When the Church of Pentecost, one of Ghana’s largest and most influential denominations, unveiled its newly built prison facilities and described the project as an “act of compassion,” the announcement stirred both admiration and unease. In the public eye, it appeared a triumph of Christian charity — a faith community stepping in to humanize a system plagued by neglect.
Yet beneath the applause lies a deeper moral and theological question: _Is building prisons truly an expression of the gospel of Christ?_ Or has the church, in its zeal to relieve suffering, risked sanctifying the very machinery that perpetuates it?
This op-ed seeks to examine that question with rigor and reverence — not to impugn the motives of the Church of Pentecost, but to reorient the compass of Christian compassion back toward liberation, not mere alleviation.
*I. Compassion and Carcerality: When Good Intentions Build Wrong Infrastructures*
The Church of Pentecost, in defending its construction of prison blocks across Ghana, has argued that overcrowding, poor sanitation, and inhumane conditions demanded an urgent, tangible response. They cite Hebrews 13:3 — “ _Remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison._ ”
It is, without question, a text that has animated Christian ministry for centuries. But to read it as an injunction to build prisons is to mistake accompaniment for endorsement, and palliative charity for prophetic solidarity.
The moral danger here is subtle but profound: when compassion is exercised within a framework of structural violence, it risks reinforcing that framework rather than transforming it. The gesture becomes what liberation theologians call “ _the mercy that maintains order_ ” — a benevolence that soothes conscience but leaves systemic injustice intact.
In Ghana, where the colonial carceral system has barely been decolonized, to construct new prisons under a Christian banner is not neutral. It echoes a long genealogy of church complicity with punitive systems, from missionary schools that doubled as instruments of cultural discipline, to chaplaincies that sacralized imperial order.
The question, then, is not whether Christian love should reach the incarcerated — of course it must. The question is: _how should that love manifest itself in a society where punishment, poverty, and power are so intertwined?__
*II. The Gospel’s Hermeneutic of Freedom*
The gospel of Christ, when read in its own radical context, is a text of liberation, not containment.
When Jesus stood in the synagogue of Nazareth and read from Isaiah 61, he declared the mission of his ministry: “ _to proclaim liberty to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed._ ” (Luke 4:18).
Every verb in that verse is centrifugal — it moves outward, breaking boundaries, dissolving walls. Christ’s compassion was not architectural; it was emancipatory.
Likewise, when Paul and Silas sang in the Philippian jail and the prison doors opened (Acts 16:25-26), it was not because God desired better ventilation. It was a revelation: divine mercy is not at home in cages.
Hebrews 13:3, then, is not a call to expand the carceral estate but to collapse the distance between the free and the imprisoned — to _remember_ in the biblical sense: to re-member, to rejoin the broken body of humanity as one.
When the early Church ministered to prisoners, it did so at risk to itself — feeding, sheltering, sometimes even bribing guards to free detainees accused under Roman law. It did not contribute to Rome’s penal architecture.
If compassion is to follow Christ’s pattern, it must do more than humanize prisons; it must question why prisons are the default response to social harm at all.
*III. The Ghanaian Context: Overcrowding as Symptom, Not Cause*
Ghana’s prisons today are indeed in crisis. Most facilities operate at two to three times capacity; sanitation and nutrition are deplorable; mental-health services are nearly absent. The Ghana Prisons Service itself admits that 60% of inmates are first-time offenders, many held for petty theft, street vending infractions, or unpaid fines.
But these symptoms point to deeper dysfunctions — poverty, unemployment, addiction, and a legal culture that still criminalizes survival.
To build more prisons without addressing these roots is to treat fever with thicker blankets. It is the appearance of healing without its substance.
From a policy standpoint, investment in new carceral infrastructure often delays the political urgency to reform sentencing, expand community-based alternatives, and humanize bail practices. The Church of Pentecost’s well-meaning intervention, therefore, may inadvertently relieve the state of its constitutional obligation to transform the justice system itself.
The result is a paradox: a church born out of the fires of revivalism, animated by the Holy Spirit’s power to set captives free, now builds the physical vessels of captivity — albeit in polished, painted form.
*IV. The Political Theology of the Prison*
No Christian act exists outside the political. In the public sphere, theology manifests as policy — whether the actor admits it or not.
To build prisons is to participate in the politics of incarceration, even if the intent is humanitarian. It signals alignment with the state’s logic that social deviance is best managed through confinement.
In Catholic social teaching, however, the dignity of the human person and the preferential option for the poor compel the church to ask: _What structures produce criminality?_ _What social sin underlies individual sin_ ?
If economic injustice, inequitable education, and systemic neglect drive people into crime, then Christian action should focus on dismantling those causes — not reinforcing the final consequence.
The Church of Pentecost, by choosing infrastructure over advocacy, has effectively prioritized amelioration over transformation. It has acted like the Samaritan who binds the wounded traveler but never asks why the road to Jericho is so dangerous in the first place.
The moral responsibility of the church is not merely to treat victims of the system, but to prophetically challenge the system itself.
*V. The Evidence: What Works and What Fails*
Empirical research across continents demonstrates that incarceration, even under humane conditions, rarely reforms. Rather, it deepens marginalization.
Studies in restorative justice, community sentencing, and re-entry programs reveal consistent patterns: when offenders are engaged in restitution, education, counseling, and community service — when they are treated as capable of repair rather than condemned to exile — recidivism drops, sometimes dramatically.
In contrast, the expansion of prison capacity tends to perpetuate incarceration rates. Criminologists call this “carceral elasticity”: as beds increase, so does the state’s readiness to fill them.
In countries like Norway, whose prisons are lauded for humane standards, rehabilitation success stems not from architectural design but from social reintegration and reduced reliance on imprisonment altogether.
If the Church of Pentecost wishes to act in the Spirit of Christ, then its material resources would yield greater moral dividends if invested in halfway houses, legal-aid clinics, community mediation, and youth employment programs that prevent crime upstream.
*VI. A Theology of Restoration, Not Retribution*
The biblical witness consistently elevates restoration over retribution.
In Exodus and Leviticus, justice involves restitution — returning, repairing, reconciling — not merely punishment. Zacchaeus, upon encountering Christ, declares, “I _f I have cheated anyone, I will pay back four times the amount._ ” The act of salvation here is economic and restorative, not punitive.
Even in God’s judgment, the aim is always to restore covenantal harmony, not to institutionalize suffering.
Christianity’s earliest communities understood this: discipline was communal, repentance was rehabilitative, and forgiveness was infinite.
Prisons, as they exist in modern states, embody the opposite theology — one of exclusion, of separating the “good” from the “bad,” of moral quarantine. To baptize that system with the language of compassion is to invert the gospel.
*VII. The Church’s Missed Opportunity: From Brick to Breath*
What if the Church of Pentecost had imagined compassion differently?
Imagine a nationwide initiative to decriminalize poverty, to reform bail laws, to provide legal representation for the indigent. Imagine churches turning their auditoriums into weekend classrooms for skills training, their tithes into seed capital for youth cooperatives, and their missionaries into paralegal volunteers visiting remand cells to secure unjustly detained persons.
Imagine, further, a public theological campaign — sermons, radio dialogues, open letters — pressing Parliament to review the over-criminalization of non-violent offenses, to expand parole systems, and to introduce restorative justice legislation.
That would be compassion in the mode of liberation: active, structural, prophetic.
The early Pentecostal revivalists who birthed this denomination did not build monuments; they built movements. Their fire was spiritual, their architecture invisible. They turned towns into altars. Their descendants, inheriting this fervor, now have the moral and material means to do the same for justice — if only they can redirect their blueprint from cement to systems.
*VIII. The Moral Psychology of the Church*
Why, then, does the church prefer building to reforming?
Partly because construction offers tangible evidence of compassion — a visible deliverable, a ribbon to cut, a plaque to unveil. Systemic reform is slow, invisible, and politically fraught.
But Christ’s ministry was precisely that: the slow work of changing hearts, systems, and souls. He left no building, no monument. The only structure he promised to raise was his own resurrected body.
To act in his name, then, is to invest in resurrection — the transformation of the human person and the society that imprisons them — not in the perpetuation of confinement.
The Church of Pentecost, for all its administrative excellence and evangelistic reach, risks adopting the managerial rationality of the state — counting projects instead of conversions, edifices instead of emancipations.
If compassion becomes a metric rather than a movement, the gospel becomes bureaucracy.
*IX. Beyond the Walls: A Pastoral Reorientation*
Let us be clear: the Church of Pentecost’s compassion is real, its intentions sincere. It saw suffering and moved to act. That impulse deserves respect, not cynicism.
But the task of Christian ethics is to guide compassion toward justice, to make sure the balm does not anesthetize the wound.
The way forward is not shame, but reorientation. The church can still redeem this initiative by turning its prisons into transitional centers — places of healing and reentry, run in partnership with restorative justice practitioners, social workers, and human-rights advocates.
It can use its moral voice to lobby for sentencing reform and to pressure the state to invest in rehabilitation over incarceration.
It can transform its chaplaincies into schools of restorative theology, teaching both inmates and officers the gospel’s radical alternative to retribution.
And above all, it can proclaim that mercy, in Christian understanding, is not the soft face of punishment — it is the abolition of its necessity.
*X. Conclusion: The Courage to Free*
The paradox of Christian compassion is that it must sometimes destroy what it loves. To love the prisoner truly is to abolish the prison, just as to love the sinner truly is to abolish sin.
In our era, compassion must evolve beyond charity. It must become systemic, liberative, political. The Christ who healed the leper also denounced the powers; the church that clothes the prisoner must also question the logic of captivity itself.
If the Church of Pentecost desires to mirror Christ’s compassion, it must have the courage to free — not to beautify bondage. Its calling is not to perfect the walls of containment, but to proclaim the resurrection of human dignity beyond them.
As long as one soul languishes behind bars built with church tithes, the gospel’s call to liberation remains unfinished.
Let us, therefore, as people of faith, policy, and conscience, remember those in prison — not by building more cells, but by tearing down the causes that keep them there.
That is the compassion the world needs: not the comfort of concrete, but the courage of the cross. *Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est.*
“ _Where charity and love are, there is God._ ”
Author: *Richard Dablah*
_Environmental Policy Analyst_
Email: richard.dablah@gmail.com
