Reflecting on a Prison Fire in Honduras

Many people have been asking me if I heard on the news about the prison fire in Honduras where over 300 people died. That news really broke my heart for a variety of reasons. I had the opportunity to spend a significant amount of time in youth detention centers in Honduras last summer interviewing inmates for my dissertation and implementing the LAMP mentoring model in cities in Honduras. I heard heartbreaking stories from the at-risk youth that I interviewed and visited with. I was thankful for the acces that I had in the jail, but it was definitely a rough environment. It hurt to see so many young people locked up in difficult conditions. Then again, it breaks my heart that so many people in America are locked up. America has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world! The conditions in American prisons may be better than the conditions in prisons in places like Honduras, but I am troubled by any large amount of people losing their freedom and their lives.

People need to be held accountable for their actions, but having been involved in working with at-risk youth for many years now I have seen first hand how broken the system is. In the detention centers I spent time at in Honduras, the young people were overcrowded and they were not receiving an education or many other basic things needed to succeed in life. In America, we spend huge amounts of money to build jails and there are many, many adults who work professionally in the system. When I go to court with the young people in Homewood, the first thing that strikes me is how many adults are needed in the court room just to deal with one offense... including judges, prosecuting lawyers, defense lawyers, probation officers, clerks and administrative staff, and more. It costs way more to lock somebody up than it does to proactively intervene in young people's lives before they get in trouble, and yet the majority of money aimed at heading off crime grows on the reactive end through the courts and incarceration systems.

As Christians, we should be greatly disturbed by what happened with the prison burning and hundreds of people dying in Honduras. As Christians, we should be greatly disturbed by so many young people dying violently in America even with the highest rate of incarceration in the world. And still... we see things on the news and it does not affect us. We go on living our lives like that stuff doesn't really matter. That stuff matters to God, though. All of it. And he wants his church to do something about it. That's why faith-based mentoring initiatives like LAMP in Homewood and in Honduras are so crucial... because these programs organize the church to make a huge impact in the lives of at-risk youth before they die violently or become incarcerated. Christians should let our hearts break for brokenness in this world, and then we should all go and do something about it for the sake of God's glory. What will we do with this prison fire in Honduras? Will we let our hearts break, or will we keep flipping through the channels? It's our choice, and God is paying attention.