Winner, Best General Interest Book for 2001, Association of Theological Booksellers Between 1980 and 2000, the number of prisoners in the U.S. has tripled to over 2 million people, 70 percent of them people of color. Indeed, by 2000, 3,600 people were on America's death rows. This growth industry currently employs 523,000 people. Among abuses that Mark Taylor notes in this "theater of terror" are capital punishment, inordinate sentencing, violations of fairness in both process and results, racism in the justice system and prisons, prison rape and other terrorizing techniques, and paramilitary policing practices. With twenty-five years of involvement with prison reform, Taylor passionately describes and explains the excesses and injustices in our corrections system and capital punishment to foster compassionate and effective Christian action. His book convincingly relates the life-engendering power of God - demonstrated in Jesus' cross and resurrection - to the potential transformation of the systems of death and imprisonment. In this work, Taylor (theology and culture, Princeton Theological Seminary) discusses the similarities between the current U.S. prison system and that of imperial Rome, where Jesus Christ and his followers were considered a criminal element. He explains how economics, a culture of terror, and other methods of catalyzing people have created a "lockdown society" in which the downtrodden suffer punitive indignities. The rise of the prison population, under the premise of protecting society, has diminished the freedom for society as a whole, with the United States leading the way for a global lockdown. Taylor shows how ancient Rome saw the crucifixion as a just deterrent and method of control over poorer and slave populations who might threaten the system of imperial privilege if they resisted authority. Jesus created a popular movement that dared to challenge the elite, leading Pontius Pilate to deploy his only means of control over the unrest execution. Taylor points to a current movement that also seeks to undermine police brutality, prison industries, and the death penalty. This book serves as a reminder and expos of the systemic failure of criminal justice as it creates more victims of crime and dishonors those already victimized, but Taylor strays from his premise. This is recommended only for larger religious and sociology collections. Leo Kriz, West Des Moines P.L. Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. From the Preface (pre-publication version): “Isn’t it odd that Christendom—that huge body of humankind that claims spiritual descent from the Jewish carpenter of Nazareth—claims to pray to and adore a being who was prisoner of Roman power, an inmate of the empire’s death row? That the one it considers the personification of the Creator of the Universe was tortured, humiliated, beaten, and crucified on a barren scrap of land on the imperial periphery, at Golgotha, the place of the skull? That the majority of its adherents strenuously support the state’s execution of thousands of imprisoned citizens? That the overwhelming majority of its judges, prosecutors, and lawyers—those who condemn, prosecute, and sell out the condemned—claim to be followers of the fettered, spat-upon, naked God?” —Mumia Abu-Jamal, Death Blossoms: Reflections from a Prisoner of Conscience Is it a contradiction that Christians pray to and adore their imprisoned and executed God while supporting or tolerating the execution and imprisonment of so many today? The United States is now on a lockdown craze, and many confessing Christians have played a key part in building it up. Termed lockdown America in a recent book by Christian Parenti, this nation now incarcerates more than two million citizens. The massive number now confined—70 percent of whom are people of color—is nearly quadruple the figure of 1980, being “the largest and most frenetic correctional build-up of any country in the history of the world.” Mumia Abu-Jamal is one of these imprisoned two million, and one of the thirty-seven hundred locked down on death row (usually for twenty-two or twenty-three hours per day), awaiting execution. He is fighting for his life and for a new trial, aided in this by Amnesty International, branches of both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and by a worldwide movement. In 1999 and 2000 alone, while Abu-Jamal waits and fights for his own life, nearly two hundred people were marched down prison corridors for execution, often with the approval of Christian chaplains and U.S. Christians. Is Abu-Jamal right? Is there not only something “odd” but perhaps also something hollow, inconsistent, wrong in Christians supporting the imprisoning and executing apparatus of lockdown America while claiming to be followers of a “fettered, spat-upon, naked God”? Not only was Jesus, the “Lord” and “founder” of what came to be called Christianity,