I did not want to like this. But I was charmed, even moved, by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s visit to Rikers Island on Wednesday to watch the World Cup.
The young mayor strode coolly through the inmate complex, shaking hands with rough-looking prisoners in tan jumpsuits and flashing his good-natured smile. He eventually pulled up at a table of inmates, sleeves rolled to his elbows, and talked soccer.
“Who are you guys rooting for?” he asked, taking the tally of the table.
The inmates, a select group of 100 who earned the privilege through good behavior, beamed back at him, enjoying the good fortune of the mayor’s company and the dignity that came with it.
“They, too, are a part of New York City,” Mamdani later told a reporter. “The World Cup has been a magical moment for the entire city. These are New Yorkers, and they will be New Yorkers when they get out of Rikers. I wanted to make sure we could celebrate this moment together.”
None of this excuses or ignores the fact that Mamdani is abysmal on crime. His socialist instincts have been mostly thwarted so far by Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, but his stated aims remain intact. He still vows to defund traditional policing in favor of unarmed crisis responders. He still uses anti-incarceration and anti-police rhetoric, framing the problem of crime as one of policing itself rather than of criminals.
In his view, the inmates in tan jumpsuits are primarily victims of the justice system, not perpetrators.
Like most things, Mamdani gets the issue of crime exactly backward.
Despite all this, his World Cup visit demonstrates something vital and true that he gets: that even criminals, and especially those who have demonstrated good behavior and a desire to rehabilitate, are human beings with the same inherent dignity as all men created equal by God. And while they are deserving of their sentences, they are also deserving of basic human decency.
This can come in many forms. But it most certainly includes making eye contact with them, saying hello, and remaining in their presence for a brief period of time.
Those who decry the diminished role of Christianity in American culture should recognize this uniquely Christian gesture. Quakers spearheaded prison ministries in the colonial period. And following the birth of the penitentiary in 1787, Christian reformers formed the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, believing that if prisoners were given a Bible, a private cell, and regular visits from God-fearing people, they would experience “penitence.” The 19th century saw the rise of prison chaplains, and the 20th century, sparked by the prison conversion of Chuck Colson of Watergate infamy, saw a boom in prison ministries.
The American tradition of what Christians call the “corporal works of mercy” is robust. But prison ministry should be a reflex for Christians the world over. Jesus Himself explicitly commanded his followers to visit prisoners in Matthew 25, saying, “I was in prison, and you came to visit me,” and later in that chapter, “whatever you did for the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”
Christian America, which most on the Right ostensibly claim to want restored, cannot pick and choose which parts of Christianity it prefers. As inconvenient as it may be for believers of either political bent, the faith places equal emphasis on justice and mercy. This is exemplified most clearly by the Cross, which simultaneously pays the penalty for sin and extends mercy for all sinners.
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Mamdani clearly doesn’t understand the first part of that equation. In a 2020 interview, he famously asked of prisons, “What purpose do they serve?” His actions as mayor prove he finds the notion of justice to be a nuisance.
But his instinct for extending mercy to inmates of goodwill deserves real credit — even from those, like me, who are convinced he’s gotten nearly everything else about crime and punishment wrong.