Maybe you’ve seen the movie. If you’re dedicated, maybe you’ve read the book. If you’re lucky, maybe you’ve seen the play.
It’s pre-revolution France, 1796, and Jean Valjean steals a loaf of bread to feed his family. Nineteen years later he wanders a true vagabond — no work, no food, no shelter. The audience properly understands Valjean as the victim, not the perpetrator, of an unspeakable crime — unspeakable because it is uncomfortable to mention, unspeakable because few are willing to admit they are part of the problem and implicate all of society in the fate of a man like Jean Valjean.
Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables” compels us, often tearfully, to face the realities of a society that ignores its most vulnerable members. His main characters are caught between a scarcity of work and an abundance of punishment that masquerades as “justice” and “the law” and perhaps as “progress.” He sums up the problem with the following lament:
“In our civilization there are fearful times when the law wrecks a man. How mournful the moment when society draws back and permits the irreparable loss of a sentient being.”
Hugo wrote from what he witnessed in 19th-century France. But the tale of miserable people, their very survival caught in the margins between poverty and punishment, is no less relevant in 21st-century America. We have our tired, our poor, our huddled masses yearning to breathe free. We have them not on some distant teeming shore as described by the Statue of Liberty, but everywhere among us.
American prisoners numbered 2,220,300 in 2013, about 20 percent of the world’s prison population. Those on parole and probation were another 4,751,400. Altogether, 2.8 percent of U.S. adults were under correctional supervision — that’s 1 in 35. How did the land of the free become the most incarcerated nation in the world? For many Americans, the story of “Les Miserables” — vulnerable citizens struggling against an aggressively “just” society — is not just a story. There are still fearful times when the law wrecks a man and allows the irreparable loss of a sentient being.
Maybe you’ve heard John Oliver, on YouTube or HBO, describe in somehow hilarious detail the deep inconsistencies of our over-incarcerated society. If you’re dedicated, maybe you’ve been to the prisons — maybe you’ve ministered to a broken spirit or know lives ruined systematically by forces beyond their control. If you’re lucky, maybe you know someone who, like Jean Valjean, miraculously overcame their circumstances to rebuild a life after what seemed like an irreparable loss.
Or you might be tempted to separate the concept of an American prisoner from that of Jean Valjean. Valjean, after all, was hardly guilty of a crime at all. You can imagine — if you so trust our criminal justice system — that most of our prisoners are locked away for far worse than stealing a loaf of bread to feed a starving family. Far be it from me to change your imagination. But if you’re a Christian, you understand that the concept of guilt has little to do with the concept of mercy, except to increase it.
I have little space to offer solutions here, only space to encourage you to begin looking for those solutions. If you aren’t sure where to start, Hugo’s work contains another hint:
“Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing a free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.”
