Newt Knows

Two weeks ago dozens of conservatives gathered in Washington, DC to assert that they are at the forefront of the prison reform movement. As former House Speaker Newt Gingrich noted, conservatives now realized that their drive in the 1980s and 1990s for long prison terms had the “unexpected consequences” of imprisoning too many non-violent offenders.

            Many in attendance at the conference credited to the late Chuck Colson for inspiring them to push for prison reform. Colson, known as the “hatchet man” for the Nixon Administration during Watergate, served time in a federal prison. He had a “Damascus Epiphany” while awaiting sentencing. His conversion allowed him to see the waste – in both money and lives – that prison is for all but the sociopaths who need to be segregated from society. Colson used his experiences as the basis for starting the group “Prison Fellowship,” a faith-based non-profit organization which has shown remarkable success in changing inmate’s lives.

            Colson wrote and spoke extensively about the evil lurking within America’s prisons (he did so before the advent of blogs!). What he witnessed convinced him that Christians must speak out about excessive punishment, waste, and despair evident “behind the walls.” This wasn’t limited to high-security prisons. Even low-custody, “soft” facilities, operate in a repressive manner. Prisons destroy. And, for so many behind bars who have known nothing but failure and disappointment, it leads only to anger, and bitterness and more failure.

            Newt and his conservative brethren know America can do better. Mr. Colson knew God expected more from us. Irony is defined as an event or result that is the opposite of what is expected. My life these past six years, meets that definition. Like Mr. Colson, I had an epiphany about my entire outlook while sitting alone in a jail cell. And like Mr. Colson, I realized all the assumption I spouted, all the things that motivated me, were false. Something else mattered.

            I don’t know if I would have come to that realization years earlier if it would have saved my marriage. I only know that I wasn’t willing to see it until, until that day in that cell.

            I think that helps explain the likes of Newt and Jeb, Edwin and Richard, and the hundreds of other “conservatives” who know now what they didn’t know then. Mr. Colson, thank you.

Jeremiah Calling

            We don’t like bad news. We especially don’t like being told we’ve got it wrong. That isn’t some modern, twitter-age shortcoming of we humans. It goes back to the beginning of creation. We don’t like people to tell us our assumptions are wrong.

            So God approaches this guy named Jeremiah and God says, “I need you to tell my people they’re off track. I’m dropping the hammer on them Jerry. They’ll be over-run, exiled, and feel abandoned and hopeless …” And Jeremiah hears God but doesn’t say, “Whoa Big Guy. I’m not telling them that. I’m not gonna be the bearer of bad news.” No, he does what God tells him. He goes to the King and the leaders of Israel and delivers God’s message … and they throw him in a well.

            Yeah, we don’t like being given bad news. We don’t like being told we aren’t “all that.” We like to think we are moral and just even as the evidence begs to differ. We react in outrage at cultural disagreements and demand “justice” – which really means punishment – for a host of crimes, yet we don’t consider the ramifications of our tough talk or tougher code of conduct. And then Jeremiah shows up and tells us we’re wrong and we get angry.

            Almost thirty years ago, a mid-forties, released Federal inmate began a second act in his life writing and speaking about the transformative power of God and the believer’s duty to minister to the outcasts and apply God’s principles to their lives. As long as the released inmate kept his words focused on the fallen repenting he was applauded. But, when he took on “conventional wisdom” on issues of wealth and law and order, well it was Jeremiah all over again. It’s always so much easier seeing the splinter in the eye of the poor, black kid charged with drug dealing or robbery than it is to see the plank in our own eye. Chuck Colson wouldn’t let people of faith do that. And, his words from the eighties are as relevant today as they were then.

            “The delusion which vote-hungry politicians perpetuate – that crime can be cured by simple panaceas – is dangerous. It diverts us from the real issue and makes the problem worse …

            The only way to combat the demagoguery … is for Christians to work for laws, which apply biblical standards to criminal justice issues. Though the Bible does not prescribe prison as punishment, restitution is called for often … And most important we must clearly discern the truth about the nature of man …”

            I work with prisoners as a prisoner. Yes, I broke the law, as did almost every other prisoner I have met. And people must be held accountable for their actions. Society cannot condone one who steals from their employer and violates work place trust. I broke the law, I am guilty, and I must be punished, I must be held accountable. But Colson asks, where is the correlation between holding me accountable and making my employer whole, and showing the sufficiency of the law. Prison does not do that. Anyone who thinks good comes from places like this is deluding themselves.

            Justice is not a tool which the majority – or the ones in power – can exert based on their own biases. Justice – true justice – is manifested in the righteousness of God. I say this without any reservation: “WWJD,” What would Jesus do? He would forgive the remorseful murderer and embezzler and say, as He did to the law-breaking adulterous woman, “go and sin no more.” But those who in their self-righteousness allow and support a soul-breaking, vile, violent system like the corrections apparatus in America, he would compare to the Pharisees who are still blind.

            Harsh words; harsh judgment. The truth is sometimes harsh. I’ve been in here almost six years. I’m not a “better” person because of prison, but in spite of it. I am the man God understood me to be all along. And my mistakes and my transgressions – while many – were not enough to separate me from the love and redeeming grace of God.

            Right now this facility is awash in drugs – any kind of drugs. You can buy weed, pills, heroin, and more on the yard. Does anyone with an ounce of sense think that volume of drugs comes in through the visitation room? No, they are brought in by dirty officers and staff supplementing their state pay on the backs of the incarcerated. It is a corrupt, dirty system and we hide behind words like “justice” and “corrections” when those words mean nothing inside prison.

            During the Second World War American General George S Patton’s Third Army raced across Europe and into Germany. It was elements from the Third Army who first came across the Nazi concentration camps. General Patton contacted the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight Eisenhower, who personally viewed the atrocities. He then ordered citizens from surrounding German towns to walk through the facilities. “We didn’t know what was going on,” was a familiar cry from the German populace.

            “We didn’t know.” I know what that means. Until I found myself on the other side of the jail door I had no idea what prison was. Then I saw it first hand – the dirt, the violence, the waste of time and life. There is a reason, I am convinced, that Jesus included “you never visited me in prison” in His parable about the wise kind who divides His flock between those who minister to the exiled and those who don’t. He’s telling us “we didn’t know” is not an excuse.

            There are two college professors who come here each week to teach classes. Both are remarkable women. They could be on campus teaching. They choose instead to teach the men here. And it’s not easy. Teaching a class inside requires special preparations. Nothing comes in without prior permission. Then, there are the pat downs and the metal detectors just to get inside the fence.

            And their first few times in, they don’t know what to expect. There are men in class who 

haven’t been outside the walls for twenty or more years; there are men who have done horrendous things to land here. Still, these two women – and at least a half dozen other men and women from the local college – come here and teach; they educate men whom most of society has written off. They do it and they find meaning in their calling; and, they make a difference in spite of the walls.

            Prison has never made someone a better person. But, someone who’s willing to teach you – even in a place like this – they can, they do, make a difference, in spite of what prison tries to destroy. And what of the rest of us? In 1981, Charles Colson, went from successful White House lawyer to Federal inmate then lay minister and writer with Prison Fellowship wrote a stirring and controversial op ed piece on the public’s apathy toward the violence and degradation running rampart in America’s prisons.

            In the piece, he described in graphic detail the rape and murder of a young violent felon in Illinois. He marveled at the lack of interest this tragic story generated. Where, he wondered, were people of faith? He wrote this:

            “Our Christian conscience must force us to act. We must go to public officials – judge and legislators – and demand in the name of our Lord that reforms be made – jails cleaned up, sentencing practices changed …”

            Jeremiah ended up in a well for telling the people of Israel what they didn’t want to hear. And Jesus, well He was castigated by the religious elite in His society for associating – even seeking out – the thieves, harlots, and lepers. They tried to silence His voice with a cross. It didn’t turn out the way the elite expected in either case.

            Russian literary giant Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who chronicled his imprisonment in the Soviet Union in The Gulag Archipelago, wrote the following:

            “I can say bless you, prison, for having been in my life. For there I caught a glimpse of God’s view of His world and His passion for justice and righteousness.”

            There is bad news: Virginia is spending over $1 billion each year to imprison nearly 400,000 men and women, over half of whom are guilty of nonviolent crimes. Half of those behind bars lack even a high school education. One-third suffer from some sort of alcohol, drug, or mental health disease yet there is little to no treatment available behind bars. Of those who leave each year, one out of three will return within a year of release.

            Inside Virginia’s prisons every street gang has a presence. New members are recruited weekly. Drug use, theft, rape, and even murder occur with much too regularity. Bizarre, quasi-religions based on racial separation, flourish.

            It isn’t a pretty picture. But people still come out here and try to make a difference. People like the two teachers I mentioned. And there is good news. Prison will never help you succeed, but some people in here will succeed – in spite of this place. If you read this blog remember those men and women behind bars. Maybe they deserved to be punished; then again maybe the punishment doled out in prison isn’t deserved. What is the obligation people of faith have when they hear about life inside prison? Jeremiah’s calling with the answer.

Contra Mundum

You’ll have to pardon me some in this piece, but I’ve been thinking a great deal about all that’s taken place the last 5 ½ years; where I was, to where I am, to where I’m headed. And sometimes those thoughts have just rambled on their own, rushing over me with memories. I’ll sit there and think, “that really happened,” and look and see where I am now and wonder how did I not have the trust to believe.

            Believe. I used to roll my eyes when I’d hear someone at church ask to hear another worshiper’s “faith” story. It was always when we’d start with a new class of elders – good old Presbyterian bureaucracy – and I’d listen to someone thirty years my senior drone on about their parents’ church and their first Bible and I’d think “faith stories,” those don’t exist anymore. They ended with Joseph, and Daniel, and Paul. After all, I was master of my own future. Life was good – on the outside anyway – and appearances mattered.

            Early on at the jail, as my life was spinning out of control (as if my former life was ever really in control) I came across Charles Colson’s book, “Who Speaks for God.” Colson was one of the most powerful – and feared – members of Nixon’s inner Whitehouse circle. He was a brilliant lawyer. He was also ruthless, cunning, and not prone to tolerate dissent. Colson met his downfall in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. He was convicted in Federal Court for his role in that scandal and sent to prison. Everything that he had worked for was stripped from him.

            I read Colson’s book feeling hopeless and lost. I was in the initial weeks of the total collapse of my life. I didn’t think I could survive a day, let alone the rest of my life, with the pain and guilt of the past and fear of the future overwhelming me in that dirty cell. And I tried to focus on something Colson wrote in that book, something – a little thread – to help me hang on. You see, Colson found God at his worst moment. God was never lost, he said. It was Colson who had been lost. He wrote these words:

            “I had spent my first 40 years seeking the whole world to the neglect of my soul. But what I couldn’t find in my quest for power and success – that is, true security and meaning – I discovered in prison where all worldly props had been stripped away. And by God’s grace, I lost my life in order that I might find true life in Christ.”

            I couldn’t believe what I was reading. There was no way Colson could mean what he wrote. It made no sense. I knew his story, knew how he left prison and founded “Prison Fellowship” and devoted the remainder of his life to spreading the message of God’s power and love in all circumstances, but there was no way he honestly believed what he wrote.

            A few quick stories. The lawyer.  I have a friend – that word doesn’t begin to describe him – who I called from the jail moments after my arrest. He’s a lawyer and jeopardized his own career by staying by me through those first difficult months. He came to the jail every day for the first three months and then four or five times a week thereafter just to check on me. He asked his minister to visit me at my worst when my own minister refused to “get involved.”

            The minister.  So an Episcopal minister shows up to meet with me and we’re talking through Plexiglas – that’s the way visits are at the jail. And I lose it. I’m a mess, sobbing, wishing I was dead but knowing I can’t be since I’d made a pact with God to “see this through” (whatever that meant. I really hadn’t given it much thought). He listened to me and then didn’t offer me any cookie-cutter prayer or syrupy words of encouragement. He just simply said “God is with you, Larry,” and he asked if he could return for more visits.

            That minister – a man I never would have even met but for my lawyer friend and my own church’s abandonment of me – has become a close friend. He visited me at the receiving center, he’s come out here, and he has led the charge to get me released early.

He is like family which brings me to ...

The relative. My cousin and her husband, a successful couple living in Northern Virginia learn I was arrested. Over Thanksgiving – my first and worst Thanksgiving while locked up – I received a simple “thinking of you” card from them. “We are here for you,” the note said. Two months later, I was called to the visitation room. There again, through the dirty Plexiglas, I saw them. I was as pale as you can be from a lack of sunlight in six months, and I was scared, and lonely, and frankly tired of it all. And yet, after that visit I wrote in my journal something I hadn’t written before that day; I wrote, “I think all this will work out.”

            Five and a half years. I’ve been let down by people in here and out there and I have seen horrendous violence and the waste of many lives. Yet, there are the other moments, like when the big, black kid at the jail bear-hugged me and kept saying over and over “we did it!” when he passed his high school equivalency test. There’s my friendship with DC, a man who forty years ago was as notorious as any inmate in the Virginia prison system. Today, he is one of the kindest, most decent men I’ve ever met. I trust DC. I don’t say that very often in here. And, I feel a kinship to him and a brotherly love I didn’t think possible in the confines of prison.

            Chuck Colson kept a diary of his time behind bars. He wrote the following insightful thoughts early in his incarceration:

            “This is no country club … It is a prison and the conditions are really worse than I expected … there is everything here from lifelong, hardened criminals to young drug offenders.

            The reason I am glad to be here, however, is the sudden realization of how many needs there are here … My heart has ached for so many while I am here; more important, when I leave I hope I can do something about the concept of rehabilitation and punishment. All its high sounding names – deterrence, rehabilitation – are untrue. If it is punishment, so be it; but maybe it is more humane to whip a man’s body than destroy his soul slowly.”

            He concluded with these words:

            “I have an obligation to try to improve the fate and circumstances of man in this plight … I am convinced the Lord has planned this for me and will use me for His purpose.”

            There is a simple story in John’s Gospel about Jesus healing a young, blind man. Prior to the healing, the discussion centers on the cause of the man’s blindness. “Is it the result of his parents’ sin or his?” the disciples ask. “Neither,” comes Jesus’s reply. “It was so the works of God might be displayed in him.” And with those words Jesus gave the young man his sight. Those in power didn’t understand who did this; how could it be, they wondered. And they questioned the man about the “healer.” His answer comes to me often: “All I know is once I was blind and now I see.”

            “Contra Mundum” – “against the world” – it was the great Latin rallying cry of the fourth century Christian theologian Athanasius. It means to stand for Christ against the powers of the world and to understand that God’s ways are different. I see now why God has so long spoken through the perspective of the powerless, why He makes special demands on His people to care for the oppressed, sick, and suffering. Justice does not devolve from human institutions and laws but in the righteousness of God and His Word.

            That may sound all fanciful and self-delusional, but it simply means it is wiser to take refuge in the Lord than any earthly prince.

            What does all that mean? It means even when we get off course, God is in control. It means at my worst, God was at His best. It means that there is a reason for all this. As Bob Dylan sang in “My Back Pages,” “I once was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” The visits, the Bible coming from my friend Charlie, being befriended by an Episcopal minister, the cards from “Martha,” and even my divorce, they happened to put me where I am today in relation to my God. Or, as the young man told the Pharisees, “I was blind and now I see.”

            It is the season of Lent, preparation for Easter, and for the first time in six years I didn’t give up something like coffee or chips. Instead, I’m reading a treatise on the 91^st Psalm and a study of the Book of James. It is hard to fathom any sacrifice I could make worthy of what God has done for me.

            What does this have to do with prison? Probably nothing, but nothing happens by coincidence. I look back over these past 5 ½ years and see what Chuck Colson meant. Like Paul being blinded on the road to Damascus and the scales suddenly falling from his eyes and he saw, I see what it means. Or, as Mr. Colson so eloquently put it,

            “It is in God’s timing, not ours. And it is the result of His sovereign will, not of any magic wand we may think we wield.”

            This chapter of my life will someday come to an end and a new one will begin and the lessons of this chapter, the understanding of contra mundum will carry forward. And I don’t think the Circuit Court judge who sentenced me had any idea what God would do for me.

            

RIP Chuck Colson

Chuck Colson died April 21^st.  To millions of incarcerated men and women like me, Chuck Colson was a hero.  He represented the transformative power of grace.  He was a man, alone at times, who cared about the plight of the incarcerated.  In many ways, Chuck Colson saved my life.

That his life turned out the way it did proves what the Prophet Jeremiah told the scattered, defeated people of Israel whose sins and failures led to their collapse as a nation and exile to Babylon.  “God says ‘For I know the plans I have for you, plans . . . to give you a future and a hope.’”

Chuck Colson, lawyer, rabid-Republican, a right-hand presence to Richard Nixon, was known as a fixer. Anything Nixon needed done, Colson would make happen.  He was ruthless, brilliant, arrogant and deeply committed to Nixon and his success in the Presidency. 

It was Colson who went after Daniel Ellsberg – leaker of the famous “Pentagon Papers” which detailed America’s military failures in Vietnam – using a series of illegally orchestrated actions against Ellsberg to embarrass and discredit him.  Colson engaged the likes of Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, who shortly thereafter gained notoriety with their botched break-in at the Watergate Hotel.

Indicted on a charge of obstruction of justice for his role in the Ellsberg affair, Colson ignored the advice of his lawyer and friends and pled guilty, no questions asked, no deal sought.  He claimed a religious conversion.  He’d “found Jesus” and he had to eliminate his old life before he could begin anew.  For that, he was ridiculed and lampooned.  Sentenced to one to three years in a minimum security Federal prison, he made parole after seven months.  His imprisonment had a profound effect on his life. 

His “frightening experience in confinement” taught him that prison, for the vast majority of those sentenced, was a horrible failure and not a suitable punishment.  Prisons, he argued turned prisoners into embittered individuals who could only “contemplate escape and revenge at every turn.”

Colson founded Prison Fellowship, a Christian prison program evangelizing the incarcerated and pushing for prison reform and dignity for those behind bars.  His work led to him receiving the prestigious Templeton Prize in 1993, a million dollar award given to the person who had done the most to advance religion in that year.

For inmates and their families – Christian, Muslim, atheist – it didn’t matter, Colson was a source of comfort and hope.  Few programs work well in prison.  Prison Fellowship is one shining success in a sea of despair.

A few days after my arrest, as I calculated and contemplated ending my life realizing my worst fears had happened – I was losing everything even though I’d prayed over and over for a way out – I ran across Colson’s autobiography, “Born Again”.  Shortly thereafter I instructed my lawyer that I would cooperate fully, plead guilty to all charges brought provided I could sign our home and personal effects over to my wife.  Lawyers, friends and a doctor told me not to do it.  “You’ll have no leverage with the Commonwealth.  You’ll have nothing if she divorces you.”  It didn’t matter.  I’d made a promise to God to put aside the old.

Many times, days that I thought would never end, I returned to something I heard Colson say.  He would go through everything again, he said, for the opportunity to experience God’s grace.  I thought of that often and it sustained me.

Colson was a brilliant, driven man.  And, like all of us, he was flawed.  Yet God had a plan for Chuck Colson.  God has a plan for all of us.

Outwardly, Colson was the same man, still driven, still amusing, still engaging.  But inwardly he was a new creation.  That his “new” life didn’t begin until he was in his late forties gives me hope. 

The work Chuck Colson began with prisoners and prison reform will continue.  And for that, those of us in here can rejoice.   Chuck Colson and his story of faith will never be forgotten.