Another Easter Statistic

By Jens Soering

Two thousand years ago, three young men—a revolutionary and two thieves—were executed by the properly constituted governing civil authority of the Roman province of Palestine. One of those three condemned convicts turned out to be the Son of God, much to everyone’s embarrassment, and naturally we all like to think that such a terrible injustice could never happen in our own, much more civilized times. But had Jesus been born today, available demographic data indicates a high probability that he would once again have ended up in some kind of trouble with the law. Some things, it turns out, never change.

Perhaps the most obvious indicator of Christ's future involvement with the criminal justice system was his mother's age and marital status: sons of unmarried teens like Mary (whom scholars assume to have been in her late adolescence) are 2.7 times more likely to go to prison than the sons of mothers who, though unwed, at least postpone childbirth until their twenties. If the child's parents are married, the probability of incarceration later in life drops even further. So Jesus already had one foot on the road to death row when he came into the world.

Joseph's role in Christ's life may well have been the second strike against the Son of God. While Mary's husband was still acting as head of the household when Jesus stayed behind in the Temple at age twelve, Joseph is never mentioned again thereafter, though he might have been expected to accompany his wife and the other children when the whole family went together to confront their eccentric relative while he was preaching (Luke 4:42, Mark 3:31-35). Indeed, the evangelist Mark may have referred to Christ as "the son of Mary" instead of the son of Joseph precisely because the latter had died, leaving Mary as the (in those times unusual) matriarch of the clan (Mark 6:3). If these speculations have any validity, then Joseph's possible absence from Jesus' life would have further heightened our Savior's chances of eventual legal problems, since 70% of all long-term prison inmates come from fatherless homes.

Children raised in single-parent households are also six times more likely to be poor, and childhood poverty is another leading indicator of later incarceration. In fact, a seminal meta-analysis of 224 previous studies on social class and crime "concluded rather convincingly that members of lower social classes were indeed more prone" to end up behind bars. By conforming to this distressing pattern in his time on earth, our Messiah may have been trying to remind us that, while "the poor you will always have with you," we have a quite practical reason to "sell what you have and give to the poor": crime prevention (Matthew 26:11, 19:21).

Two other factors that correlate strongly with fatherless homes, poverty and subsequent stays in the penitentiary are lack of education and mental illness: 71% of all high school dropouts and 85% of all children with behavioral disorders come from single parent families; and 19% of all prisoners are completely illiterate, another 40% are functionally illiterate, and 20% are mentally ill.

From our point of view it is clear, of course, that Christ suffered from neither of these disabilities; but for many of his contemporaries, things may have looked different. The only writing that Jesus appears to have done in his earthly lifetime was doodling "on the ground with his finger" during the trial of the woman caught in adultery, and the scribes publicly accused him of "hav[ing] an unclean spirit" or mental illness (John 8:6, Mark 3:30). If our federal Bureau of Criminal Justice Statistics had examined the Son of God on the way to his execution, it would undoubtedly have classified him as a fairly typical fatherless, uneducated and crazy convict.

And that surely is the whole point of God taking on flesh so long ago: "he had to become like his brothers in every way," just another statistic in the never-ending war on crime (Hebrews 2:17). Of course, with a little "compassionate conservatism" and a school voucher pilot program, he might have escaped the socio-economic conditions of his birth and perhaps ended up running his own money-changing table in the Temple. But the truth is that, when you start life with as many strikes against you as Jesus, you are more likely to end up where he did: in jail, on death row. Two thousand years ago or today, some things never change.

This Easter, 38,400 homeless people will be sleeping in the shelters of New York City alone, a number that includes 16,700 children. To stop them from traveling down the road that Jesus took—the road from the homeless shelter to a prisoner's death—will require love and action and commitment and, sad to say, quite a few of your dollars. An impossible task? Perhaps. But if we love one another as that condemned convict on the cross loved us, we can save at least some of today's homeless children from becoming another Easter statistic.

Back to The Way of the Prisoner