven years, as director of a prison education program, I have spent several hours every week inside the Women’s Therapeutic Residential Center, a medium-security, 1,200 bed facility for women in Henning, Tennessee. This carceral experience has shifted my thinking about the (im)morality of incarceration, the (in)justice of the criminal justice system, and (un)ethical methods of treating the incarcerated. It has also begun to change the way I read and understand Dietrich Bonhoeffer. As an example of this change, I will explore Bonhoeffer’s “After Ten Years” (1942) in light of my experience at the Women’s Therapeutic Residential Center. Although “After Ten Years” was penned several months before Bonhoeffer himself was arrested and imprisoned, I have found that reading it through my own carceral lens has brought the text alive for me in a new way.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was imprisoned for two years without trial prior to his execution, the majority at Tegel Prison in Berlin under the care of Chaplain Harald Poelchau. Poelchau did what many prison chaplains do: he worked for life in a system purposed toward death. His navigation of a Nazi prison as an employee and an active member of the resistance movement goes deeper than “code switching” or hiding in plain sight. He remained undiscovered as a resister because he became an active, paid participant in more than 1,000 executions of the regime. He was able to save some people from death because of his participation in other people’s executions. Drawing on a collaborative ethnography of prison chaplaincy, I argue that Poelchau is representative of prison chaplains who learn to hold both horror and holiness within themselves, following the example of Jesus in being “made sin” for the sake of salvation. 

In 2019, I taught a course entitled "Theology Behind Bars" at Cook County Jail in Chicago. Among the texts we examined was Bonhoeffer's *Letters and Papers from Prison.*

In this paper, I will describe and analyze the experience of teaching Bonhoeffer in a prison context, both in terms of how his writing shed light on the experience of my students and in terms of how the students drew on their own experiences to understand and challenge the text. Coming from a wide array of religious backgrounds, students approached the text with a critical, and at times skeptical, eye, and yet were able to discern the ways in which Bonhoeffer's own thought challenged their theological presuppositions and offered a means to understand their experiences. Bonhoeffer's prison theology can offer resources for understanding and challenging the carceral system in the United States, and the contemporary relevance of his thought.

What does it take to be responsible--especially in our era of mass incarceration? I turn to Bonhoeffer's substitution or Stellvertretung, standing in for another, for guidance. The account of substitution and responsibility found in his Ethics has, however, its shortcoming according to critics, in particular, for being theologically presumptuous, ethically paternalistic, and vague. Bonhoeffer’s short story, “Farewell, Comrade,” written shortly after his arrest and incarceration in 1943, offers us an alternative and largely overlooked take on substitution, one that is theologically modest, solidaristic rather than paternalistic, and concrete. In effect, by making the story’s authorities its villains and the socially marginalized characters his heroic responsible substitutes, Bonhoeffer challenges his own earlier implication that responsibility requires substantial authority, power, privilege to enact heroic, history-changing acts. Instead, responsibility—both for and by those who are incarcerated—can and often should be made up of modest acts of reciprocity and mutual recognition.