Last year, the United States marked an inauspicious milestone. The Department of Justice announced that as of June 2002, for the first time ever, two million of its citizens were behind bars. One of every 142 Americans was in prison or jail, one of the highest rates in the world.1 One in 37 is or has been incarcerated, including one in three African American males.2

The two-million mark could have been hailed as an achievement. President Gerald Ford all but set the goal of the past three decades of crime fighting in a 1975 address to Yale Law School. Since violent crime was caused by a "relatively few persistent criminals," the solution was simply to "get them off the streets," to "separate the law-breakers from the law-abiding society."3 Ford was complaining specifically about plea-bargain-happy prosecutors at a time when the nation's inmate population was less than half a million. But then and since, the call to "get tough on crime" has dominated political rhetoric. Now that we have incarcerated two million offenders, we should be feeling much more secure.

Yet even among many who believe that tougher enforcement and sentencing have been good for the nation on balance, the staggering size of the prison population has begun to raise some unsettling questions. Ten years after violent crime began to drop steadily, are we actually filling prisons faster at a time when there are fewer criminals to fill them with? And is violence really the reason many of them are locked up? As counterintuitive as it seems, it turns out to be difficult to demonstrate a relationship between incarceration rates and crime rates. Over the last three decades, rates of homicide and rape rose and fell like tides, with no clear causal relationship to the steady, nearly sixfold rise in the inmate population (and the corresponding surge in prison construction).4

In The Challenge of Crime, drawing on the work of criminologist Frank Zimring, Henry Ruth and Kevin Reitz argue that the incarceration boom should be seen in roughly three phases. In the 1970s, Ruth and Reitz contend, more "marginal" felons (such as auto thieves) were sentenced rather than put on probation, as Ford wished. In the 1980s, prisons swelled in response to a new commitment to the war on drugs; ten times more drug offenders were in prison in 1996 than in 1980. Then, in the 1990s, a wave of reform-minded crime laws mandated longer sentences, allowing fewer inmates to vacate cells for new arrivals.

Moreover, Ruth and Reitz find that violent crime—the kind that most strongly inspires the get-tough rhetoric, as opposed to property, drug, and public order violations—cannot satisfactorily account for the prison boom. They cite a Department of Justice statistician who found that only one third of prison growth in the 1980s, and less than one half in the 1990s, was attributable to violent crime.

Even John DiIulio, Jr., the widely influential political scientist who helped to popularize the concept of "superpredators"—and who had previously justified prison building with the erroneous assumption that "virtually all prisoners are violent or repeat offenders"—relented and declared in a 1999 Wall Street Journal op-ed that reaching the two-million inmate mark (then rapidly approaching) should lead policymakers to change course. "The nation has 'maxed out' on the public-safety value of incarceration," DiIulio wrote, adding that we should be "aiming for zero prison growth."5 Now the question is posed by liberals and conservatives alike: will we be any better off at three million? And how will we afford it?

The most troubling question, though, may not be what happens when two million people are incarcerated, but what happens when many of them get out. Those mandated sentences of the 1990s can be self-defeating; by law, more prisoners serve full sentences, with no chance of earning early release and thus less reason to try. "When offenders have 'done their time,' they are released no matter what level of support is available to them or how prepared they are for release," writes Joan Petersillia in When Prisoners Come Home.6 More than 50% of those released are expected to return to prison.

Nor is preparation for release a priority; funding for vocational and educational prison programs declined in the get-tough 1990s, potentially leaving prisoners less socially functional upon their release than when they committed their crime. Caseloads for parole officers have nearly doubled, leaving less time for counseling parolees (and leading to a rise in the number of parolees returned to prison on "technical violations"—non-criminal acts such as missing a meeting with a parole officer).7 Longer sentences mean more time spent amid the harshness of prison culture, the darkness and intricacies of which have been knowledgeably mapped for would-be prison evangelists by Lennie Spitale in Prison Ministry.

Indeed, the very word "rehabilitation," freighted as it has come to be with utopian left-wing ideals, has fallen out of fashion (though as Ann Chih Lin argues in Reform in the Making, this reflects the mistake of expecting prison education programs to be effective even in climates of mutual hostility between prison staff and inmates). Something seems out of balance when state governments, as they did in the 1990s, increase spending on prisons while cutting spending on schools. The prison system's resulting purpose—and apparent abandonment of its "correctional" mission—was summarized by a headline in the Atlantic Monthly: "Catch and release."8

Only in America, James Whitman and T. Richard Snyder might say, would such a dysfunctional system flourish. The two seemingly ameliorating factors in America's get-tough criminal justice climate—democracy and Christianity—may only make things worse. Whitman raises the question of why America, with its egalitarian character, has a harsher criminal justice system than Europe, whose governments have a more brutal history. The difference, he says, is that Europe used to have lenient punishment for the upper classes and degrading punishment for the lower classes. As it democratized, it democratized up, so to speak; now everyone enjoys relatively lenient punishments. America, on the other hand, never had any light punishment to standardize.

Protestant Christianity is another culprit in America's harsh justice system, charges Snyder in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Punishment. You would think, he says, that a society shaped by Christian principles would be marked by grace and forgiveness. Instead, "Most of us want those who have done wrong to be punished—not healed, but punished." Having alluded to Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and like Weber exaggerating the role of those frowning Puritans in forming our social order, Snyder submits a familiar grievance against Calvinism: "If we believe that all persons are essentially corrupt save for the extraordinary intervention of God's grace in their lives, it is a simple step to think that those who are … in trouble with the law, or different from us in any way … are somehow evil." There but for the grace of God go I, we say, paraphrasing 16th-century English martyr John Bradford's confession upon seeing fellow prisoners led to the gallows. But what Bradford intended as an affirmation of commonality with the criminal changes in our mouths, Snyder says, expressing our "thinly mask[ed] smugness and an underlying sense of superiority."

Clearly, the debate over what's wrong with the prison system and what to do about it is so vexing because it touches on fundamental questions of human nature. Shall we aim to redeem persons or redeem the society they live in? What kind of demons drive humans to commit violent acts? Is it nature or nurture, moral choice or desperate circumstance—or do such stark alternatives miss the tangled reality altogether?

Certainly a tour through the literature suggests that the "either/or" approach which dominates the criminal justice debate has led us to a dead end. Astonishingly, you can leaf through reams of criminological research on the prison system—and many a rant against the prison industrial complex (such as journalist Joseph Hallinan's engaging Going Up The River)—without hearing a peep about a criminal's conscience or his victims' suffering. On the other hand is DiIulio's "moral poverty" narrative (to invoke the subtitle of a book he coauthored with William Bennett), which blames the cultural subversion of the 1960s for the rise in violence and deemphasizes the role of social environment in a criminal's actions. Such an approach tends to focus on individual stories of reform and conversion, of demons defeated and a life journey begun anew. The result is a nearly unintelligible din of scholars and activists on both sides, talking past each other.

Few authors bridge the rhetorical divide as well as Charles Colson, one of the finest ambassadors of the gospel to prisons worldwide. His Prison Fellowship Ministries, active in 88 countries, stands as one of the most visible and encouraging agents of prison reform, and he lays out his vision of criminal justice in Justice That Restores. Colson is not only a reformed prisoner but also a reformed speechwriter—one who is weary of the get-tough rhetoric and prison-building policies he used to advocate as a presidential advisor.

Yet even Colson finds it difficult to avoid false dichotomies. When he argues that there is a fundamental truth missing from many accounts of crime and its consequences—"Criminal acts are moral choices"—he's absolutely right; as we've seen, you can go from cover to cover of many of those indictments against the prison system and "Christian America" without finding the word "immoral" applied to crime. Colson's vigor in emphasizing this point, coupled with his denial of the social roots of crime, however, encourages the reader to see crime as essentially the act of the under-scolded. Adhering to the moral poverty narrative, Colson sees a spiritual revival as the only way for society to ultimately fight crime. Whether this revival must precede the adoption of his truly sensible "noncustodial alternatives" to incarceration is left unclear.

Ruth, Reitz, and company are not short on ways to fix the system, nor Colson and those who follow his lead on ways to fix the soul. Perhaps the best that can be offered here is a way to tweak the vocabulary, the way we talk about crime and punishment. And that is by getting religion, in the truest sense of the word, into the conversation. The Latin root of "religion," Quentin Schultze points out in Habits of the High-Tech Heart, is religio, to rebind. "The purpose of religion is to reveal to people how they can be reconciled to each other, to themselves, to the physical world, and to God," Schultze writes. This stitching back together of shalom, the recovery of the right alignment of the world (as painstaking and ultimately failed as it must be, prior to Christ's return), is a healthier guiding principle of criminal justice than the preoccupation with punishment that inspired the prison boom of the last 30 years.

Such a perspective would allow partisans from both sides of the debate to stop talking past each other; the brokenness of the world and the ways to mend it are broader in scope than ideology tends to allow. Yes, crime is a social failure, and yes, crime is a spiritual failure; we need good public schools and good Sunday schools too if we are to have "zero prison growth."

In etymology and practice, the closest thing to religio in criminal justice is "restorative justice," which Colson and Snyder define as any number of alternatives to incarceration practiced around the world. They include restitution and reconciliation programs, in which offenders work to repay their victims, or meet with them to ask forgiveness, rather than wasting away in prison or being schooled in hate and despair before "release." Colson also puts crime prevention and inmate reintegration programs in this category. The more that crime is seen as an offense against the community, rather than the state, he and Snyder suggest, the better. As Christopher D. Marshall writes in Beyond Retribution, his important study of New Testament principles of punishment, "The social institution of punishment is best understood and most readily justified in ethical terms when it serves the goal of restoration."

The danger of promoting such alternatives is that they may be successful anecdotally but not easily administered at the state or federal level. Still, if the idea of restorative justice can unite such ideologically disparate figures as Colson and Snyder, take note. Considering the limited patience voters tend to have with government programs as massive and ineffective as the prison system, there is reason to hope for more creative and functional solutions to crime—for rewoven strands of a frayed world.

Nathan Bierma is an editorial assistant at Books & Culture. See www.booksandculture.com for his weekly weblog "Content & Context."

1. Reuters, "Number Imprisoned Exceeds 2 Million, Justice Dept. Says," Washington Post, April 7, 2003.

2. Associated Press, "Study: 1 in 37 U.S. adults have 'prison experience,'" CNN.com, August 18, 2003.

3. Address at the Yale University Law School Sesquicentennial Convocation Dinner, April 25, 1975. The American Presidency Project

4. Social Statistics Briefing Room, The White House

5. John J. DiIulio, Jr., "Two Million Prisoners Are Enough." Wall Street Journal, March 12, 1999.

6. Quoted in Margaret Talbot, "Catch and Release," The Atlantic Monthly, January/February 2003.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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