PRISON FELLOWSHIP BLOG: Uncategorized

The following post originally appeared as a BreakPoint radio commentary.

Now that Father’s Day is past, we can ignore dads again for another year. I’m joking, of course, but society isn’t. And that’s the problem.

We’ve discussed the cultural attacks on men many times before on BreakPoint, how pop culture is fond of portraying them as over-grown adolescents, or worse, as sadistic and violent haters of women.

There aren’t too many things these days on which Republicans and Democrats agree.  Partisanship is high, and considering that this is an election year, the incentive for both parties to work together to solve problems is low.

There is, however, at least one issue that has elicited support from both liberals and conservatives: prison reform.

On a recent visit to a prison I met a man I’ll call “Tom.”

Tom’s past is typical of many stories I hear. He is a repeat, nonviolent drug offender. By day, on the outside, he was a truck driver, but he also sold drugs to supplement his income.

When the word “prison” is mentioned, a some very common images come to mind – cold, gray bars set against drab, colorless walls; small, dark cells intended to isolate and punish rather than to reform or rehabilitate.  Acres of razor wire surrounding these facilities bespeak the philosophy that those on the inside are to be set apart, not to be connected in any meaningful way to society at large.

In a recent edition of Inside Journal®, Prison Fellowship’s newspaper for men and women behind bars, I asked our readers this question: What should we do to make our streets safer from gun violence?

You might be thinking, What would criminals know or care about stopping violence?

The following article originally appeared on the Worldview Church website, a ministry of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview that is part of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

In Shawshank Redemption, “Red,” the character played by Morgan Freeman, calmly tells new inmate Andy Dufresne, “Haven’t you heard?

Speaking to a gathering of the American Bar Association in San Francisco on August 12, Attorney General Eric Holder announced sweeping changes to current sentencing practices that will allow for greater flexibility and eliminate “mandatory minimum” sentencing for many non-violent offenders.

After years of work to limit astronomical phone rates in jails and prisons, we have reached a significant milestone!  At today’s open meeting in Washington, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted 2-1 to cut the rates that prisoners and their families pay for interstate phone calls. 

More than 12,000 prisoners in the California correctional system have entered into a hunger strike to protest solitary confinement practices in the state’s prisons.  The hunger strike is the largest of its kind in California history, nearly doubling a similar hunger strike in 2011.

The following post originally appeared on Justice Fellowship’s weblog.  To learn more about Justice Fellowship and its work to reform the criminal justice system, visit www.justicefellowship.org.

An investigation has revealed that California’s prisons have been routinely sterilizing female prisoners. The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) released a report that found that prison doctors have performed tubal ligations on nearly 150 female inmates from 2006 to 2010 without required state approvals.

There’s a solution to crime, and it’s been staring us in the face for a long time. It’s not more education. It’s not better economic policies or a police officer on every corner. Economics, legislation, and policing are all important, of course, and followers of Jesus should be working vigorously in every area to promote justice and peace, but none of those things will actually solve the problem of crime where it starts: in the human heart.

At a graduation ceremony for students completing Prison Fellowship’s four-year Prisoners to Pastors program, a tearful dad confessed to me, “I thought my son would never complete anything but a prison sentence!”

We were at South Bay Correctional Institution in Florida.

Can you believe abandoning a snowmobile in a life-threatening blizzard or digging up arrowheads can result in criminal charges?

These are a few unfortunate examples of “overcriminalization.”

New criminal laws that do not include a criminal intent requirement and the duplication of federal criminal laws that already exist at the state level have made it impossible for reasonable citizens to know all the criminal laws and regulations that could land them in jail or prison.