In Ohio, about 16,500 people are in jail on any given night, and 300,000 are booked into jails each year. Jails hold people immediately after arrest who are awaiting trial and are serving less than 12 months.
That passage was recently in the pages of the Newark Advocate, and also in a number of our partners in the USA TODAY Network Ohio. I invite you to pause, whether you can read the whole piece (or series) or not — kudos to USA TODAY Network Ohio bureau reporters Laura Bischoff and Erin Glynn, who anchored the reporting and writing of it, and you really should subscribe — to consider what that data point alone tells you: 2.5% of ALL Ohioans will be booked this year. Over any 10 year period, that ends up somewhere between 7% to as much as 10% of the population, allowing for repeat visitors.
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That’s one thing you learn in pastoral ministry over time: I had to get out into parish work to learn the difference between jails (see definition above) and prisons (mostly felony charges with a year or more), but it was also a slowly dawning realization — friends, when a preacher gets up into the pulpit on Sunday, you are talking to a group of people of whom 10% to 20% (remember, we’re talking lifetime now) have spent at least one night in jail. It does change how you talk about certain things, but it’s not something you often refer to directly. Maybe we should.
Think about it, though: This year, almost three of every 100 adults you meet will have been through intake at the county justice center. And that’s just THIS year. Or to be more direct: The people in jail are not THEM. They are most emphatically US.
I came to Licking County in 1989, a couple years before a group of clergy had launched Licking County Jail Ministries, a collaboration between many local churches and clergy to serve the newly opened Licking County Justice Center, our county jail. Then-Sheriff Gerry Billy was supportive and a real blessing to the work we did, allowing us to enter the facility with appropriate training and for us to help his staff serve those incarcerated at the jail and ultimately for us to employ a chaplain, Mark Shoemaker. He and his successor, Scott Hayes, are the only two jail chaplains we’ve had in some 35 years, a testimony to the stability and quality of the ministry they both have provided: all at the expense of the jail ministry board and supporting churches, not the taxpayers, I should note.
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Sheriff Randy Thorp has continued to value the ministries’ work, and Chaplain Hayes is deeply respected across our community. But I have to admit as a former board member and president and volunteer inside the jail, we may not pause to remind people often enough of the facts that USA TODAY Network Ohio has put before us.
Again, the people in jail are not THEM. They are most emphatically US. And for Christians, we are called very directly in scripture to minister to those who are locked up; I would read those passages as enjoining us to reach out to the guilty and innocent alike. To give them hope and a plan for their future.
Some of the most powerful Bible study experiences I’ve had in my life were inside the jail. They were holy moments, and those classrooms and modules can be holy ground. If you don’t believe me, you may need to go in there sometime yourself.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s not spent any nights in jail (yet), but plenty of time there. Tell him about your experiences seeking justice at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
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