Archive: Let’s Admit That Prison is for Punishment

By Charles Colson

After I addressed a state legislature, advocating alternatives to prison for non-violent offenders, a bewildered representative accosted me. “As a fellow conservative, Mr. Colson, how can you be against punishment?”

It’s a question I’m often asked—and a telling commentary on the attitudes of so many who consider prison and punishment synonymous. This serious confusion can undermine our most basic concepts of justice.

As a Christian, I most certainly believe in punishment. Biblical justice demands that individuals be held accountable. Throughout the history of ancient Israel, to break God’s law was to invite swift, specific, and certain punishment. When a law was broken, the resulting imbalance could be righted only when the transgressor was punished, and thus made to “pay” for his wrong.

Though modern sociologists take offense at this elemental concept of retribution, it is essential: If justice means getting one’s due, then justice is denied when deserved punishment is not received. And ultimately this undermines one’s role as a moral, responsible human being.

C. S. Lewis summed this up in his brilliant essay, “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” which assails the view that lawbreakers should be “cured” or “treated” rather than punished. “To be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we ‘ought to have known better,’ is to be treated as a human person made in God’s image,” says Lewis. In this Biblical sense, punishment is not only just, it is very often redemptive—to the offender, the victim, and society at large.

This is why the distinction between prison and punishment is so crucial. Prisons, though necessary to confine violent offenders, can hardly be considered redemptive.

And while punishment is clearly Biblical, American penal philosophy is not based on the Biblical principle of just desserts that Lewis cited; it is founded on a humanistic view that crime is an illness to be cured.

The pattern for American prisons was established two centuries ago when well-meaning Quakers converted Philadelphia’s Walnut Street jail into a facility where offenders were confined in order to repent and be rehabilitated.

Though a number of those early “penitents” simply went mad, the idea caught on and flourished. Soothed by the comforting illusion that these miscreants were in reality being “treated,” the public conscience could ignore the harsh conditions of their confinement. In keeping with this philosophy, such places came to be called, not prisons, but penitentiaries, reformatories, and correctional institutions.

This illusion was reinforced in the 20th century when a school of liberal sociologists argued that crime was not the individual’s fault, but society’s. Societal failures like poverty, racism, and unemployment were to blame.

Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark summed up this fashionable view when he asserted unequivocally that poverty is “the cause of crime.” President Carter echoed it when he blamed ghetto conditions for widespread looting during New York’s 1977 power blackout.

If the criminal was but a victim of the system, prisons were therefore places for him or her to be vocationally trained, “socialized,” and educated. Society, which had caused the disease of crime, would now cure it—and so ever-increasing thousands were packed into institutions as wards of the state.

Thus two centuries of the “humanitarian tradition ” left America with more than one-half million of its citizens incarcerated—the third largest per capita prison population in the world—as well as the staggering recidivism statistics of the 1970s: 74 percent of ex-prisoners re-arrested within four years of release. Prisons proved themselves not places of rehabilitation, but breeding grounds for further crime.

It’s a travesty that in this so-called Christian nation, we consistently ignore the most basic of Christ’s teaching: sin comes from within the individual (Mark 7:20). It can’t be foisted off on germs, genes, a bad neighborhood, or some impersonal entity called society.

Crime is the result of morally responsible people making wrong moral decisions, for which they must be held accountable. The just and necessary response to such behavior is redemptive punishment, which may include, as the Bible prescribes, restitution or community service, stiff fines, loss of rights, or in cases where the offender is dangerous, prison. But let’s not kid ourselves any longer. Prison isn’t to cure the individual. It’s to lock him or her up.

President Reagan got to the heart of the issue in his 1981 speech to police chiefs of the nation:

“Controlling crime … is … ultimately a moral dilemma—one that calls for moral, or if you will, a spiritual solution. … The war on crime will be won only when our attitude of mind and a change of heart takes place in America, when certain truths take hold again and plant their roots deep in our national consciousness, truths like: right and wrong matters; individuals are responsible for their actions; retribution should be swift and sure for those who prey on the innocent.”

But we continue building more prisons and filling them up. Why? Because public passions discern no difference between prisons and punishment. As long as that mindset flourishes, the Biblical concept of justice cannot. And it will be society which will suffer the real punishment: $80,000 per cell for new prison construction, and spiraling crime and recidivism rates as well.

Charles Colson is the director of Prison Fellowship and the author of Born Again, Life Sentence, and Loving God. The preceding was reprinted by permission from Jubilee, the monthly newsletter of Prison Fellowship Ministries, © August 1985.