Acton Institute PowerBlog - Entries tagged as prison fellowship ministries

Colson Receives Presidential Citizens Medal

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

It is with a sense of great pride and joy that I join with thousands around the nation in congratulating Chuck Colson on his reception of the Presidential Citizen’s Medal presented to Chuck at the Oval Office today by President Bush.

It is important to remember that the ministry that Chuck founded some 35 years ago is noteworthy not only because it has assisted in countless men and women to transform their lives through the power of a right relationship with Christ, or that this ministry is staff by a veritable army of volunteers who visit prisons and in other ways help to mend broken families with God’s love.

What is most noteworthy is that all of this came from one man’s surrender to the call of Christ to turn from his sins and accept the Gospel of redemption. Through that encounter with grace, Chuck Colson’s life has been on ongoing testimony to grace which has inspired all of us to reflect more deeply on the invitation to forgiveness and restoration offered by the One who will shortly come to us as a babe in Bethlehem.

I salute my friend Chuck Colson on this and thank him for placing his life at the disposal of heaven.

Here’s some of what Chuck had to say on the Prison Fellowship site:

“Whatever good I may have done is because God saw fit to reach into the depths of Watergate and convert a broken sinner,” said Colson. “Everything that has been accomplished these past 35 years has been by God’s grace and sovereign design.”

In responding to the award, Colson directed the praise and accolades back toward the ministry of Prison Fellowship, the ministry he founded in 1976.

“I do not treat this medal as mine,” he said. “It is, like in the military, a unit citation. The staff of Prison Fellowship, the thousands of volunteers and the hundreds of thousands of donors have made this possible. So while I am overwhelmed in gratitude to God, I am grateful to all those associated in this movement called Prison Fellowship.”

Read the White House statement on Chuck and the other honorees.

Posted by Rev. Robert Sirico in News and Events at 16:49 | Leave a comment | Trackback

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chuck colson, presidential citizens medal, prison fellowship ministries, white house

Religion, Recidivism, and Reform

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

The Detroit News ran my commentary from the end of last year on the role of religion and prisoner reform today, “Don’t prevent religion from helping to reform prisoners.” The version that ran today omits the references to Jeremy Bentham, which you can get from the original and this related blog post.

In related news, Prison Fellowship president Mark Earley reports today that the “Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals has set February 13, 2007, for oral arguments in the appeal of the ruling against Prison Fellowship and the InnerChange Freedom Initiative (IFI).” The appeal will be argued in St. Louis, MO and former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor will be part of the three judge panel.

Get more information about the case at the IFI Ruling web page.

Posted by Jordan J. Ballor in Effective Compassion at 12:43 | Comment (1) | Trackback

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crime, faith-based initiatives, innerchange freedom initiative, iowa, jeremy bentham, prison fellowship ministries, prison reform, recidivism

Recidivism and Reform: Competing Views of the State’s Role in Prison

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

In this week’s Acton commentary, I reflect on the past year’s developments for InnerChange Freedom Initiative, a ministry of Prison Fellowship. In June a federal judge in Iowa ruled against IFI’s work at Iowa’s Newton facility. In his ruling (PDF here), the judge wrote that the responsibility for combating recidivism is “traditionally and exclusively reserved to the state.” This means that since reducing recidivism is a “state function,” anyone working to combat recidivism is by definition a “state actor.”

Panopticon blueprint by Jeremy Bentham, 1791

I contrast the judge’s perspective with that of IFI and other advocates of the importance of civil society, using the theories of utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham to highlight their differences. Bentham too thought that reform was the task of the government. He argued for the construction of prisons along the model of his “panopticon,” literally meaning “all seeing,” where the extreme use of constant surveillance and individual sequestration would break down the anti-social behaviors of convicted criminals. It was a rather unintuitive program, to say the least, but an influential one nonetheless.

Bentham thought so little of religious practice in fact, that he thought communal worship would destroy his isolationist agenda. In other types of prison facilities prisoner solitude would necessarily be disturbed when prisoners were given “the benefits of attendance on Divine service.”

Under Bentham’s plan, however, prisoners “might receive these benefits, in every circumstance, without stirring from their cells. No thronging nor jostling in the way between the scene of work and the scene destined to devotion; no quarellings, nor confederatings, nor plottings to escape; nor yet any whips or fetters to prevent it.” The communal aspects of worship could thus be entirely dispensed with while placating the necessities of religious adherence.

All of these events effecting IFI’s work occurred in a year that saw a sharp increase in violent crime. For more on the broader picture of the year’s legal developments for faith-based work, see this year’s “The State of the Law 2006: Legal Developments Affecting Government Partnerships with Faith-Based Organizations” from the Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy. The report includes a section devoted to IFI’s case.

And as a recent article in the NYT magazine observes, there is a growing political coalition on the topic of prison reform. Chris Suellentrop writes with regard to a specific piece of legislation that almost passed in the last congressional session, but may be brought up again in the future, “If the Second Chance Act fails to pass, it will not be because the two parties cannot agree on the importance of rehabilitation programs in prisons. But it may be because they disagree on the role religious organizations should play in rehabilitation.” (HT: Mirror of Justice)

Read the entire commentary here.

Posted by Jordan J. Ballor in Effective Compassion at 12:35 | Comments (7) | Trackback

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crime, faith-based initiatives, innerchange freedom initiative, iowa, jeremy bentham, panopticon, prison fellowship ministries, prison reform, recidivism