EX-CON
LOCONTE, JOE
EX-CON The Remarkable Second Career of Chuck Colson By Joe Loconte Sixty-seven-year-old Chuck Colson looks almost spry as he threads his way through the New Jersey State Prison, a maximum...
...Over the last 25 years, the man who at one time would have "run over his grandmother" to win an election, has built something else: a vast and effective ministry of mercy to the nation's prisoners...
...We don't think everybody is going to transform," says Pat Nolan, president of Justice Fellowship, the ministry's public-policy arm...
...Admittedly, the studies are limited by small samples and insufficient follow-up...
...But it is Easter morning, and Colson is here to preach...
...Parole decisions seemed arbitrary...
...On the other hand, he scolds his brethren when they sound like "medieval crusaders" and rely too much on politics to instigate cultural change...
...When Myles Fish took a job with Prison Fellowship in 1984, wardens treated ministers as either a scheduling problem or a security risk...
...Newsweek declared it the "Year of the Evangelical...
...The Colson version of biblical justice upsets the crime-fighting dogmas of the left and the right...
...When Colson got there, the prison was in "lock-down" mode, with inmates confined to squalid cells 23 hours a day...
...is a plea for Christians to reengage their world with biblical thinking...
...Out came the old hatchet man: Colson immediately called a press conference in the prison yard, prompting an investigation and legislative reforms to relieve overcrowding...
...Yet they are important because they involve not wayward Boy Scouts but convicted felons: multiple offenders who already have tried job training and drug treatment programs...
...IT IS HIS HANDS-ON INVOLVEMENT— HIS LONG RECORD OF SCANDAL-FREE, COMPASSIONATE HELP TO INMATES— THAT GIVES COLSON HIS AUTHORITY...
...But consider the prison culture, Colson says...
...A second concept, also drawn from the Bible, is that punishment should be restorative: It should help turn criminals into citizens...
...James Dobson, president of the vast Joe Loconte the William E. Simon fellow in religion and a free society at the Heritage Foundation...
...First, crime is fundamentally an offense not against the state, but against individuals and the God whose image they bear...
...He baldly manipulated southern evangelicals and Catholics at election time...
...And while ministers such as Jesse Jackson and Tony Campolo became "counselors" to Bill Clinton—and were diminished in the process—Colson insisted that repentance be more than a lip-biting pose...
...All his life, he says, he took the easy way out and quit—college, jobs, marriage—when things got tough...
...Still, in an "argument culture" that has traded persuasion for put-downs, he delivers cultural criticism that is sane and balanced...
...He dismisses talk of building "alternative institutions" as a one-way ticket to marginalization...
...Therapy teaches people how to manage their problems," he explains...
...He writes a monthly column for Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism...
...The book laid Colson bare and sent his lawyer-ly mind into a tailspin...
...No more: After enlisting in InnerChange, he wrote a letter to his ex-boss asking for forgiveness and pledging to pay him back...
...Prison sparked Colson's second conversion, this one on crime...
...Colson designed three-day seminars laying out the basics of Christian doctrine and Christian living...
...We either go all out with some ill-conceived Moral Majority—which was heavy-handed, oppressive, triumphant, all the wrong things—and put all the emphasis on politics, or we go 100 percent the other way...
...We're still getting hate mail for that," says a ministry staffer...
...It was just warehousing them...
...But Christian conversion transforms the human will...
...Yet Colson set out to launch what would become a major social reform movement...
...It ignores victims and their losses...
...Our culture needs to be reevangelized," he says...
...Ask him about Paul Weyrich's recent letter to conservatives declaring the culture war lost, and he stiffens...
...It certainly has been the most conspicuous: Last year the nation's prison population hit 1.8 million, and it's growing by nearly 1,500 people a week...
...Colson is showing us that there's no substitute for religious faith in reforming people's lives...
...He has helped recover a great reform tradition, the tradition of William Wilberforce in England, the abolition movement in America," says Martin E. Marty, one of the nation's foremost historians of religion...
...Father Richard John Neuhaus, a longtime friend and editor of First Things, agrees: "It distinguishes him from a lot of political-religious entrepreneurs who announce every week the new thing God has told them to do that will usher in the kingdom...
...Vargas was released last year, got involved with a church, and was hired as a pipeline welder...
...It is pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began," Lewis wrote...
...The system wasn't doing anything to restore or rehabilitate them," he says...
...Called the Inner-Change Freedom Initiative, it offers Christian education to felons serving the last 18 months of their sentences...
...This is, of course, the acid test: Will religious belief really make a lasting difference in the lives of the lawless...
...Former drug czar Bill Bennett and Princeton criminologist John DiIulio—the toughest of the tough-on-crime crowd—^both say Colson helped change their minds about the purposes of incarceration...
...It was a time when other religious conservatives were either rediscovering politics or founding glitzy television empires...
...Such concerns have long since evaporated...
...To some it all sounds like a weak-kneed substitute for punishment...
...The men—all volunteers in the program—rise for a 6:00 a.m...
...Pundits roared...
...A dozen men on death row had staged a hunger strike...
...His answer: "It's because every time I lay a bead I say, 'God, this is your bead.'" Whatever the long-term results, jailhouse religion is making a comeback...
...State guards provide security, but Colson's staff runs the day-to-day activities of 125 men, about one third of Jester II's inmates...
...By the following June, he would plead guilty to obstruction of justice, the first of the Nixon clique to fall...
...On one hand, Colson argues that Christians are obligated to speak out on the vital issues of the day, whether abortion or education or religious freedom...
...It is a new society, created for the salvation of a lost world, pointing to the kingdom to come...
...Over 200 inmates, in khakis and T-shirts, turn out to hear him...
...That first initiative involved about 50 inmates...
...It was just the right tonic for James Peterson, near-ing the end of an eight-year sentence for embezzlement...
...Last year, 14,000 congregations— Catholic, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, Baptist, you name it—participated, buying and wrapping presents requested by inmates for over half a million children...
...Says Dilulio: "I would challenge a group of researchers to show me something that works better than this...
...Not a promising target for a weepy, walk-the-aisle-for-Jesus campaign...
...At the suggestion of an old friend, Raytheon president Tom Phillips, Colson picked up Mere Christianity in the summer of 1973—just as the Nixon presidency was in meltdown over Watergate...
...Most every warden in America knows who he is...
...More than any other event, the great scandal of the Nixon White House chastened him as to the limits, and the temptations, of power...
...He served seven months at Maxwell Federal Prison in Alabama...
...In 1976, soon after his release, Colson persuaded the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons to furlough federal inmates to attend discipleship seminars...
...Michael Cromartie, Colson's research assistant in the 1970s, recalls traveling with him to a conservative Baptist church in Memphis and getting a stony reception...
...Social science data now suggest that it should...
...While some conservative Christians suggest pulling out of the culture war, the former Marine captain shows no sign of retreat...
...The main event was Christian artist Kathy Troccoli, singing about faith and forgiveness...
...About 400 women—virtually the entire prison—packed the gymnasium...
...His books—ranging from crime to politics to church renewal—top the list of Christian bestsellers...
...Prison ministry in America dates back to the 18th-century penitentiaries in Pennsylvania, courtesy of the Quakers...
...Imaginative partnerships with local churches are the key...
...Over the next two decades these activities grew almost exponentially: Twenty-six thousand prisoners now meet for Bible studies alone, and there are a dozen different programs for inmates, their families, and crime victims...
...The art of politics, he says—how we order our public lives together—ought to be the business of Christians...
...Presidential hopeful Gary Bauer describes him as "the voice of real wisdom" for Christians in politics...
...Or confuse a government program with the Kingdom of Heaven...
...So perhaps it was providential that his first serious encounter with Christian faith was with the lucid prose and moral logic of C.S...
...Liberal columnist Coleman McCarthy, for example, who once lambasted Colson for "babbling Jesus-talk," conceded that in his prison work, "he has been tireless, wise and humane...
...Case in point: the Monica crisis...
...Men like Ruben Vargas, who got mixed up in the Mexican mafia as a teenager, was arrested on drug charges, and landed 12 years in state prison...
...Or simply fail to go about God's work in God's way...
...The guy sitting next to me wrote in his notes: 'Colson sounds like a social gospel-er' "—an activist more bent on changing society than converting hearts...
...Dozens of women spoke, wept, and prayed with volunteers that night...
...Along the way, Colson has established himself as one of the most important social reformers in a generation...
...Petty offenders got the same treatment as violent felons...
...By anybody's certification, it stuck...
...The current system does not work," he writes in Convicted: New Hope for Ending America's Crime Crisis (1989...
...A Little Biblical Justice Behind Colson's prison programs lie two theological ideas...
...Chronic, remorseless, violent offenders must be put away, Colson says...
...Jimmy Carter was running for president as a born-again Christian...
...Around the White House, his hardball tactics earned him the title "hatchet man...
...To be sure, Colson's eager embrace of Catholics as co-belligerents in the culture war has sent some evangelicals into apoplexy...
...HE SAW THAT THE SYSTEM WAS DOING NOTHING TO REHABILITATE INMATES...
...Evangelicals don't have a public philosophy," he says...
...When prison workers saw, for example, that offenders fared much better if connected to their families, Colson's outfit started the Angel Tree program, which provides Christmas presents for kids who have a parent in jail...
...Since then it's been confined mainly to Bible studies or Sunday services inside prisons...
...Of the 60 inmates who've completed the InnerChange program in Texas, only five are back in the system, all for parole violations...
...Two Conversions One could argue that Colson always possessed a believer's zeal...
...You don't have to explain that they're sinners...
...He arrived at Jester II unable to trust anyone and not happy about taking orders...
...But if you saw six prisoners walking toward you across the yard, would it make a difference to you if they were coming from a Bible study...
...Higher incarceration rates, however, haven't made a dent in recidivism rates, the portion of ex-offenders who are rear-rested for committing more crimes...
...Even Wilson, in a recent City Journal article, agreed that although prisons are good at warehousing offenders, "they don't change people...
...One columnist opined: "If he isn't embarrassed by this sudden excess of piety, then surely the Lord must be...
...For pride is spiritual cancer: It eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense...
...We're not chumps...
...Wardens at a recent conference in Houston, for example, called Inner-Change the "hug-a-thug" program...
...While at Maxwell, Colson helped organize a prayer group and through it saw the impact of faith on otherwise bitter and despairing men...
...He felt obligated to attend...
...Most wardens balked at the off-site program, however, and within a year, Prison Fellowship was working almost exclusively inside prisons...
...He's showing what can be done to renew culture through these mediating institutions...
...radio ministry Focus on the Family, phones him every few days for advice...
...Lewis wrote, "until we care for something else more than we care for it...
...Watergate as Watershed It would be easy to overlook the incongruity of Col-son's decision, back in 1976, to throw himself into prison work...
...Joe Pitts, a state legislator (now a congressman) from Pennsylvania, was so excited by the idea that he drove two convicts from his district to Washington in his own car...
...He shakes hands, embraces them, prays with them...
...Conservatives may be more likely to talk about sin, but they love incarcerating sinners...
...The Christian worldview must be brought to bear in new form and forcefulness on the intellectual and moral framework of contemporary life...
...They would get two weeks of Bible training in a fraternity-like setting— not in a lock-down facility, but in a Washington row house...
...Soon after U.S...
...His employer noticed that every job he completed (welders call it a "bead") passed inspection, and one day he asked Vargas about it...
...His upcoming book (co-authored with Nancy Pearcey) How Now Shall We Live...
...Harvey attended every event that week and now does volunteer work in the prisons he once managed...
...Peterson even turned down a chance at early parole so he could finish the program—a decision that kept him behind bars another 10 months...
...Chuck talked about the need to reach out to prisoners and work for prison reform," Cromartie says...
...In 1982, the program's first year, church volunteers bought gifts for about 500 children...
...Republicans mostly avoided the character issue, but he knew firsthand why it mattered, and said so...
...ports 300 full-time staff and nearly 50,000 volunteers...
...The lifetime law-and-order Republican, author of some of Nixon's toughest anti-crime speeches, saw a justice system in free fall...
...Aside from all his writing and speaking, Chuck has spent a lot of time in prisons like Leavenworth, comforting inmates who are not getting out," says Cromartie, now a scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C...
...Lewis...
...Prison Fellowship stresses supervised work, community service, mentoring, restitution, and even meetings between victim and offender...
...He began to sense a call to enter what may be the least glamorous of mission fields...
...You're meeting people at a point of incredible need...
...Today there are so many groups going in, so many Bible studies taking place, that you're actually competing to get on the calendar," says Fish, now a senior vice president...
...I've been through five prison riots, seven hostage situations, 54 murders, 57 suicides," Harvey says...
...It is just such hands-on involvement—his long record of scandal-free, compassionate help to prisoners and their families—that gives Colson his authoritative edge...
...It is sin...
...He makes only occasional television appearances, is seldom in Washington, and has never tried to build a political organization...
...Last year the organization logged over 2,100 in-prison seminars, drawing about 70,000 inmates...
...The director of Inner-Change, Jack Cowley (a dead ringer for Tommy Lee Jones), is a former warden with a low tolerance for sob stories...
...worship service and spend most of the day in Bible study, supervised work, or school...
...In September 1973, Colson joined a weekly prayer group with, among others, the late senator Harold Hughes, a liberal Democrat from Iowa...
...Conservative Christians thought they smelled liberal Protestantism...
...His programs extend to both the children of inmates and the victims of crime...
...Political scientist James Q. Wilson writes that "putting people in prison has been the single most important thing we've done to reduce crime...
...It's filled with scheming, scamming, and surviving...
...When possible, churches are matched with children in their own neighborhood, and church teenagers organize and host Christmas parties for the families...
...Jim Harvey, former regional director of South Carolina's Department of Corrections, was a warden of the old school...
...Still, the image of Chuck Colson praying with prison thugs doesn't fit the stock portrait of one of America's most powerful Christian conservatives, which Colson clearly is...
...The unabashed objective is Christian conversion...
...Uneaten food and human waste were everywhere...
...Appearing on Larry King Live after the Senate's vote to acquit the president, Colson stressed its impact on prisoners who already hold the justice system in contempt...
...His legions of church-based volunteers, drawn from virtually all denominations, are active in most of the nation's 1,600 state and federal prisons...
...But nothing ever got to me like that did...
...This view led Colson in the early 1980s to found Justice Fellowship, which lobbies for legislative reform in such areas as prison conditions and religious freedom for inmates...
...Instead of rehabilitating offenders, it debilitates them...
...A study by T. David Evans published in 1995 in Criminology, the leading journal of crime research, links exposure to religion with a significant reduction in crime and delinquency...
...We're going to expect the men to act normal, and we're going to give them choices...
...They know it, and they're hungry...
...Compare that with Colson: "No matter what its aggravating causes, there is only one taproot of crime," he says...
...What is surprising is that, in an era so politicized that even cloistered monks might show up on Meet the Press, Colson himself rarely enters national politics...
...Five years later, he is still denounced for his part in crafting "Evangelicals and Catholics Together," a joint statement of theological and cultural concerns...
...His work among inmates earned him the 1993 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, placing him in the ranks of Billy Graham, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Mother Teresa...
...Evenings are filled with parenting classes, meetings with crime victims, family nights, and more Bible study...
...His daily radio commentary on faith and culture can be heard on over 1,000 outlets...
...Thousands of inmates have read his book Born Again, where he recounts his jolting journey to Christian faith—from serving in President Nixon's inner circle to sorting laundry during his stint at a federal prison for Watergate crimes...
...I'd rather preach in prison than anywhere else," he says later...
...A manic work schedule wrecked his first marriage...
...The catalyst was a visit to the notoriously unruly Walla Walla prison in Washington state...
...He is easily one of its most prolific...
...Nixon himself called Colson "the guy who'll walk through a door without opening it...
...Several slip notes into his pocket, thanking him for coming...
...The problem is that nearly all inmates will be released eventually—and return to a neighborhood near you...
...The church is no civic center, no social club or encounter group," he writes in his 1992 book The Body...
...They move from idea to acceptance to program faster and with more business acumen and heart than any organization I've ever seen," says John DiIulio, a board member and leading authority on faith-based crime-fighting programs...
...We don't need to accept foolish liberal criminology ideas in order to fulfill our responsibility to reach out to people who've done wicked deeds," says Robert George, a political scientist at Princeton...
...Perhaps civilization will never be safe," C.S...
...When Pat Robertson ran for president in 1988, for example, he asked Colson to take over his television ministry...
...Moreover, Colson's rhetoric sometimes gets a little overheated...
...So while other religious celebrities are exchanging pleasantries with well-groomed congregants, Colson is mixing it up with violent felons...
...A theme he returns to frequently: Congregations must do a much better job of Christianizing their own members...
...As the founder of Prison Fellowship, the world's largest prison ministry, operating now in 83 countries, Colson has repeated the scene hundreds of times...
...He's become a voice for "muscular" Christianity, denying liberal notions of human goodness, while insisting that faith produce good works...
...I supervised the first 13 executions in South Carolina since 1986...
...Over the years, liberals have added a bagful of therapeutic approaches to their economic model...
...No one really expected criminals to stop committing crimes...
...A budget of $38.7 million—all privately funded—supPRISON SPARKED COLSON'S SECOND CONVERSION—ON CRIME...
...Within a few months he put his faith in Christ, and almost immediately his outlook changed...
...Today I'm like a son to him...
...From the time he served as an aide to U.S...
...DiIulio, who debated Colson several years ago over the need for more prisons, now thinks we have "maxed out" on the usefulness of incarceration...
...Then Prison Fellowship brought a week of concerts and other events into state facilities, beginning at a women's prison in Columbia...
...A Prison Fellowship mentoring program in Detroit, which targets offenders at high risk of recidivism, claims similar results...
...EX-CON The Remarkable Second Career of Chuck Colson By Joe Loconte Sixty-seven-year-old Chuck Colson looks almost spry as he threads his way through the New Jersey State Prison, a maximum security facility in Trenton, New Jersey...
...But most inmates don't fit that description...
...Time magazine labeled him "the toughest of the Nixon tough guys...
...A 1997 report by the National Institute for Healthcare Research found that inmates in a Prison Fellowship Bible study in New York were three times less likely to be rearrested than those who weren't...
...In a First Things symposium on the growing power of the federal courts, he recalled the German evangelical churches' stand against the Nazis...
...Some victims' rights groups worry that prison ministries can become another way to coddle criminals...
...Yet Colson is no pietist, enthralled by private spirituality...
...He holds the classic view of Christian disciple-ship—that genuine faith always produces ripple effects beyond the individual and into the larger culture...
...Says Jester warden Fred Becker, "It might be the first time in American corrections we've had people refuse parole...
...He oversaw 13 prisons and logged nearly 30 years' experience in criminal justice, but until a few years ago he didn't take prison ministry seriously...
...James Dobson calls him "probably the most valuable resource the Christian community has today...
...Moral and cultural renewal may require more than helping the poor, visiting the sick, praying with prisoners—but surely not less...
...Martin Marty, who recently edited a book series critical of religious fundamentalism, says even those who disagree with Colson's conservative theology do not doubt his conversion or fail to respect the ministry it has produced...
...Bible studies, worship, and revival meetings were added to the mix...
...It's going to be the hardest prison in the system," he says, "because we're going to raise expectations...
...Within a few weeks, he committed his life to Jesus...
...It does nothing to hold criminals personally accountable to their victims...
...Col-son's original idea was different: Give inmates intensive exposure to Christian teaching and fellowship, preferably outside the prison culture...
...Recall the words of Ramsey Clark, attorney general under Lyndon Johnson: "The basic solution for crime is economic...
...senator Sam Brownback arrived in Washington, he asked for a meeting with Colson, whom he calls a leader of "soul-based conservatism...
...The barbed wire, watchtowers, and 15-foot walls suggest a pretty exclusive club: Only men who've committed crimes earning them 25 years to life are admitted here...
...Jesus turned the values of the world upside down," he tells them, "because he came not for the victors, but for the losers...
...Colson's most ambitious project so far is in Sugar Land, Texas, where Prison Fellowship has actually been running a wing of the Jester II Prison since mid 1997...
...A state prison in Texas, run like a spiritual retreat center, is getting visits from criminal justice officials nationwide...
...And zero accountability usually produces zero remorse...
...The good Samaritan in the Bible— "he went to him and bandaged his wounds"—sticks his neck out, after all, for a crime victim...
...I was the last person he wanted to see," Peterson says...
...many of them, with God's help, can change...
...It is very deep, very profound, very tested...
...senator Leverett Saltonstall in the 1950s, then founded a Washington law firm, through his role as special counsel to President Nixon starting in 1969, Colson knelt at the altar of politics and power...
...The justice system must pay more attention to victims and communities actually hurt by crime...
...If only a few more TV evangelists had those experiences...
...Perhaps this is Colson's rebuke to those who demand "a seat at the table" of national politics...
...Ironically, Colson's influence as a Christian has its roots in the political arena, in Watergate...
...The former employer even agreed to a meeting...
Vol. 4 • June 1999 • No. 39
