Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Charles W. Colson, the Watergate figure, founded Prison Fellowship, the world’s largest Christian outreach to prisoners.
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With Prison Ministry, Colson Linked Religion and Reform
By MARK OPPENHEIMER
“Since the 1960s, prison reform has been seen as a leftist cause,” Robert Perkinson, a historian and the author of “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire,” said this week. “But it used to be a Christian cause, and Colson played a big role in bringing prison reform back to Christian conservatism.”
Dr. Perkinson was referring, of course, to Charles W. Colson, the convicted Watergate felon who died last Saturday. In his first act, Mr. Colson was “Nixon’s hatchet man” and “the ugliest of the Watergate thugs, the most shamelessly vicious,” as one historian wrote this week in The New Republic.
But Mr. Colson, who found Jesus shortly before entering prison, remade himself as a free man, in 1976 founding what became Prison Fellowship, the world’s largest Christian outreach to prisoners. In the process, he played an important role in the ever-changing relationship between prisons and religion. Historians of penology — there are many — remembered Mr. Colson as someone who, in a small way, pointed American prisons back toward their roots.
Scholars speak of two rival impulses in American incarceration: one an older, Christian reform impulse and the other a disciplinary and retributive impulse, focused on punitive labor and harsh conditions, which gained strength in the slaveholding South.
“Since the 1790s, religious reformers in some Eastern states successfully lobbied not only for the creation of prisons, but also for reformers’ influence in these institutions’ management,” Jennifer Graber, author of “The Furnace of Affliction: Prisons & Religion in Antebellum America,” wrote in an e-mail. “New York’s first prison, for example, had an operating board composed primarily of Quaker reformers.”
Philadelphia’s earliest prisons were also influenced by Friends, or Quakers. They believed bad environments led people to crime. The theory, according to Joshua Dubler, of the University of Rochester, was that “you separate people out, and because every human being has a divine light inside of them, the divine light will thrive anew.”
In these prisons, those who committed crimes could be penitents — hence the term “penitentiary” — then re-enter society as changed people. Jailers often relied on solitary confinement, which could drive prisoners mad, but the impulse, at least, was toward rehabilitation.
But almost from the beginning that model was opposed by another model, in which the prison was mainly a place of punishment: think of chain gangs and labor farms. Over the centuries, each model has come in and out of vogue.
In the 1960s, “we were at a progressive extreme” in prison theory, according to Dr. Dubler. Prison administrators pursued prisoners’ rehabilitation, while many inmates — including those, like Malcolm X, who joined the Nation of Islam — practiced “revolutionary, politically engaged religion.” Since the 1980s, however, with the trend toward more punitive prisons, prison religion, often supported by volunteers like those from Mr. Colson’s outreach group, has often been more about “adjusting to the system, not about changing the system itself,” Dr. Dubler said.
Yet Mr. Colson advocated more humane, less crowded prisons; more prisoner contact with the outside world; more rehabilitative services; and better services for re-entry to society. Against the conservative and evangelical tides, Mr. Colson was, in a sense, returning to the spirit of the 1960s, or even the 1790s.
A spokesman for Prison Fellowship pointed to studies — by New York Theological Seminary and the University of Pennsylvania, among others — that conclude that prison ministry turns inmates away from crime.
But not all scholars are convinced.
“Criminologists have convincingly shown that inmates involved in religious programming have fewer infractions while inside,” said Dr. Graber. “The data outside is much more difficult to interpret.”
“Nobody knows if this stuff works,” said Winnifred F. Sullivan, a professor at the University at Buffalo and the author of “Prison Religion.” Because prisoners have to request to be part of Mr. Colson’s programs, they may be a more motivated population, Dr. Sullivan said, making it hard to determine the source of any eventual success.
Dr. Sullivan praised Mr. Colson’s ministries for going where other angels fear to tread. “Few people want to do this work,” she said. But she agreed that while Mr. Colson allied with many liberals on prison reform, his brand of evangelical Christianity easily accommodated a conservative vision of society.
The basic goal of Prison Fellowship Ministries “is to train people to be good productive workers in a capitalist society,” Dr. Sullivan said. The ministers want to teach people “to get up every morning and go to work and take care of their families. They say they just happen to use religion.”
Dr. Perkinson, who teaches at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, said that Mr. Colson’s conservative faith may help inmates understand their own failings, but that it does little to help them understand society’s.
“The thing that’s sad is you could have a prison tied to the social gospel or liberation theology, which could connect people to the sins and failings of the larger society,” Dr. Perkinson said. “But that’s not what they have access to.”
Dr. Perkinson once visited the Carol S. Vance Unit, a Texas prison that subcontracts with Prison Fellowship for programming. Inmates can opt into the program, but cannot be forced to participate. He was both discomfited and amazed by what he saw.
“On the one hand, it was flagrantly unconstitutional,” Dr. Perkinson said. “If you didn’t believe God created the earth in seven days, and not just that same-sex relations were a sin but so was masturbation, you couldn’t graduate from this program. It was almost Taliban-style. But it was the only prison of all that I visited in Texas that was permeated with love.”
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