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In this episode, Trent examines Fr. Casey Cole’s recent video defending the claim that prison labor involves intrinsically evil slavery.
Narrator:
Welcome to the Council of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Council of Trent Podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answers apologist, Trent Horn, and today I’m going to be responding to a recent video from Father Casey Cole on the issue of imprisoning people. Now, if his video had just focused on pointing out the problems in the modern American prison system, then I wouldn’t have had any problem with it. I would not have made this response because those problems do exist and people should respond to them. But my concern is that Father Casey goes far beyond that and says things that aren’t true and could even undermine the Christian faith. Let’s take a look at what he says. Father Casey’s basic argument is that slavery is always wrong, forcing people to work in prison is slavery. Therefore, it is always wrong to force imprisoned or incarcerated people to work. In this episode, I’m going to show that this is not a teaching of the church, so you’re free to disagree with Father Casey, and there are good reasons you should disagree with him because as I said earlier, this kind of reasoning can be used against the faith itself.
But before I do that, I want to make it clear that there was actually a lot in Father Casey’s original video that I do agree with. Let me go through that now. First, I agree that in many cases, incarceration causes more problems than it solves, and that for many non-violent crimes like possession of a small amount of drugs for personal use, doesn’t justify imprisoning someone. There can be cases where it’s unjust to incarcerate people. This is especially the case involving innocent people or people arrested for acts that shouldn’t be crimes at all, such as the example Father Casey, sites of blacks who were imprisoned decades ago for simply loitering or not being employed. Number two, prisoners should always be given the essentials to live in dignity. The catechism says “Prisoners must be respected and treated humanely, and the dignity of the human person is rooted in his creation, in the image and likeness of God.”
And the catechism says, “This dignity is inviolable.” It cannot be lost. No matter what evil a person has done, that person must always be treated as someone, not something. That doesn’t mean you have to give this person every amenity. You simply must recognize their inherent dignity. People who are incarcerated should have adequate food, water, protection from the elements medicine, basic hygiene care, security from violence, and not be placed in solitary confinement for extended periods unless this is absolutely necessary for safety. Father Casey is right that some prisons do abuse and neglect inmates, and that’s wrong, but some families abuse and neglect their own children, but that doesn’t prove families in general are evil. Abuse does not anull the proper use of something. Number three, prison work should not violate a person’s dignity. That means prisoners should not be forced to perform dangerous jobs or be put in conditions that threaten their safety like long hours working in the heat without shelter or water.
But there’s nothing undignified about strenuous or even unpleasant work like cleaning toilets as long as safety protocols are being followed. Number four, I agree with Father Casey that prisons must do more to rehabilitate offenders. In some cases, incarceration creates a situation where after being released, a person is more likely to commit crimes in the future. However, one way to rehabilitate prisoners is to offer them work programs where they gain valuable skills while the fruit of their labor goes to paying their debt to society. And for prisoners who don’t want these opportunities to grow in character and particular productive skills, they can always pick up trash on the side of the road and repay their debt to society in this way.
Number five, finally, in recognizing that prisoners have intrinsic dignity, we should always offer them the opportunity to repent and unite themselves to Christ. This is why things like diocesan prison ministries are so important for us to support, but where Father Casey goes wrong is his blanket assertion about imprisonment and imprison labor being in principle contrary to human dignity. In fact, if you followed some of his arguments to their logical conclusion, you’d have to say, God acts against our human dignity, which is impossible. Let’s see what he says. Starting with the opening of his video.
Fr. Casey:
Would you say that there is ever a justification for slavery? Sounds like a pretty ridiculous question, but hear me out for a second. Think about every situation you can imagine the worst people you can think of your worst enemy. Can you think of any situation where you would say that owning another human being is morally permissible? Where it would be okay to have complete control over where they lived and what they did, where you could make them work as long as you wanted, doing grueling labor for little or no money, punishing them, however and whenever you want it, this would include the right to cut them off from their family, their friends in all forms of leisure, subjecting them to physical or mental abuse, to keep them behaved, docile, and afraid to run away. This is really, really awful stuff, but I want to make sure that everyone is clear on what slavery actually is.
My hope is that your answer is no without any hesitation in your voice. What I’ve described is heinous and unthinkable in our world today. I know for myself as a Christian, I’ve been taught to love my enemies, not hate them. I know that each and every human being is created in the image and likeness of God, and as such is due inalienable human rights and dignity. Every life has worth, not because they’ve earned it or because they’re useful to society, but because God has created and loves them. No, I can’t imagine a situation where this level of dehumanization could ever be acceptable, not for an enemy of war, not for a political adversary, not for Hitler himself. It’s wrong and disgusting always and everywhere, which is why I have such a problem with the American prison system.
Trent Horn:
This is why it’s really, really important for us to define our terms because the word slavery can have a lot of different meanings. I agree that owning another person like they are property is always wrong. Nothing takes away our human dignity. Prisoners should never be abused, but it’s not evil to keep Hitler, if he had survived World War II, locked up, not give him leisure time, not let him call his friends and make him do some labor if not grueling labor that’s fit for Hitler. Here’s an analogy to show what’s wrong with Father Casey’s argument. Let me start with a question. Is there ever a justification for kidnapping? Now, you might say no because when you think of kidnapping, the first thing you think of are innocent children or innocent adults being taken from the safety of their homes against their will. The catechism even says “Kidnapping and hostage taking bring on a reign of terror by means of threats. They subject their victims to intolerable pressures. They are morally wrong.”
But what is kidnapping? You can see in the catechisms’ definition, it’s talking about kidnapping as the taking of innocent people as a crime. But if you define kidnapping simply as taking someone from his home and not letting him leave another location, this can’t be an intrinsically evil act because everybody agrees it’s okay to take guilty, violent people from their homes or even innocent, dangerous people like those who are having psychotic episodes and place them somewhere else and not let them leave in order to protect others or even themselves. And the same is true of slavery. It’s wrong to kidnap innocent people and force them to work. In fact, the Bible condemns this in Exodus 21:16, “Whoever steals a man, whether he sells him or is found in possession of him shall be put to death.”
But there can be clear cases where it’s not wrong to take guilty people force them to live somewhere and force them to work. For example, imagine an aggressive medieval kingdom invades another peaceful kingdom and causes massive damage before the invasion is repelled. It would be just to force the prisoners of that war to fix the damage they caused, which would technically be slavery, but it certainly is not unjust. Father Casey’s unilateral condemnation of slavery, it also gets awkward because the Bible regulates slavery. St. Paul even told Christians to be kind to their slaves instead of just commanding Christians to release their slaves. I go into this topic in a lot more detail on my book on Bible difficulties called Hard Sayings. I’m not going to get into the entire subject of slavery and biblical slavery in this episode. Instead, I just want to say that it makes more sense to see slavery as a moral hazard that can be justified in very limited cases like how the Bible tolerated ancient debt slavery.
Genesis 47:19 talks about this when the Egyptians tell Joseph, “Buy us and our land for food and we with our land will be slaves to Pharaoh and give us seed that we may live and not die and that the land may not be desolate.” In this context, slavery is an evil in the same way that many people would say modern factory farming that causes animals pain isn’t evil, it’s wrong, but it’s something we tolerate because any alternative would lead to starvation and even more suffering for human beings. Slavery in principle or restricting a person’s movements and compelling him to work is not intrinsically evil because we see it can be justified in cases like using prisoners of war and who were fighting an unjust war and forcing them to fix the damage they caused. That would be a just example of applying slavery.
But you can see that just because in this is not intrinsically evil, in the vast, vast majority of cases, it still is evil. We would call this a moral hazard, while not wrong in principle because it so often leads to abuse, this means we as a society should move away from slavery as much as possible and where it exists in very limited cases like prisons, it still needs to be strictly regulated because of the moral hazards associated with it. Although some people say slavery is intrinsically evil because Pope John Paul II list it among other intrinsic evils in Veritatis splendor. But in this passage, the Pope also said, “Deportation is intrinsically evil.” I have an entire video showing the Pope was talking about only specific kinds of mass deportations, like what happened to innocent people in World War II, not all deportation that happens today.
And the same is true of slavery and that the Pope must be referring to specific kinds of slavery like debt or chattel slavery that exploit innocent people and not the more basic concept of controlling a person’s location and compelling him to work. Cardinal Avery Dulles commented on this part of Veritatis splendor actually saying, “If pressed, I suspect the Pope would’ve admitted the need for some qualifications, but he could not have specified these without a rather long excursus that would’ve been distracting in the framework of his in cyclical.” That’s why the catechism itself qualifies what it means by the evil of slavery that says the following, “The seventh commandment forbids acts or enterprises that for any reason selfish or ideological, commercial or totalitarian lead to the enslavement of human beings to their being bought, sold, and exchanged like merchandise in disregard for their personal dignity. It is a sin against the dignity of persons and their fundamental rights to reduce them by violence to their productive value or to a source of profit.”
Notice that the evil of slavery involves buying and selling people like they were products or things without dignity and that a person should not be reduced by violence to this status. But this definition does not condemn prisons or even prison labor. No, we should not dehumanize anyone. Everyone should be treated as a human being, even moral monsters like Hitler. But Father Casey has not disproven the state’s duty to humanely yet severely punish moral monsters, including Hitler.
Fr. Casey:
Imagine working eight hours doing grueling work and walking away with $2 and 40 cents. But that’s not even the most absurd part of this. These wages as small as they already are, are garnished and taxed by prisons. That’s right. You’re probably not even taking home all $2 and 40 cents for the day that money is first put towards court costs restitution and get this room and board. Yes, prisoners are forced to pay for room and board they’re forced to be in.
Trent Horn:
If these prisoners were justly convicted of a crime that deserves imprisonment, then nobody forced them to do anything. They chose to break the law and now they’re suffering the consequences of their actions in hopes that this will motivate them to change their future behavior. Lawbreakers and criminals harm individuals, but they also harm society as a whole, which means they have a debt to repay to society. Police officers, judges, lawyers and other officials have to spend time and money and other resources to manage their crimes and solve them. Guards and wardens and other officials have to spend their days watching these criminals in order to protect society from them. Somebody has to pay for all of this, a burden which usually falls upon taxpayers. Why shouldn’t we expect prisoners to repay some of these costs through labor? Why shouldn’t they be forced to work to pay for their own room and board?
You and I have to work to pay for our room and board. That’s not evil, that’s life. Father Casey opposes slavery, but he expects the rest of us to work so that people in prison can have room and board without working. Ironically, he’s advocating for us to be forced to work so that criminals, some of whom have no intention of repenting or feeling sorry for any of their crimes don’t have to work. Now, society should support people who because of age or disability can’t work, but we should not support people who simply choose to not work. St. Paul put it well in second Thessalonians 3:10, “For even when we were with you, we gave you this command, if anyone will not work, let him not eat.” In fact, it makes sense to force prisoners to work because they don’t just harm their immediate victims.
As I said, they harm society as well. Even if you and I aren’t directly victimized, criminals cause us to pay money to install security and surveillance systems. They rob us of our peace and sense of safety. They make us fearful to walk down unlit streets and alleys. In doing this, criminals have taken material and immaterial goods from society and justice demands they pay society back for the damage they’ve caused. Pope John Paul II said this, “The primary purpose of the punishment which society inflicts is to redress the disorder caused by the offense. Public authority must redress the violation of personal and social rights by imposing on the offender an adequate punishment for the crime as a condition for the offender to regain the exercise of his or her freedom. In this way, authority also fulfills the purpose of defending public order and ensuring people’s safety while at the same time offering the offender an incentive and help to change his or her behavior and be rehabilitated.”
And in his encyclical, Laborem exercens, which means through work, Pope Saint John Paul II talked about the dignity of work saying, “Work is a good thing for man, a good thing for his humanity. Because through work man not only transforms nature, adapting it to his own needs, but he also achieves fulfillment as a human being. And indeed in a sense becomes more a human being.” We can see how humane labor contributes to a prisoner’s moral development. It’s appropriate to force prisoners to serve society as a whole through work. A classic example of this is picking up trash on the side of the road. We all use public roads and instead of having to pay other people to clean our roads, prisoners can clean them and in doing so, they give back to the society that they’ve stolen from. Or prisoners can make license plates like they still do in some Texas prisons, which is also a public good that serves society.
Now I can see how for-profit prisons could abuse this practice so that prison work is used to only enrich a group of shareholders rather than society itself. But the fact that prison work can be abused does not mean all prison work or labor is evil in principle. Finally, there is room to debate whether prison labor is a good idea. You could do studies that show its benefits don’t outweigh the costs of running these kinds of programs. That’s an empirical question people can debate. All I’m saying is that from a moral perspective, there is nothing wrong with forcing inmates to perform humane labor.
Fr. Casey:
Prisons in this country are not about rehabilitation. They’re not about incapacitation, and they’re not about deterrence. They are first and foremost and have always been forms of retribution, of punishment, of causing pain and shame in people because they have done something wrong. Who cares about them? A prison system that seeks to punish and shame rather than love and rehabilitate is one that knows nothing of Christ and cares nothing about the human person.
Trent Horn:
This is a false dilemma. You can love someone and punish them at the same time. In fact, as a father, I know that when I fail to punish my children or prevent them from ever being ashamed of their actions, then I have failed to love them as a father should love them. The author of the Book of Hebrews makes this very same point about our father in heaven. He says this, “It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons for what son is there whom his father does not discipline. If you are left without discipline in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers to discipline us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the father of spirits and live for they disciplined us for a short time at their pleasure, but he disciplines us for our good that we may share his holiness.”
For the moment, all disciplines seems painful rather than pleasant. Later, it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. Discipline is just punishment aimed at morally correcting the offender. This is something we all have to endure even long after we become adults. For minor crimes, the discipline or punishment is paying a fine. Sometimes that’s enough to help us understand we must not break that particular law again. For major crimes, harsher punishment is necessary. It must, but it must always be done in accord with the dignity of the human person.
Fr. Casey:
For too long, we have been sold the idea that criminals deserve what they get. Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time. In acting as they have, they have forfeited their right, right to our sympathy and should pay back for what they’ve done. This is not a Christian idea. There’s nothing Christlike in treating someone like this. It goes against everything we believe about the human person. Is this something that Jesus would support? Is this how Jesus would have us treat our enemies?
Trent Horn:
This depends on what Father Casey is talking about. If he’s saying it’s un-Christlike to say prisoners deserve undignified conditions, then he’s right. But if he’s saying it’s un-Christlike to simply imprison people and give them retributive punishment, then he is wrong. Jesus himself uses prisons where people must pay their debts as an allegory to talk about purgatory, he says in Matthew 5:26, “Make friends quickly with your accuser while you’re going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison. Truly, I say to you, you will never get out till you have paid the last penny.” Jesus is not just giving earthly advice. He’s talking about the temporal punishment we’ll have to endure after death in response to our sins when we are purified of sin and purgatory.
The ecclesial writer, Tertullian, put it this way in the third century, “In as much as we understand the prison pointed out in the gospel to be Hades, and as we also interpret the uttermost farthing, or penny, to mean the very smallest defense which has to be recompensed there before the resurrection, no one will hesitate to believe that the soul undergoes in Hades some compensatory discipline.”
If it isn’t contrary to our dignity for God to imprison us so to speak, and force us to endure the temporal punishments of our sins in purgatory, then it’s not contrary to our dignity for the state to imprison us and force us to endure punishment for our crimes. And when it comes to sympathy, we should offer merciful compassion to the imprisoned in hopes they’ll repent of their desire to do evil. We don’t have to feel bad for them suffering the just punishment of their crimes. After all, God and the saints don’t feel bad when we suffer temporal punishments in purgatory, they don’t feel bad for the damned who suffer eternal punishments in hell.
Why should we feel bad merely about a prisoner receiving a just punishment in this life? We can feel bad for the decisions they’ve made and pray that their time in prison will be an opportunity for them to change. And we can and should support or volunteer for prison ministries that help prisoners not be defined by their past crimes, but be defined by their relationship to Jesus Christ. But we should not act like modern prisons are morally equivalent to the slave trade.
Fr. Casey:
I’m not suggesting that we close all prisons or abolish the legal system by no means, but I am asking us to look at what we have and ask if we’re okay with this on our conscience. There are ways that we could safely house people away from society while maintaining their dignity and providing for their needs. This ain’t it.
Trent Horn:
I appreciate that Father Casey sees the need for incarceration, and once again, I agree with him that many prisons in the US are in need of reform and accountability. But beyond that, what would Father Casey recommend? Would he be against prisons that put people to work in rewarding environments like growing produce for a local farmer’s market? Any alternative he proposed to modern prisons would probably either look like a current prison without abuses, which I support, or it would be a totally impractical idea that wouldn’t keep people safe or contribute to a prisoner’s moral improvement. But if he ever wants to dialogue about this with me, he can feel I would love to do that with him. The offer is always on the table, a dialogue about this or other things we disagree about, but whatever we think, we should always remember that even those who have been convicted of horrible crimes are still human beings made in the image of God.
And we should pray for them, care for them, either directly or by supporting ministries that help them. But we should be careful in speaking up for those who are in prison to not go so far to undermine the principles of justice that we can know through the natural law or to undermine the principles of justice that come to us through divine revelation. Thank you very much for listening to today’s episode. And I just hope that you have a very blessed day.
Narrator:
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