Addiction, Religion, And Recovery

Rev. Alexander E. Sharp Clemency, Events, Faith Perspectives

Dear Friends and Colleagues, Most church buildings host two kinds of activities: traditional worship in the sanctuary on Sunday mornings, and meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) in the church basement, usually on weeknights. The twain rarely meet. Drug use and addiction don’t merit prime-time attention.  There is something profoundly wrong with this picture. AA and other Twelve-Step meetings are, of course, confidential. But what we do and say in church should reflect the reality that addiction exists all around us. If those who suffer from addiction feel not only unwelcome but stigmatized, what is our faith really about?  That is why almost three years ago I was delighted to learn of a conference on faith and addiction to be held in Minneapolis. I attended that meeting and blogged about it. Since 2019, the small group of volunteers who created that first event have transformed themselves into the organization called the Center of Addiction and Faith (CAF). Though it is still taking shape, CAF now has a board and executive director.  Its website offers theological reflections on addiction, sample sermons, a bibliography of helpful and inspiring readings, podcasts and webinars from leading authors and practitioners, and a directory of 12-step recovery groups for lay and clergy. This new organization has the potential to transform the way the institutional church, and, indeed, all of us, understand and respond to addiction.  CAF is holding its third annual conference in person as well as remotely in Minneapolis on October 7-9. Workshop topics will include: how to bring the subject of addiction forward in a congregational setting, and harm reduction as a spiritual response to substance abuse. I will be leading a discussion on the role of churches in ending the War on Drugs. All sessions will be online. Beyond these workshops, I see a second and possibly overriding reason why the conference is important. In bringing addiction out into the open, CAF may be key to accomplishing something that all of us hope for and few of us know how to do. I speak of revitalizing a progressive Christianity that is clearly in a downward spiral.  We normally think of addiction as manifested in those abusing substances or trapped in gambling or pornography. It is important to deal with these afflictions as they affect individuals. But, at a more profound level, seeking to understand addiction is a way of coming to terms with what might be considered the human condition. It raises profound questions about personal freedom, how we change, and the sources of meaning in our lives. These are religious questions. Yet they are rarely answered in the traditional church. Even as church attendance declines, we hear increasingly of those who say they are “spiritual but not religious.” They are the “new wine” that the Bible talks about when it says “new wine is put into fresh wineskins.” (Matt. 9:17) They reject the “old wineskin” of organized religion with its outdated theology and empty ritual.  In my experience, the religious figure today who comes closest to capturing what those who call themselves “spiritual but not religious” are reaching for is Richard Rohr, a Franciscan Father and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His spiritual insights have the potential to bring new vitality and meaning to a Christian church that must change to survive.   If you drop his name in casual conversation, you will be surprised how many people recognize it and smile. How many theologians recently have been the subject of articles in prominent national magazines such as the New Yorker and Harpers? The language of addiction is central to Rohr’s theological perspective. In one of his books, Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps, he makes the case that in a profound sense, we are all addicts. In varying degrees, we pursue false gods. These, in turn, separate us from our “True Self” as the source and expression of authentic joy and meaning. Although he will not be with us in person, Rohr’s message will be abundantly present throughout the CAF conference.   Sincerely,  Rev. Alexander E. Sharp, Executive Director, Clergy for a New Drug Policy

“BLESSED ARE THE MERCIFUL, FOR THEY SHALL RECEIVE MERCY”

Rev. Alexander E. Sharp Clemency, Faith Perspectives

Those of us who have grown up attending church  can recall at least a few familiar Biblical passages. For attorney and law professor Mark Osler, these passages have guided his life.   In 2011, he was a federal prosecutor in Detroit.  His job was to send those accused of dealing, or even possessing, crack cocaine to prison, sometimes for life. Under the law, those with crack, usually African Americans, faced sentences 100 times greater than those, mostly Whites, with powder cocaine. One day Osler remembered Jesus coming upon a group of pharisees who were about stone to death a woman caught in adultery.  When they asked him what they should do, Jesus answered, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” All the men present dropped their stones, and walked silently away. (John 8:7-8)  In the courtroom, Osler realized, “I was the guy with the rock.” Osler resigned his position and took a teaching job at Baylor Law School, where he and legal colleagues successfully challenged the 100 to 1 crack-to-powder disparity. In 2011, he moved to St. Thomas Law School in Minneapolis and founded the first law school clemency clinic in the United States. He was instrumental in the creation of the Clemency Initiative at the end of President Obama’s second term. Osler’s work continues to attract national attention. Last week he spoke with Clergy for a New Drug Policy about the Obama Clemency Initiative and prospects for clemency under the Trump administration. Q: Of the 1,715 individuals who received clemency under the Obama Clemency Initiative, how many of their convictions were in some way related to the draconian laws of the War on Drugs? A: Nearly all of them. Q: In light of this, what changes would you propose in our drug laws? A: I would argue for changes in our tactics and strategy, as well as in our drug laws. One of the biggest drivers of unfair sentences is that we use the weight of the drugs at issue as a proxy for culpability. That’s just wrong. If I hire somebody for $500 plus expenses to go down to Laredo and pick up some kilos of methamphetamine, I’m going to make tens of thousands of dollars once I sell those kilos.  If we both get arrested, we are going to face the same sentence because we’re involved in the same activity. But we are not equally culpable, or anything close to it. We should not be addressing people at all.  When it comes to interdiction, the most we can hope for because of the laws of economics is to marginally and temporarily raise the street price of drugs. It’s supply and demand. As long as the demand is there the supply is going come back.  Labor is especially easily replaced. What they should go after is the cash flow because you’re never going to close down a business by sweeping up low wage labor but you can close down a business by denying them cash flow and credit.  The FBI have become real experts at grabbing money going back to terrorist groups. We can apply that expertise to narcotics, and shut them down that way. This would demonstrate a whole new model: The guy who’s selling crack isn’t going to be in prison, he’s just not going have that job anymore. Q: Concerning drug laws, I thought you would say that we need to get rid of mandatory minimums and three strikes. A: Absolutely. The First Step Act is starting to move towards that. Q: If we had proportionate, fair sentencing laws, would we still need clemency? A: You wouldn’t need it as much, but we would still need clemency to take into account people who received long sentences, even if they had serious involvement in narcotics or other crimes, who have changed their lives, who aren’t the same person. You take Rudy Martinez. That was not a case where someone got racked up for a minor role. He was transporting  a lot of cocaine, but the person he was when he did that is fundamentally different than the person he is now. That idea of redemption is that there can be a transformation in a person’s life. You would always need clemency to account for those people whose lives have changed, whose souls, and hearts, and minds, are different. Q: How does that argument apply to the hardest core crimes? Let’s take first degree murder. No matter how repentant, no matter how much one changes, isn’t there degree of retribution needed for some crimes? A: Certainly there is a role for societal retribution. It helps to avoid vigilantism. As long as people are assured that the state is going to take an approach that ensures punishment, they are not going take action into their own hands. But, even for the worst crimes, we can’t rule out the possibility of redemption. King David was a murderer. Paul was a murderer in a conspiracy. They were redeemable. They were given a role. We visit those in prison with the goal of there being a role, a vocation, even for those people who have done terrible things. Q: The Obama Clemency Initiative chose to look only at individuals on a case-by-case basis.  Are there categories he could have used? For example, the ACLU report A Living Death argues that we should review all non-violent offenders who have been given life sentences without parole. A: You could look at people who received really long sentences before they were 22 years old.  We know the brain science which tells us how much people change after that age. We are not serving public safety by spending millions of dollars to incarcerate those people. One thing we could do is go to the warden of each prison and ask “Who doesn’t belong here?” They will tell you. My students go into the prison to interview their clients and the guards say, “This is the guy who should be getting out.” Q: Mark Mauer of The Sentencing Project has argued for no sentences longer than 20 years.   A: I don’t think that’s politically feasible. We’re a long way from that.  There’s an ongoing argument within the advocacy community: Do you go for incremental changes, or do you try to have everything change right now? Even the briefest analysis of our political history will tell you that everything’s incremental. That’s how things change. Look at the civil rights movement.  There wasn’t a before and after. There was a movement toward what’s better. It’s that gradual arc towards justice. Q: Are there other nations with better drug laws? A: Portugal is a reasonable model to look at. It has decriminalized all drugs.  But they also have treatment on demand. One thing that we have to take into account is that the United States is a much greater consumer of narcotics than a nation like Portugal. Our usage rates outstrip those of any other country. The social costs are significant. Most of us know someone who is consumed by opioids and the tragedy that goes with that. We’re going to have to put more resources towards treatment, for example, than a country with a lower rate of consumption. Q: Why do we consume so much more? A: I think it’s in part because of our individualism. We all believe that our lives have to be significant, important, and exciting. Drugs do that. In the same way that Americans all want to be on television, we all want to see things in an exciting way. Selling or doing drugs provides that. Q: What is your assessment of the First Step Act brought forward and passed under the Trump Administration? A: I wrote a piece in the Minneapolis Star Tribune supporting it. It’s an incremental step and frankly, it’s a lot more than people expected to come from this administration. I think the response is, “That’s great. Let’s keep moving. Let’s get to that next step.” Q: Who is going to implement it?  Attorney General Barr does not seem sympathetic. In his first term as Attorney General, he said, “We have a choice between more prisons and more crime.” A: I think that there is some real opportunity in this administration. In the past, the bar to reform has consistently been the Department of Justice.  Politicians and presidents tend to defer to DOJ. This President does not. This brings a remarkable opportunity We saw that with the First Step Act. The First Step Act includes a lot of things we did not get from the Obama Administration, and the reason was because DOJ said, “Don’t do that.” Well, Donald Trump doesn’t care what DOJ thinks.  On that score, we’re better off. Also, there is a remarkable advocate for reform within the inner circle of this White House. That’s Jared Kushner. Because of the experience of his family due the incarceration of his father, I think he’s really motivated to take action in this area. The third thing is that Attorney General Barr is a believer in the unitary executive theory: the president has to re-claim from the bureaucracy the power that is given to him or her by the Constitution.  This is completely consistent with our argument on clemency: the president has to claim that power and take it back from DOJ. Q: Our discussion thus far pertains to the 181,000 people in the federal prisons system.  This is a small percentage of the over 2.1 million individuals in state prisons and jails.  Is there anything federally that can affect what happens in the states? A: Not directly.  But hopefully, we will see some “leading by example.” It helps that there are some conservative Republicans leading the charge at the national level.  This gives conservatives at the state level permission to do the same thing. When you’ve got Senator Mike Lee and the Koch Foundation arguing for this, it sends a signal to the states. Harsh punishment across the board is no longer entirely a core Republican belief. That’s a game changer. Q: In the introduction, we commented on your Christian faith. Are there other scripture passages that have guided your work?   Micah 6:8 is common to a lot of people.  I remember first coming across that when I was a prosecutor. On the surface, it seems almost glib. You have three values:  justice, mercy, and humility. They are all good, but in criminal law they are in tension with one another. If justice is viewed as treating similarly situated people the same way, it’s fairness.Mercy cuts into that.  In a way, it is an argument for unfairness. What we learn is that the criminal justice system can’t be all mercy or all justice. It has to have aspects of both if it’s going to be principled. Our tendency in the United States is to have all justice and no mercy.  The active push from people who take those principles seriously has to be towards mercy because we are too far towards the other pole. We also need to learn humility. Consider juvenile life without parole. We are saying someone is irredeemable.  We are playing God when we have such certainty about something that is ultimately unknowable, namely the chance of redemption for someone we barely know. Christ also told us, “When you visit those in prison, you visit me.”  This is transformative for me. There is an imperative to visit all those in prison, not just innocent people, not political prisoners, not our friends, but all those who are in prison. The power of that directive is shrouded until people actually do it. I have students who have generally had fairly privileged lives. My clinic students are required to go a prison and spend two days with a client.  They come back transformed. Taking down someone’s life story as they sit in a cell is something that alters the way they see the world. That is exactly what Jesus is after when he tells …

Clemency and Advent

Eric Sterling Clemency

The season of advent is a season of mercy. God’s gift of Jesus to the world was prophesied by Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, as a “tender mercy” (Luke 1:78). For the last 1500 years, Advent has been a season of merciful acts in the churches of Western Christianity. What steps can we take in this season to help make mercy real in the world? A fundamental form of mercy is forgiveness of transgression. In our society, we punish transgression by imprisonment. Contemporary America is one of the most punishing societies in history. Our current rate of imprisonment is over 700 persons per 100,000 population. This is a huge increase compared to our historic rate of imprisonment for the half century between 1920 and 1970 of about 110-140 per 100,000. No country – not China, Russia, Iran, etc. – imprisons its population at rates like America’s current rate. America is now imprisoning so many people that, even though about 1 out of 20 people in the world live in the U.S., 1 out of 4 of the world’s prisoners are kept in cells in the U.S.!

Why Not Forgiveness?

Jean Bishop Clemency, Guest Pieces

A powerful way to see the effects of the disastrous and misguided war on drugs is to work on a clemency petition. Tens of thousands of prisoners are warehoused in America’s prisons, serving long and sometimes life sentences for non-violent drug offenses. Thousands of federal prisoners are seeking commutations of their sentences from the only person who can grant them: the President of the United States. I have worked on two such petitions. In the process of preparing those petitions, you learn the life story of a person seeking mercy; you come to care deeply about what becomes of them; and you see up close how out of proportion the punishment often is to the drug crime. One of the petitions I worked on, sadly, was just denied. But the other has just been granted, one of 214 announced on August 3, 2016. Charlie Lawuary, age 64, was serving a natural life sentence for possession with intent to distribute crack cocaine. Because Charlie was alleged to have more than 50 grams of cocaine and he had two prior felony drug convictions, the life sentence was mandatory. Charlie was utterly remorseful; he felt deep shame that he had profited by addicting people. He was also completely rehabilitated and had earned a reputation as the inmate who, when a new prisoner arrived, used his own commissary money to buy needed supplies for the newcomer. Charlie has a large, supportive family eager to welcome him home. He has served 18 years of his sentence. Charlie will not get out of prison right away; the sentence will continue until August 3, 2018, and he must participate in a drug program before he can be released. But he and his family have hope now that he will not die in prison. My other prisoner–the one who was denied– too, has a close and loving family which is aching for him to return home. He has done everything possible to live an upstanding life since his conviction for his crime. He has done enough time. He should come home. So should thousands of others like him.

clemency

Clemency: An Alternative for Illinois

Rev. Katherine B. Ray Clemency, Guest Pieces, IL, Opinion

Our guest blogger is Jeanne Bishop, assistant public defender at Cook County Public Defender’s Office, adjunct professor of law at Northwestern, author of Change of Heart: Justice, Mercy and Making Peace with My Sister’s Killer (Westminster John Knox Press) and a member of Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. On February 11, 2015, newly-inaugurated Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner did a bold and widely-applauded act: he issued an executive order designed to solve a serious problem facing the State. That problem: mass incarceration.