Crime, Morality, and the Media Elites

Charles Colson offers an olive branch to journalists at the National Press Club.

After the announcement that Prison Fellowship chairman Charles Colson had won the prestigious Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion (see CT News, March 8, 1993, p. 57), he was invited by the National Press Club to address their members at their Washington, D.C., headquarters. The March 11 talk addressed journalists; but because it has consequences for religious leaders, readers of CHRISTIANITY TODAY may like to listen in. A condensed version of the talk follows:

The irony of this occasion is not lost on me and possibly not on you. It was 20 years ago in this place that I appeared to defend Richard Nixon. Many journalists who covered Watergate ended up winning Pulitzer prizes or lucrative book contracts. I ended up in prison.

Today I come, not with a hatchet, as I did 20 years ago, but with an olive branch. I hope to persuade you that the two camps which you and I represent should make peace.

My side is often stereotyped as the Religious Right—those folks described by the Washington Post as “largely uneducated, poor and easy to command.” There is considerable diversity in that group, including some who show more zeal than thought. But generally our side agrees on one thing: We harbor a fear and loathing of the media elite. That phrase—even if you don’t feel very elite—means all of you here today.

My proposition is simple: that both sides need each other for the greater good of our society.

Let me approach my thesis beginning with the subject I know best: criminal justice. Over the past 17 years, I have been in well over 600 prisons in nearly 30 countries. What I have experienced can be summed up tersely: The American criminal justice system is terminally ill. While I find Dr. Kevorkian appalling, we could use someone like him in public policy—to dispose of discredited government programs. (Nothing in government dies of natural causes.) And criminal-justice policies would top the list to be hooked up to the death machine.

The statistics tell the story. In 1973 there were 210,000 people in U.S. prisons; the incarceration rate was 98 per 100,000 U.S. citizens, well behind the notoriously high rates of the Soviet Union and South Africa. Last year the total number of people imprisoned in America was 856,000, plus 425,000 in jails. Our rate of incarceration was 512 per 100,000 (including jails). We are now leading the world by a wide margin.

In spite of the huge number of criminals being incarcerated, our crime rate has continued to rise. In 20 years, violent crime has climbed over 75 percent. And each year the people who commit these bloody crimes are younger. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control estimate that 20 percent of high-school students carry weapons to class.

Lawlessness lies just below the surface of our everyday life. Crime’s societal burden grows heavier each year. When spark touched tinder in Los Angeles, many of us saw a vision of the future of many American cities.

Statistics can leave us cold. But I have seen the dreadful cost of this system in the faces of thousands of human beings trapped in it. When I was a prisoner, I watched men spend their days lying on their bunks doing nothing, staring into the emptiness—bodies atrophying, souls corroding. Prison talk centered on how they would get even with those who had wronged them or with society in general. I have never been in a place so filled with anger, bitterness, despair, dejection.

It is no wonder to me that, after being released, between 66 and 74 percent commit new crimes within four years; the wonder is that 25 percent do not. The prison experience is brutal, dehumanizing, counterproductive.

Of course, prisons do serve one very important function. They separate dangerous offenders from the rest of society. And I should add that the failure of the system is not due to correctional officials. I’ve been greatly impressed with the high quality of people who serve in corrections—some of the most dedicated public servants I’ve known.

No, the blame for the mess we’re in today rests squarely on the shoulders of politicians; and it is shared equally by Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives. Both sides have been wrong. Dangerously wrong.

Let’s consider first the liberal approach. The prevailing sociological view earlier in this century was that crime is caused by environmental factors—poverty, racism, oppression, lack of opportunity. Once this idea took root, it was hard to shake. In the 1960s, Attorney General Ramsey Clark said flat out, “Poverty is the cause of crime.” Millions of people concluded they weren’t responsible for their behavior. They were the victims of poverty.

President Jimmy Carter said virtually the same thing in response to the looting following New York’s infamous 24-hour blackout. Poverty drove New Yorkers to riot, Carter argued. But his words rang hollow a few months later when studies showed that most looters were employed, and they stole things they didn’t need or have any use for.

And last year during the Los Angeles riots we heard haunting echoes of Clark and Carter.

If the cause of crime is the external environment, then crime could be cured by changing the environment. Thus we came to believe that prisons are capable of rehabilitating criminals. But rehabilitation proved to be a costly myth. I don’t know anyone in corrections today who honestly believes that prisons have a redemptive purpose. Nevertheless, the myth lives on, and so does the notion that individuals are not responsible for their behavior.

The assumptions on the conservative side have been equally flawed. They believe the solution to crime is to lock criminals up and throw away the key. Since Christians are called to repent of their sins, I will do so here. I helped shape the law-and-order mentality popular today. Politicians have simply repeated some of the lines I wrote for Nixon that proved to be crowd pleasers. “Throw away the key. Get tough on crime,” intones the politician—and he is drowned out by applause.

This is called the deterrent theory: Lock them up and we’ll scare people out of crime. But it doesn’t work either. The problem is that fear does little to change behavior. If it did, no one would smoke. Motivations are more complex than that, particularly when it comes to crime and violence.

If prisons did rehabilitate or if the threat of prison did deter crime, surely we would be living in utopian peace. But the stark fact is this: Though we’ve thrown more people in prison than at any other time in human history, few sensible people would be willing to take a walk in this city’s combat zone after dark. One out of four American households will be victims of crime this year. Crime and the fear of crime disrupt our lives and haunt our nights.

Why have these approaches failed? The answer is as close as our conscience and as distant as our highest ideals. Both approaches have ignored our moral life. They have passed over our character and forgotten our soul. And that is where the cause of crime is rooted.

In the 1950s a psychologist, Stanton Samenow, and a psychiatrist, Samuel Yochelson, sharing the conventional wisdom that crime is caused by environment, set out to prove their point. They began a 17-year study involving thousands of hours of clinical testing of 250 inmates here in the District of Columbia. To their astonishment, they discovered that the cause of crime cannot be traced to environment, poverty, or oppression. Instead, crime is the result of individuals making, as they put it, wrong moral choices. In their 1977 work The Criminal Personality, they concluded that the answer to crime is a “conversion of the wrong-doer to a more responsible lifestyle.”

In 1987, Harvard professors James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein came to similar conclusions in their book Crime and Human Nature. They determined that the cause of crime is a lack of proper moral training among young people during the morally formative years, particularly ages one to six.

In other words, the crime problem boils down to concepts foreign to our understanding today. The root of our crime problem is the loss of individual morality and the resulting erosion of our character as a people. Neither the liberal solution nor the conservative solution reaches this deep.

The evidence of American history powerfully supports this conclusion. In the early 1980s, the same James Q. Wilson decided to survey our history to find some trend or cycle that would correlate with crime data. He noticed a startling pattern. Crime did not correlate with poverty. During the Great Depression, for example, there was widespread poverty—34 million people unemployed—and yet crime dropped.

Nor did it correlate with factors like urbanization. The middle of the nineteenth century, for example, was a period of rapid urbanization. Yet the level of crime actually fell. Why? During that same period a great spiritual awakening took place. So from the mid-1800s to 1920, despite all the environmental, economic, and social pressures, the crime rate actually decreased.

Conversely, during the good economic years of the 1920s, crime rose. Why? Because, as Wilson concluded, “the educated classes began to repudiate moral uplift and Freud’s psychological theories came into vogue.” People no longer believed in restraining a child’s sinful impulses; they wanted to develop his “naturally good” personality. The weaker emphasis on moral training led to an increase in criminal behavior.

The same philosophy, by the way, came back into fashion in the 1960s, bringing with it a sharp increase in crime, which still continues today.

If crime stems from moral factors, then the solution to crime must be moral as well. Anything else is merely a Band-Aid to treat a sickness of the soul. What practical guidelines does this insight give us in confronting our crisis of crime and punishment?

First, we need committed people who will transmit to prison inmates a message of hope and redemption. At this moment, Prison Fellowship has 50,000 volunteers going into prisons: holding seminars, conducting Bible studies, mentoring inmates as they are released from prison, visiting their families, bringing gifts to their children.

I would not be so presumptuous to say that only the gospel of Christ can bring about moral reformation. I’m happy about every effort where people are helped. But it is Jesus Christ who made a lasting difference in my life. And this is what I can offer to others.

Does it work? Emphatically, yes—even by the standards of the most skeptical critic. A 1990 study conducted by the Institute for Religious Research at Loyola College in Maryland compared two groups of ex-offenders. They were similar in terms of crimes committed, age, gender, and race. The only difference between them was that one group had participated in Prison Fellowship programs and the other had not. The study found that, overall, offenders who had taken part in the programs were nearly 22 percent less likely to be re-arrested than those who had not.

Second, to deal with the crime crisis, we need a balanced criminal justice policy, one that offers both real punishment and real redemption. That means abandoning the idea altogether that prisons either rehabilitate or deter. Prisons succeed in keeping violent and dangerous criminals off the streets. Beyond that, they accomplish little. Yet 50 percent of those admitted to prison each year have committed nonviolent offenses.

We could solve the prison overcrowding problem overnight if we had the political courage and honesty to take nonviolent, nondangerous inmates out of prison, put them in work camps or in community-based treatment centers or in home incarceration and make them work. In this way, they could pay back their victims rather than sit in a prison cell at a cost of $20,000 a year to the taxpayers. It is redemptive for the individual, teaching responsibility for his actions; and it is redemptive for society, restoring the victims of crime.

Restitution is a biblical principle that works. In 1973, Minnesota revised its corrections system, coupling alternatives to incarceration with sentencing reform. The results are impressive. Minnesota has an incarceration rate of 73 per 100,000 residents—the second lowest in the nation. Even more impressive, Minnesota’s incarceration rate is lower than many western European countries, including Denmark, France, Switzerland, and Austria. The numbers prove that alternatives to incarceration do succeed.

Third, if the solution to crime involves a moral response, we must deal with our culture’s crumbling moral consensus. Remember what Wilson and Herrnstein said: Crime stems from a failure in moral training.

No culture can survive without a moral consensus, shared beliefs about right and wrong, a common standard of truth. This is what defines the rules we live by. It motivates self-sacrifice. It undergirds the law. It permits freedom without anarchy. It is the agreement that society is governed more by transcendent truths than by individual desires, that society is more than the sum of the choices individuals make. Without this consensus, the individual is abandoned to self-interest alone.

I’m reminded of Samuel Johnson’s reaction when he was told a certain guest believed all morality is a sham. “Why, sir, if he really believes there is no distinction between virtue and vice,” roared Johnson, “let us count the spoons before he leaves.” The problem is, after decades of value-free tolerance, we don’t have any spoons left to count. Look at all the “gates” that followed Watergate—the Wall Street scandals, religious frauds, fallen sports heros.

The problem is that our moral consensus has shattered. So how do we go about restoring it? Where does moral conviction come from?

Though George Will might argue that government can inspire and create public virtue—that statecraft is soulcraft—I respectfully disagree. I believe virtue is something that grows from within, not something enforced from above. The law does have a role in moral instruction. But the roots of our moral life go deeper than laws and bills. Government programs can feed the body; they cannot touch the soul. They can punish behavior; they cannot transform hearts.

Ultimately, the goal must be reformation, not just reform. And this points directly to the essential role of religious values and religious hope in our common life. Religion is the only way to reach into the darkest corners of every community, into the darkest corners of every mind.

Religion provides a moral impulse to do good. It has sent legions of Christians into battle against disease and oppression and bigotry. It ended the slave trade, built hospitals and orphanages, tamed the brutality of mental wards and prisons. It motivated marches for civil rights and marches for human life. It has provided a voice for the weak and a hope for the hopeless.

Religion also provides the power to be good. It subdues an obstinate will. It provides new values to old sinners—even to people like a White House hatchet man.

I sense some of you are squirming, and I know what many people think: “Christians just want to cram their religious values down reluctant throats.” But that is not my intention. I want simply to argue that Christians bring something important to our culture, something that cannot be easily replaced. I want to argue that they deserve an honored place at the table, that in a free, pluralistic society, we can contend in the public square for the truths we cherish without “imposing” them on anyone.

The great paradox of our age is this: In the interest of tolerance, we are aggressively seeking to scrub religious values, and even reminders of our religious heritage, out of our public life. Yet it is that religious heritage that is essential for the recovery of character.

There can be no truce in our “culture war” until we begin to understand one another—until we see that a society can be both tolerant and, at the same time, respect certain transcendent truths, ideas of right and wrong that inspire us to rise beyond narrow self-interest.

A good place to start is with you and me—with what we might call the conservative evangelical wing of the American church and what, for lack of a better term, is called the media elite. So long as we see one another as mortal enemies, we will make little contribution to public harmony.

I have to confess that my side bears a substantial responsibility for the gulf that divides us. We have often pictured you as extremists, who will not rest until you’ve strangled the last abortion protester with the guts of the last televangelist. You, in turn, have painted us as bigoted enemies of freedom. Every church is pictured as a carnival of corruption, with an ayatollah in every pulpit.

Both of us are wrong. And if this is how the debate continues to be framed, all America loses.

And so let us offer one another an olive branch.

Those of us who represent the Christian faith share a common interest with you, the media, in the preservation of America’s first freedom. Both of us live or die by the same First Amendment.

On our side, we need to make a better case of what is required to develop public virtue. We need to argue more convincingly that a free society depends not only on economic and political freedoms but also on the moral character that supports those freedoms.

We would ask you, on the other hand, to look at what religion actually means in American life. To be frank, Christians chafe when we see front-page coverage of our shameful scandals. Our religious excesses are fair game for your coverage, of course. But how about giving the other side of the story, too? I appeal to you, in the interest of the public welfare: Hear our case. Don’t judge us by a few zealots, just as we should not judge you by those few journalists who stereotype us as “poor, uneducated and easy to command.”

Let us come together to recognize that an escalating war between paranoia and bigotry serves no one. And in this truce, perhaps we can begin a serious discussion of our common moral life—in a society where crime makes that discussion increasingly urgent.

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