Deliver Us from Evil: Prison Fellowship's Saving Grace
1992; Hoover Institution; Issue: 62 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0146-5945
Autores Tópico(s)Homelessness and Social Issues
ResumoIn 1812 Francis Howard Greenway was convicted of forgery and sentenced by a British court to 14 years in the penal colony of Australia. Within months of his arrival, Greenway was hired by the governor of Australia as a civil architect. Four years later the governor, impressed by Greenway's skill as a designer, annulled his sentence and made him a citizen. Greenway went on to build over 40 buildings, including the country's first lighthouse, several churches, a courthouse, and Sydney's capitol building. In 1964, without a hint of irony, the Australian government placed this convicted forger's portrait on the face of its $10 bill. In his ascent from convict to hero, Greenway joined the ranks of ex- criminals such as Fyodor Dostoyevski, O. Henry, Ray Charles, Sonny Liston, Johnny Cash, and Bullet Bob Hayes, who have led productive lives after imprisonment. While the prevailing view on the right for the past 25 years has been that segregation from society is the best solution for criminal behavior, some conservatives are beginning to realize that the lock-em-up strategies of the past are not sufficient. America now spends more than $20 billion annually to keep a higher percentage of men and women behind bars than any other country in the world: 455 per 100,000 people. Yet longer sentences have done little to deter criminals. According to the FBI, two-thirds of released prisoners are rearrested within three years of getting out; 74 percent are back in prison within four years, often for increasingly violent crimes. These statistics have convinced many conservatives that a strong emphasis on law and order must coexist with efforts toward criminal rehabilitation. Although attempts to reform prisoners through education and economic opportunity have failed, there is evidence that even the most hardened convict can sometimes be rehabilitated if he is reshaped spiritually. A religious conversion changes a prisoner inwardly, giving him a truly compelling reason to give up crime for good. Imprisonment Isn't Enough At the vanguard of the conservative prison reform movement is Prison Fellowship, a Christian outreach group. Prison Fellowship was founded in 1976 by Charles Colson, a special counsel in the Nixon White House. In 1974, during the Watergate scandal, Colson was charged with obstructing justice in the trial of Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the so-called Pentagon Papers. Having recently become a Christian, he decided to plead guilty to the charges, and received a term of three to five years in Maxwell federal prison in Alabama. Released after seven months, Colson wrote a book entitled Born Again, in which he argued that prisoners imbued with spiritual purpose could be rehabilitated. On that premise he started Prison Fellowship. Colson founded his group at a time when neither of the prevailing approaches to prison reform seemed to be working. Since the Quakers opened the nation's first penitentiary in Philadelphia in 1790, Americans have been divided into two camps over the purpose of punishment and the way it is meted out. Liberals have traditionally believed that crime is the product of economic and social influences such as poverty, broken homes, and drug use. Such factors exert a nearly irresistible force over a criminal, sapping him of his free will, and so making his crimes only partially his fault. They assume that it is not the criminal who needs to be reformed, but society: a world without injustice and poverty would also be a world without crime. The second view, the conservative one, holds that sane people who break the law do so of their own volition. Criminals alone are responsible for their crimes. The purpose of imprisonment is not to rehabilitate criminals--that is impossible--but to punish them, to deter other criminals, and to keep society safe. Colson, a conservative, had natural sympathy for the latter view. He recognized, however, that it ignores man's spiritual dimension. …
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