In 1974, while serving time in prison for his role in Watergate, Prison Fellowship founder Chuck Colson was wrestling with thoughts about what he would do with his life after his release.
“Here I was in pris on, public enemy number one, the notoriety of the Watergate publicity, and the most depressing thing to me was the realization that I probably couldn’t ever do anything significant with my life again.”
UPDATE: The Senate Judiciary Committee passed the Sentencing and Corrections Act of 2015 on October 22 by a vote of 15 to 5. The bill now advances to the full Senate for approval. To contact your Senator to encourage their vote in support of the legislation, click here.
(Click on letter to view larger image.)
“My name is Carlos,” the letter begins. “I am 44 years old, a husband and father who is incarcerated, and has been for going on 9 years.”
Carlos is one of thousands of men and women who have been a part of Prison Fellowship’s in-prison programs.
Coleen Gray in Kansas City Confidential (Public Domain)
As an actress in the “golden age” of Hollywood, few had a more impressive résumé than Coleen Gray. She rose to national prominence in the late 1940s, starring in classic films like Kiss of Death, Kansas City Confidential, Red River, and The Killing.
It was uncanny. The prisoner standing in front of me shared my first name. Like me, he was raised on a farm in Michigan. In fact, our homes were so close together that we frequented the same ice cream parlor and hamburger joint growing up.
Jim Liske (l) with Chuck Colson
When I was still a pastor in Michigan, Prison Fellowship founder Chuck Colson came up for a visit. He attended a lunch celebrating those involved in a church-based reentry program for the formerly incarcerated. Men and women came up to thank Chuck for his work with prisoners, and as they did so, tears sprang to his eyes.
When Charles W. “Chuck” Colson entered the Maxwell Correctional Facility in July 1974, he did so as a humbled man. The former special prosecutor for President Richard Nixon had pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice during the ongoing Watergate scandal investigation, and was preparing to serve a one-to-three-year sentence in the Montgomery, Alabama, facility.
The following post originally appeared aired as a BreakPoint commentary on March 17.
During a recent visit to Swarthmore College, political scientist Robert Putnam of Harvard asked everyone in the room whose parents had graduated from college to raise their hands.
The criminal justice system was a vital concern to the late Chuck Colson and the organization he founded, Prison Fellowship. The need for Reform is ongoing. And to that end, John Stonestreet welcomes former Congressman J.
A version of the following commentary originally appeared on the BreakPoint website.
No human life is irredeemable—no one is beyond the reach of God. And if anyone in recent history embodied that truth, it was Chuck Colson.
In 1969, as a young, hard-driving, fast-rising political star, Chuck found himself in the oval office, accepting Richard Nixon’s offer to become special counsel to the President.
In January of 2014, the U.S. Congress established the Charles Colson Task Force on Federal Corrections. Prison Fellowship President and CEO Jim Liske was asked to serve on that task force, representing the interests of Prison Fellowship, and providing a voice to millions of prisoners and their families.
Devoting the rest of his life to prison ministry wasn’t what Chuck expected to do when he got out of prison, but God had other plans.
It was just a few months before Chuck went home to Jesus. We were sitting in his home in Naples, Florida, and he was “schooling” me, as he did several times in the nine months he and I were together at Prison Fellowship.
“This is what the LORD says—he who made a way through the sea, a path through the mighty waters … See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”