The Does God Exist? ministry recently mailed out our 6,000th apologetics course to a person in prison. Over the years, we have presented our programs in prisons throughout the United States. I recently had a conversation with an inmate who said he was glad to be in jail, where he was learning things from other prisoners to help him not get caught when he gets out and resumes his life of crime. This shows that the curse of incarceration is not working.
The solution to this curse is to change our concept of how to handle a person who has committed a crime. From a financial standpoint, when taxpayers must pay for a person who will be in jail for many years or even life, the cost is massive. There are some bright spots in this very dark problem. In Texas, a program called C.A.S.A (Christians Against Substance Abuse) has been able to change the lives of literally thousands of incarcerated men and women through education and counseling. Several chaplains in Texas prisons are using the “New Life Behavior” curriculum.
Recently, two factors have made getting our life lesson materials to prisoners more challenging. The mail service is more expensive, and prisons have extreme requirements for delivery because so many prisoners have received mail with hidden drugs.
Christians believe that every human being is created in the image of God and should be shown the “agape” kind of love that Jesus taught. (See Matthew 5:43-44.) Prisons should be places where people are rehabilitated, not tortured. We cage dangerous animals, and caging a human is like caging a vicious dog. It doesn’t make the dog less vicious. That is the curse of incarceration.
Educating and rehabilitating humans would be far less expensive than our present system, where most prisoners are simply learning how to be smarter criminals and commit more crimes when released. Will America wake up to this need? If it happens, Christians are the ones who will lead the way.
— John N. Clayton © 2024
Information on CASA is available from Kings Crossing Prison Ministries at https://www.kingscrossingprisonministries.org/.
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