July 10, 1925, the Scopes Monkey trial began in Dayton, Tennessee. High school teacher John Thomas Scopes was charged with violating Tennessee’s law against teaching evolution instead of the divine creation of man.
In 1958 the National Defense Education Act was passed with the encouragement of many legislators who feared the United States education system was falling behind that of the Soviet Union. The act yielded textbooks, produced in cooperation with the American Institute of Biological Sciences, which stressed the importance of evolution as the unifying principle of biology.
In 1963 God and prayer was removed from the public schools after 250 years of Christianity being both acknowledged and taught in our public schools was removed by those who hate Christianity, and follow “other” gods.
in just ten short years, by 1973 several things happened, we started murdering our unborn children (yes that is the correct terminology for abortion… it is the taking of an innocent life by design), the drug culture was becoming well established in America and the prison population started to esculate. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_Trial)
Also in 1973 the prison poplulation which stayed on average with the rest of the world with app 105 people incarerated out of 100,000 poplulation. It started to rise, and has risen to over 700 people per 100,000 population which accounts for App 22% of all prisoners world wide being incarcerated in America…. it doesn’t take any effort to understand something went wrong with that 1963 decision.
It doesn’t take much too realize that something is wrong with out system when America which represents only 4.4% of the worlds poplulation accounts for most of those imprisoned.
We are attempting to send as many of these men and women back into society with a firm grounding in scripture, in how to live according to scripture (New Life Behavior) and how to defend the scripture (Christian Apologetics).
National Statistics on Recidivism
Bureau of Justice Statistics studies have found high rates of recidivism among released prisoners. One study tracked 404,638 prisoners in 30 states after their release from prison in 2005.[1] The researchers found that:
- Within three years of release, about two-thirds (67.8 percent) of released prisoners were rearrested.
- Within five years of release, about three-quarters (76.6 percent) of released prisoners were rearrested.
- Of those prisoners who were rearrested, more than half (56.7 percent) were arrested by the end of the first year.
- Property offenders were the most likely to be rearrested, with 82.1 percent of released property offenders arrested for a new crime compared with 76.9 percent of drug offenders, 73.6 percent of public order offenders and 71.3 percent of violent offenders.
Children of Prisoners
- There are more than 2.7 million children in the United States with an incarcerated parent (The Pew Charitable Trusts, 2010. Collateral Costs: Incarceration’s Effect on Economic Mobility, Washington, DC: The Pew Charitable Trusts).
- An estimated 7.3 million children have a parent in prison or under some form of state or federal supervision (FAMILIES Left Behind: The Hidden Costs of Incarceration and Reentry, The Urban Institute Justice Policy Center, June 2005).
- Some 10 million young people in the United States have had a mother or father—or both—spend time behind bars at some point in their lives (U.S. News & World Report, April 2002).
- One-third of the two million men in state and federal prisons have fathered two or more children (Bureau of Justice Statistics, April 2001).
- In general, more than 60 percent of offenders in state and federal prisons in the United States are incarcerated more than 100 miles from their last place of residence, cutting down opportunities for family visits (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2000).
- 57 percent of fathers and 54 percent of mothers in state prison have never had a personal visit with their children during their imprisonment (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2000).
- The average age of prison inmates’ minor children is eight years old. Black children are nearly nine times more likely to have a parent in prison than white children, while Hispanic children were three times more likely (Incarcerated Parents and Their Children, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2000).
- More than 80 percent of the children of prisoners live with their other parent, while about 20 percent live with grandparents and other relatives and 2 percent live in a foster home, agency or institution. (Incarcerated Parents and Their Children, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2000).
- While about 90 percent of incarcerated fathers report that their children live with their mothers, only 28 percent of female prisoners say their children’s father is the child’s caregiver (Incarcerated Parents and Their Children, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2000).
The Effectiveness of Faith-based Prison Programs
- Participation by prisoners in multiple in-prison Bible studies conducted by Prison Fellowship reduced their recidivism by 66 percent (Justice Quarterly, Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, March 1997).
- Inmates involved in a faith-based program at the Humaita prison in Brazil, which came under the leadership of Prison Fellowship in 1989, had a 16 percent rate of re-arrest, while those involved in the vocation-based Braganca program in Brazil had a 36 percent rate. Brazil’s recidivism average is 60 to 70 percent (Assessing the Impact of Religious Programs and Prison Industry on Recidivism, 2002).
- In a University of Pennsylvania study released in 2003, InnerChange Freedom Initiative graduates were 50 percent less likely to be re-arrested than the matched comparison group. The two-year, post-release, re-arrest rate among InnerChange Freedom Initiative program graduates in Texas was 17.3 percent, compared with 35 percent for the matched comparison group.
