Let’s start with the proposition that if every church in the United States would adopt an inmate, our problem would be solved. Theoretically that’s true, but we’re a long way from being able to achieve that. Mayor Koch tried to do that with the 35,000 homeless people in New York; he challenged the churches to help. All the churches did was raise practical problems about why it wouldn’t work. In my opinion, both sides were wrong. The churches adopted a wrong attitude, and the mayor oversimplified a terribly complicated problem.
I happen to believe the church today does need to broaden its horizons to work more and more in meeting human needs. But it can’t instantly pick up all the government welfare programs that took fifty years to build.
We’re going to have to raise up and train probably 100,000 volunteers before we will make a dent in some of the major social problems such as criminal justice. And we’ll have to put up with the grossly inefficient government bureaucrats a little longer than we’d like.
In the meantime, the church can tackle some parts of the problem. Education is the biggest one. I have addressed state legislatures, political leaders across the country, White House people, members of the Congress, and almost without exception the politicians understand the issue and know what needs to be done. But they’re afraid to do it.
After I addressed a caucus of the Washington state legislature, the spokesman got up and said, “Mr. Colson, you’re the kind of guy we don’t like to come around here. You make us face things we don’t want to face, but we also respect your coming and telling us the truth. Now we have to do something about it. But we also want to get re-elected; you take the lead, and we’ll follow you.” The whole place cheered. We got a reform package through the legislature, and the state prison population, which was going up at the rate of 20 percent a year, will soon be stabilized. We’re going to help make some sense out of criminal justice in that state.
But we did it with a coalition. Church volunteers all across the state passed out literature, spoke to groups, and visited prisons. We raised the consciousness level of the people about the inefficient, wasteful, immoral condition of the system. Half of the prisoners in America are in for nonviolent, nondangerous crimes. According to the latest study, it costs $70,000 to build a maximum security prison cell, $50,000 to build a medium security prison cell—to house a nonviolent criminal? Any business in the world would go bankrupt if it did what the prison system does.
Unfortunately, the biggest opposition to reform comes from conservative, evangelical churches, out of plain ignorance. Their conservative theology carries them over into conservative politics and the myth that to get criminals off the street you ought to lock up everybody. You can’t build enough prisons to get criminals off the street. Only 2 percent today are being prosecuted and sent to prison. We already have a per capita incarceration rate higher than any other country on earth except the Soviet Union and South Africa. Conservative Christian leadership needs to be educated on these issues.
The alternatives? Punish nonviolent offenders in a different way. Everybody has to be punished. We believe in accountability—a person is responsible for his or her own crime—but punishment shouldn’t be restricted to prison. Why put a nonviolent offender in a $70,000 prison cell and spend another $17,000 each year to maintain him? It’s mad, and it’s ignorance. State governors have said to me, “I want to do what you’re talking about, because I want to save the money, but the public will never stand for it.” How do we change the public? By educating the people with a conscience—the Christians.
Churches can do this. They can take the material we are generating, all biblically based. They can ask Christian judges to come lecture on the subject. Set aside a day in your church for your people to hear about this. Then go visit the jails, speak at clubs, assign someone in your church to research what’s going on in your community, and make a difference. Then we can really be instruments of justice.
