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Epilogue To untangle our criminal and social justice crises, we must begin by learning to care about people in prison. Many of us are able to avoid caring about them because prisons lie outside of our immediate realms of experience. Without direct experience of prisons and prisoners, it is easier to maintain the perspective that incarcerated people are dangerous, dirty, and despicable, mere animals in cages. Although we live in the first genuine prison society, we can live most of our lives without awareness of the harsh realities surrounding mass incarceration and the ways in which many people in prison have been degraded and demeaned throughout their lives. Insulated by racial, ethnic, and class privilege, many Americans know little about the New Jim Crow. To overcome our indifference toward people in prison and to begin to address the problem of mass incarceration, we must come to care across racial, ethnic, and class divisions and to recognize that people in prison are indeed human persons. We must also begin to envision a new kind of society that is not so willing to throw people away, especially people who have already been pushed to the edges of our communities. As Catholics seek ways to contribute to resolving these crises, we ought to draw on the heart of our tradition: liturgy and sacraments. Most Catholics in the United States may not ever have loved a person in prison, an experience that can pique one’s conscience about the problems of mass incarceration. Most will not read the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Responsibility, Rehabilitation, and Restoration. Realistically speaking, most will not be moved by an intellectual appeal to liturgical and sacramental ethics. But Catholics will be shaped by their participation in liturgy and sacraments. The experience of God’s grace disclosed in the Eucharist is the most important experience in our lives as individual Christians and as the gathered church. As we partake of the Eucharist, we are called to discern our consciences about the ways in which we continue to participate in broken relationships and to seek reconciliation through the sacrament of Penance. If Catholics are to come to stand for an end to our criminal and social justice crises, they will do so because of the vision of justice in God’s reign conveyed by liturgy and sacraments. We must begin our work for justice by seeing it as integrated with the liturgical and sacramental heart of Catholicism. 197 Our liturgical and sacramental practices summon us to care for all people, regardless of the social, cultural, economic, and political boundaries that currently divide us from one another. The public service of the church embodied in liturgy draws us more deeply into the world in anticipation of God’s life, freedom, justice, love, and peace. The grace of God disclosed in the sacraments consecrates our lives in the world. Our consciousness of the injustices of this world is transformed as we enter the world-picture of God’s reign. In our celebration of the Eucharist, we are invited into a covenant in which all people are ultimately included and the needs of everyone—especially the degraded and demeaned—are fulfilled. We anticipate the triumph of God’s justice even as we remember the death of Jesus Christ as a convicted criminal. As we participate in Penance and Reconciliation, we repent of our sins. We must be mindful not only of our personal sins, but also our complicity in social sin. Within our communities, we seek ways to repair broken relationships and to be redeemed in the hope that through forgiveness, we can walk together again. The repentance and communion tied together in Reconciliation and the Eucharist draw us toward relationship, inclusion, forgiveness, and hope. Based upon this vision, our care for others must extend even into the prison cell, as well as across the boundaries upon which mass incarceration depends. As our consciousness is transformed in these ways by participation in liturgy and sacraments, we must also envision a new kind of society that can replace the first genuine prison society. If we come to care about all persons through our experience of the eucharistic table, then we cannot be content any longer with a society that is willing to throw people away. We must endeavor to create a new society that takes seriously the inviolable and inalienable dignity of every human person. We must ensure that our society serves the good of all people. We must commit ourselves to the...

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