Interest in understanding and working with and for the marginalized is a growing concern within the academy. The president-elect of the American Academy of Religion, Eddie Glaude, has declared that his focus during his presidential year will be on vulnerable populations. A yearly review of the AAR Annual Meeting program will find panels drawing from research with and teaching of various vulnerable populations. As all of the authors in this issue will attest, there is no group more vulnerable than those incarcerated in the various levels of our prison system: city, county, state, and federal.

Introduction

I am a professor in the religious studies department at Manhattan College. Each semester I teach a course entitled Criminal Justice Ethics at the New York City jail complex on Rikers Island. Half of the students are from our main campus; the other half includes either men or women from one of the jails on the island. The course has a deliberately secular title, but the intent is to trace significant ethical questions raised in the apprehension, prosecution, and detention of individuals to their roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The parallel goal is to reframe the entire structure and practice of criminal justice in terms of an inclusive, compassionate, and restorative vision of human weakness, human potential, and human fulfillment.

Introduction

Last fall, I taught the course Theories of Religion to students at New York’s Auburn Prison through the Cornell Prison Education Program (CPEP). As funded through a recent grant from the Mellon Foundation, CPEP is in the process of expanding its program from two facilities to four and is assembling a consortium of area schools to participate in it. The University of Rochester, where I am an assistant professor of religion, is one of these schools.

I required my Auburn students to complete a weekly writing assignment. Below, I present the assignment in full, as it appeared on the syllabus, with notations to follow.

“New York Theological Seminary Prison Program, Sing Sing Correctional Facility.” 2000. Souls 2 (1): 12–16.

Alexander, Michelle. 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press.

Atkins, Jr., Charles. 2016. “The Path of the Logos: The Relevance of the Practice of Bible Study in an American Prison.” Dissertation (PhD). Université de Montréal.

Atkins, Margaret Quern. 2007. “Integrative Justice Theory: A Study of God’s Justice and the US Prison System.” Thesis (MTS), Drew Theological School.

Castro, Erin L., Michael Brawn, Daniel E. Graves, Orlando Mayorga, Johnny Page, and Andra Slater. 2015. "Higher Education in an Era of Mass Incarceration: Possibility under Constraint." Journal of Critical Scholarship on Higher Education and Student Affairs Vol. 1, Article 2.