Test of Faith: Hope, Courage and the Prison Experience

Christine Schmidt specializes in law and sociology at Laurentian
University.

Eva Evelyn Hanks’s lover is sentenced to prison for seven years for
armed robbery—a crime he commits in part as a result of social forces
that disenfranchise. Eva is traumatized by this crime and the impact it
has on her relationship, but soon discovers that the criminal justice
system will mete out more pain and turmoil than she thinks she can
endure. She discovers that our penal system seeks to ensure that the
degradation ritual, usually reserved for convicts, also extends to the
families of those convicted.

Documenting the abuse of power and position in our criminal justice
system, Test of Faith is an inside excursion through the turmoil and
extreme abuse that families and friends of those convicted are forced to
endure. Finding more inner strength than she thought she had, Eva
triumphs by coming to understand that, in order to be effective, this
process of humiliation requires not our permission as individuals but
rather our support as a society. Ultimately, Eva and her lover use their
letters and journal entries to teach us that the prison system does not
seek to rehabilitate those convicted of committing a crime, but rather
punishes the convicted and the families of the convicted over and over
again. Test of Faith echoes demands for an overhaul of our penal system
and illustrates that the abuse of power continues to be a problem in our
criminal justice system.