Being a Christian, I’m always interested in cultural issues. One of the most controversial cultural conversations centers on prisons and whether the United States’ system of incarceration is a good system. I first started thinking about this issue in earnest when, a few years ago, I was listening to Al Mohler, and he noted New York’s 2019 plan to spend $9 billion on building new prisons. Mohler included a brief discussion of the history of prisons, which inspired me to do a little more research on the issue. This brief article is a summation of the history of prisons and how we ought to think about them as Christians. Throughout most of human history,prisons were meant to be a temporary arrangement. Prisons in the ancient world were places where suspects were held while waiting for their cases to be heard. For example, Leviticus 24:10-12 mentions the imprisonment of an individual…