Who is in prison?

I don't know how much people think about the parable, or the individual components. I do wonder, though, if when people do look at it they find ways to keep the "in prison" part from applying. After all, those are criminals in there.

Yes, John the Baptist and Paul both spent significant time in prison. Jesus was taken prisoner, though everything happened pretty quickly there; I'm not sure that he spent much time in a cell. Do we only visit good prisoners?

I have already mentioned price gouging on prison phone calls and not funding programs that appear to help, and there will be something eventually on how valuing profits over people becomes a problem. Before that, we need to remember that not all people are valued equally.

They should be. You may believe that for religious reasons, or humanistic reasons, or because you take the founding documents of the United States seriously, but there should be a belief in the equality of people and it is commonly stated. Practices often do not back it up.

Looking at the modern carceral state has many issues, which I will try and get to clearly and logically, but I am finding writing on this topic very difficult and if I break it down into small pieces to try and make it go by easier (because there is so much here), that's just how I have to be.

However, with these three model prisoners I think there are some points we can make.

John the Baptist was in prison because he accurately criticized the king's marriage. It doesn't even look like Herod took it that personally, but Herodias took it seriously enough to plot John's death, and that worked out.

Jesus was arrested for upsetting the social order. They had to change his blasphemy charge to sedition to make it stick, because Roman law and Jewish law felt differently about monotheism, but as revolutionary as he was, none of it was actually illegal, including his accurate claims. Determined people in power were still able to get him in jail.

Paul's imprisonments also involved false charges as well. As Saul he had thrown people in jail for practicing Christianity, so there was some logic in him being in danger for preaching it, but still whenever there was an actual hearing, the general result was that it wasn't illegal.

It was not only then that there were political components to who went to jail. This can affect the writing of the law, but it comes up even more in how the law is pursued: where is it enforced? against whom?

This is especially important now as we have an executive branch that leans toward totalitarianism and a legislative branch that does not seem interested in checking it.

Consider this case:

http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/01/politics/doj-woman-laughed-jeff-sessions-confirmation-hearing/index.html

Yes, the charges ended up being dropped, but the precedent of the charges even coming up is disturbing.

The United States has about 4.4 percent of the world population but 22 percent of the world's prisoners. Are we sure that is just? And if it's not, what do we do?