104 Sermon Illustrations on Crime

[Young teenager commits a multi-million dollar fraud, then gets saved in prison, becomes a pastor and shares his knowledge with others.]

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Barry Minkow picked up the telephone one late spring morning in 1987 and knew right away that the game was up. Until that point, his life had seemed like a movie plot - the skinny 16-year-old from the LA suburbs who starts his own company in his parents' garage, hoping to impress girls, and ends up a celebrated teenage millionaire, paraded on Oprah, and lecturing in business schools. His carpet-cleaning firm, ZZZZ Best, had started with a loan of $1,600; within four years it was employing 1,400 people, and by the time Minkow took it public - crowning him the youngest chief executive on Wall Street by a stretch - the company was worth more than $280 million, and busily diversifying into lucrative restoration jobs on fire-damaged hotels and apartment blocks. He was stunning. The mayor of Los Angeles was so stunned that he declared an official Barry Minkow Day across the city.

So it was only to be expected that envious rivals would want to cause him grief. Perhaps it was even to be expected that he would have a team of fraud investigators on the phone, like he did now, demanding a guided tour of an upmarket apartment building that ZZZZ Best had renovated in Dallas. But there was something about the building in question which certainly wasn't to be expected, which was that it didn't exist.

Not existing, as it turned out, was a recurring problem with the diverse activities of the Minkow empire. In June 1987, two days before it was due to acquire a competitor twice its size for $40 million, ZZZZ Best collapsed - and Minkow, then 20, stood exposed as the perpetrator of a massive stock fraud which the court would later value at $26 million - probably an underestimate. For years he had been frenziedly negotiating slabs of investment worth millions of dollars for bogus projects he never planned to fund - he just needed the cash to pay for his staff, not to mention his Ferrari Testarossa and his mansion in the wealthy community of Woodland Hills.

Minkow ended up serving seven and a half years in prison, still something of a record for a white-collar crime. “Real prison, too,” he points out, “most of that time with a murderer for a cellmate, not 18 months in a golf-course camp.”

And so he has been watching with a certain wry detachment in recent weeks as the behemoths of the US economy - WorldCom, Enron, Arthur Andersen, Global Crossing; now Xerox; now Merck - have become mired in charges of fraud. This is partly because his mind is on higher things these days: for five and a half years he has been the senior pastor of the Community Bible Church in Mira Mesa, California, having found God in jail. (And he knows what you're thinking, by the way. “I'm not allowed to sign cheques and my name isn't on the bank accounts,” he says. “I don't want to be in that position.”)

Mainly, though, it's because he thinks he knows what was going through the minds of Kenneth Lay, Bernie Ebbers and their ilk. The FBI thinks so, too, and has hired him to give seminars to its investigators. Minkow also performs “fraudits” on behalf of the Fraud Discovery Institute, which he co-founded.

“Everyone I met in prison had one thing in common - they never planned on being there,” he says, talking loud and fast and expansively, still with a salesman's charm, using my name at every possible opportunity. “And not one of those companies went into business to defraud. Not one. Neither did I. What people don't realize is that fraud is always a means to an end, never an end in itself. There is always a rationalization: I'm going to do this now, and it's tough, but next week we're gonna get some big carpet-cleaning jobs, whatever, and we're gonna make it back, pay everyone back, nobody's gonna be hurt - and that will be the cure.”

ZZZZ Best started out real enough. Minkow wanted desperately to be popular at school, to find a girlfriend; his twin strategy involved taking steroids to boost his muscles and starting his own business. He chose the logical line of work: his mother had a job cold-calling for a carpet-cleaning firm, and he had an after-school job actually cleaning them. Once he had his own equipment - bought with a loan from a friend - he hired his mother to work the phones, basing the fledgling enterprise in the family garage. Within months, he had more employees and made it on to the local television news, slacking on his schoolwork in his quest to become the carpet-cleaning king of California.

The publicity began to snowball. People magazine caught on, and Oprah, and Newsweek, and the business magazines - and Tom Bradley, the LA mayor, with his plan for a civic celebration of youthful brilliance that caught even Minkow by surprise. “Celebrity was a tool to attract money,” he says. “It isn't like the mayor sent in a team of accountants to audit my books before he declared Barry Minkow Day - but the impression investors got was that he did. When I did Oprah, the impression was given that they'd checked me out, but, of course, they hadn't.

“That's how it works: the bank gives the loan because the numbers were done by Arthur Andersen. Arthur Andersen took on the job because the law firm was one of the Big Ten, and they'd surely have caught on if anything was wrong... And on it goes.”

Everything happened very fast indeed after that. Minkow retained Wall Street lawyers and reputable accountants, using credibility to attract investment and investments to buy credibility. He planned a public stock offering, and ZZZZ Best expanded into “insurance restoration” - renovating buildings damaged by smoke and fire - while Minkow spun tales of 40% profit margins, winning another $15 million investment.

The company finally went public in a blaze of media coverage in 1986, catapulted into a stockmarket as dizzy as one that would follow a decade and a half later on the back of the internet boom. Within weeks, shares in ZZZZ Best soared from an initial offering of $4 to $18. Nobody was in the mood for asking questions - which was unfortunate, because Minkow might have had difficulty answering them.

Ever since the company's earliest days, in fact, he had been stealing to boost growth and make ends meet. It began, as he explains it, with “money orders stolen from the money order place at Rick's Liquor Store in Resada”, but it quickly escalated.

“There are two days in my life I remember especially,” he says. “One is when I first started taking steroids, aged 15. I was in the bathroom, and I remember closing the door and thinking the pill was so small, how could it do the things they said? I took it and I knew I had crossed the line: I wanted to be strong now, who cares if you can't have kids when you're 30? Live for the now. Very existential. Jean-Paul Sartre. Camus.

“And then there was the day I decided: I want to be successful this year. This quarter. Not later. That's when I rationalized. I'd have some big carpet-cleaning jobs coming up, and it would all work out.”

For a long time it did: Minkow had quickly moved on from Rick's Liquor Store to obtaining bank loans on spurious grounds; by the time ZZZZ Best had moved into insurance restoration, he had been operating a massive, precarious pyramid scheme, taking in millions and paying off his early investors with money from later ones. It looked like a house of cards, but Minkow had a cure: the public offering had been part of the plan, a surge of income that would allow him to pay off his investors, and then, as a player on Wall Street, build a legitimate business.

As in the recent corporate scandals, it was not the accountants and the auditors who toppled Minkow's pyramid, although in his case they seem more criminally gullible than conspiring. There were thousands of documents to prove that ZZZZ Best's business was legitimate - they were all faked, of course - but when a team of accountants, undertaking routine due diligence, finally asked to see a restoration project in action, Minkow fooled them with an act that this time made his life truly seem like Hollywood. At the last minute, he rented a half-finished building in San Diego, stationed ZZZZ Best staff to stand around with rolls of carpet nearby, and presented it to the accountants as a typical example of the company in action.

They scared him three months later by asking to see the finished project. He pulled it off again this time by re-renting the still unfinished building and, astonishingly, renovating it from scratch in 20 days [at a cost of $2 million].

Going public had not quite proved the panacea he had hoped, but by now he was within 48 hours of another cure: the acquisition of KeyServe, a rival firm, using a $40 million outside investment masterminded by the junk-bond king Michael Milken.

But then there was the Mafia. Minkow had bumped into a Mafioso on a carpet-cleaning job months previously, and by this point one of his biggest institutional investors was the Genovese crime family of New York. It was investigators chasing the Mob who finally caught up with the chief executive of ZZZZ Best. Then a newspaper excavated an old tale of credit-card fraud - one of Minkow's earlier fundraising plans - and then he got the phone call asking him to demonstrate that he really had undertaken a renovation in Dallas. This time the investigators were on the lookout for fraud, and Minkow, exhausted, did not try to fool them.

“Things go from order to disorder,” Minkow explains today, slipping into seminar mode. “This is one of the laws of what I call fraudodynamics. Let's say Nick Leeson got the one good trading day he needed to cure the fraud. Well, he's reinforced subconsciously the idea that he can do it - faced with pressure, he'll do it again. Do you think Nick Leeson's first trade was a billion? Of course not. And if I could have survived, I would have been able to sell my restricted stock, unload a million shares, get close to $20m in cash, pay off the Ponzi scheme and go forward.”

These days he visits executives while wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, telling them: “Look. I know you think you can be one good trading day away. But if you lie, you're going to be wearing this jumpsuit for eight Super Bowls.”

There is one further lesson from the ZZZZ Best story that Kenneth Lay and Bernie Ebbers might like to consider: you can say sorry, even pay back the people you robbed, and the sky, surprisingly enough, does not fall in. Minkow has been paying back his victims - mostly institutional investors - at a rate of around 95 cents to the dollar ever since he got out of jail, first under the terms of his probation and now, he says, because his religion requires him to. One major creditor has received $100,000 so far; Minkow says he pays between $750 and $2,000 a month into restitution funds. At a recent hearing connected to his probation, the judge who first sentenced him praised the fact that he was “on a straight and narrow path” and thanked him for his annual Christmas card.

“I do some prison visiting, and everybody there tells me: you're an idiot, you're a moron, you served the time, so why pay and get hit twice?” Minkow says. “But God would have you pay back the money even if you did the time. Unfortunately. That's what I hate about my faith. I had to get this faith where there's no way out. I'd love to tell them to take a flying leap.” He sighs. “But I can't.”

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U.S. News and World Report, May 10, 2004, page EE14, by Randy Dotinga:

When former federal prosecutor James Asperger first laid eyes on Barry Minkow in a California courtroom in 1988, he saw all the traits of a financial kingpin in the musclebound “whiz kid” of Wall Street. “He was cocky; he was charismatic; he was arrogant,” Asperger recalls. “His talents and charisma were so strong that he could have succeeded in a legitimate enterprise.”

But he didn't. Minkow was a white-collar crook extraordinaire, a greedy college-age swindler with an eye for the ladies and the loot. Now, 16 years and one prison term after his conviction on fraud charges, Minkow spends his days telling businesses how to watch out for the likes of him -- the old, lawbreaking him, that is. In presentations before everyone from FBI agents to corporate CEOs, Minkow confides the secrets of hiding debt and faking revenue. Follow the money, he says, and, perhaps even more important, follow the postman. “When we go on a job, the first question I ask is who gets the mail. They think I'm crazy,” Minkow says. “I know that to hide debt we had hidden bank accounts nobody knew about.

His company also provides consulting and has exposed an estimated $1 billion in fraud. “I had to do eight Super Bowls in prison,” says Minkow, 38, who lectures in an orange prison jumpsuit. “When you've done that kind of time, you get credibility.”

Minkow began his career with a carpet-cleaning business in his family's Los Angeles garage, which he expanded into a home restoration empire. “Barry represented the perfect Republican dream - a 16-year-old kid starts his own business in the valley while he's still in high school and builds it up into a multimillion-dollar organization,” says journalist Joe Domanick, who wrote a book about Minkow. But Minkow had built his ZZZZBest by defrauding investors. By 1988 he went on trial, at the age of 21. A judge ordered him to pay restitution and handed down a 25-year sentence.

Minkow served nearly eight years and, armed with two master's degrees in religion, now serves as pastor of Community Bible Church, a nondenominational evangelical Christian congregation in San Diego. “Everybody thought I'd he one of those born-again-until-you're-out-again people,” he says, but his faith persisted.

Married to a former makeup artist, he lives modestly in a beach town and just traveled to Guatemala to adopt 1-year-old identical twin boys. His conviction, however, will always follow him. While he's been released from parole, Minkow is still making payments to a bank. And he discloses his past on his church's Web site and from the pulpit. “When I getup there, I'm worse than anybody in my congregation,” he says. “I always let them know that.”

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From Barry's church website at http://www.cbcsandiego.com/Pastors/barry.html:

At the age of 16, Barry Minkow started a carpet cleaning company in the family garage. By age 20, he had a 240 million-dollar company and was referred to as the “whiz-kid” of Wall Street. After milking highly educated investors out of millions of dollars, Barry's scam came to a sudden halt when he was arrested in 1987 at the age of 23 and sentenced to 25 years in the federal prison. Against all odds, and with a 26 million-dollar court awarded restitution nailed over his head, Barry decided it was time to make a change.

After accepting Jesus Christ as his personal Savior and receiving God's unmeasurable forgiveness, Barry headed down a new path. It was a path of restitution and comeback. While in prison, Barry accepted the role of heading up the prison's religious services. He spoke to his fellow inmates every Sunday and shared the gospel of grace and mercy that God offers to anyone who will receive it.

During his time in prison, Barry felt the calling of God in his life. With a call to the ministry and an unquenchable fire burning in his heart, he headed his life full speed ahead in that direction. After serving 8 years of his sentence with an unblemished record and with the recommendation of the sentencing judge, Barry was released into society. In the judge's own words, “Barry can do more for his victims out of prison than he can in prison.”

While in prison Barry earned a B.A. and a Masters of Arts degree in Church Ministries (with an emphasis on Theology and Apologetics) from Liberty University. In 1996, he earned yet another degree, a Masters of Divinity, also from Liberty. After his early release from prison, he was called to work as Director of the Bible Institute and Pastor of Evangelism at the Church at Rocky Peak. In March 1997, Barry was called to become the Senior Pastor of Community Bible Church in San Diego, California. Since that time the church has more than doubled its attendance and a tremendous outreach has begun.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #19677]

A man who allegedly shot a teen-ager in a street dispute was himself robbed at gunpoint a couple of hours later and arrested when he tried to report the robbery, police said Sunday.

The double crime began at 2 a.m. EST in midtown Manhattan when Chris Applewhite, 23, got into a dispute with a 19-year-old man and shot him in the abdomen, critically wounding him.

Applewhite fled the scene but approached officers outside an East Side night club two hours later to report that a thief had just stolen his leather jacket at gunpoint.

Police arrested the alleged thief, Ronnie Butler, after catching him stuffing a leather jacket and a .22 caliber revolver under a parked car. But officers quickly realized that Applewhite fit the description of the assailant in the shooting and arrested him too, a police spokeswoman said.

^REUTERS@

ENTERTAINMENT

Now a word from the director of the FBI: "Movies are doing more to advance crime and juvenile delinquency than any other factor today." The book writer who quoted the FBI head went on, "This is, of course, because of the steady stream of dirty sex, brutality, and violence. Millions of our young generation learn evil thoughts, evil acts, law-breaking ways, perverted sex, murder, and divorce from the films they see. The movie theater has become America's college for an education in filth and crime."

These words of warning sound contemporary, but they aren't. They were written in 1962. (Selected)

A mother allegedly shot dead her 6-year-old son Sunday but a shotgun blast intended for his 16-year-old brother was absorbed by the teen-ager's Bible, police said.

Leslie Ann Wallace, 39, was later shot by sheriff's deputies and hospitalized in critical condition.

Authorities said Wallace shot her son James Wallace at home, then drove to her family's church where she fired her shotgun at 16-year-old Kenneth Wallace as he stood outside.

The blast, fired at close range, struck his Bible and the overcoat he was carrying. Kenneth Wallace's arm had minor scratches.

"The Bible certainly saved his life," said Lee County Sheriff's Deputy Larry King. "Had his Bible not been in the way he would have sustained the brunt of the blast and very well could have died from that type of injury."

Authorities said that from the church, Mrs. Wallace drove to a pizzeria where her 19-year-old son, Gregory Wallace, was working and she pointed her shotgun at the store's manager. Police had forewarned Gregory Wallace that his mother may be en route.

Authorities said she then went to a pay phone and called 911 to report the killing of James Wallace. Police found his body at the family's home.

As deputies pulled over her car, she began firing at them, authorities said. They returned fire, hitting her once.

King said police found anti-depressant medication at the home but did not give a motive for the shootings.

"We're still sorting through things," King said. "The rest of the circumstances aren't real clear yet."

He said charges against Wallace were pending.

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Copyright 2001 The Associated Press

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Holy book proves son's salvation

By DON RUANE, druane@news-press.com

NORTH FORT MYERS - A brown Bible that Kenny Wallace was carrying at church stopped a 16-gauge shotgun blast fired by his mother on Sunday.

"The Bible deflected 99 percent of the blast," said New Wine Ministries Pastor Steve Rogers. "The shotgun blast blew a two-inch hole in it. It saved his life. It's a miracle."

Wallace, 16, who plays bass for the music group at New Wine Ministries, only suffered minor cuts to his arm when his mother, Leslie Wallace, fired at him outside the church.

Leslie Wallace already had killed her 6-year-old son when she arrived at the storefront church, deputies said.

She convinced Kenny, a junior at North Fort Myers High School, to come outside.

Kenny Wallace came outside, clutching the Bible in front of him.

Leslie Wallace fired at her son, cocked the gun and shot at him a second time, witnesses told police.

"Based on where he was carrying it, I would say yes, that probably saved his life," said Lee County Sheriff Rod Shoap.

Kenny said it was God who saved him. "God pulled the Bible in the way," he told WINK-TV. "He used the Bible as my sword and my shield."

Leslie Wallace arrived as church members were gathering for a morning service after they spent time in an educational program. Rogers was praying in his office when someone came in and said a person was in the parking lot with a rifle.

"We only had a few people who knew what was going on," Rogers said.

The shooting took place outside of a cheery, blue-painted room used as the church's child center. A hallway and the worship area are separated from the parking lot by the child center at 903 Pondella Road.

The church, which has about 70 members, is in the Tropic Isles plaza, a small strip mall next to the North Fort Myers Community Pool on Orange Grove Boulevard.

Other children were nearby when the shooting occurred but were uninjured.

"God protected them all," Rogers said.

Church members brought the wounded Wallace to the pastor's office and tried to care for him until medical helped arrived.

"He was starting to shiver," Rogers said. Pellets from the blast cut his arm and one apparently pierced his stomach, Rogers said. He didn't say anything about the shooting.

"I know there was a reason," he said later, his voice quivering. "God - God has a reason for everything he does."

Kenny Wallace attended the church without his family and would help out after school. "He's a precious 16-year-old," Rogers said.

Rogers visited with Kenny's father, William, after the shooting, but Rogers said the father was in a state of shock and offered no explanation for the shootings.

The congregation has a regularly scheduled prayer service on Wednesday.

"We'll be praying for the family, the extended family and for Kenny," Rogers said. "We know God has a tremendous destiny for him."

Copyright 2001, The News-Press.

NAIROBI (Reuters) - A 93-year-old Kenyan woman has been sentenced to four months in jail for cutting down her son's banana plants, newspapers reported on Friday.

Esther Nyambura Kaburu burst into tears as she was led out of the court in the central town of Nyeri to serve her sentence, imposed after she failed to pay a 5,000 Kenya shilling ($60) fine, the East African Standard Newspaper reported.

The Newspaper said Kaburu admitted to slashing 12 banana stems belonging to her son and daughter-in-law, with whom she had been embroiled in a land feud.

Last year a 70-year-old woman was jailed in Nyeri after being convicted of trying to bribe a magistrate with a packet of tea.

A few weeks ago, Charles Young was beaten to death on the north side of Milwaukee. On the face of it, the murder wasn't particularly noteworthy. It's a rough part of town.

But what captured people's attention were the ages of those charged with the crime. Charles Young was killed by a mob of children as young as age ten.

It all began when a thirteen-year-old boy threw an egg at Young, who chased the boy and punched another one who intervened. Then the hunter became the hunted as a mob of nearly twenty males chased Young, caught him, and beat him with brooms, shovels, and bats. Eerily, none of the boys uttered a word as they went about their grim work.

Among the sixteen boys charged in Young's death was a 10-year-old who is believed to be the youngest person ever to face homicide charges in Wisconsin. At a preliminary hearing, Dennis Cimpl, the court commissioner, asked the question that was on everybody's mind: "Where were the boys' parents?" One parent, the father of the ten-year-old, had no real answer, but told reporters, "Kids will be kids."

An equally important question is, "Who are the parents?" According to the MILWAUKEE JOURNAL-SENTINEL, at least nine of the eleven minors charged in the crime have at least one parent with either a felony conviction or a record of serving time in prison. The rest -- like a boy whose father was stabbed to death outside a methadone clinic -- come from equally unstable homes.

This is what social workers have in mind when they talk about "at-risk children." These boys have grown up in a world devoid of fathers or any other effective adult supervision. Thus we shouldn't be surprised when they reenact a scene from William Golding's LORD OF THE FLIES on the streets of Milwaukee.

It's in stories like these that the need for ministries like Prison Fellowship is most keenly felt. At BreakPoint, for the past decade, we have been telling Christians about the link between family breakdown and crime.

Listeners have learned that the children of offenders are the kids most at risk for drug and alcohol abuse, teen pregnancy, poor school performance, and criminal activity. Eighty-five percent of juveniles arrested for their first serious crime report having a sibling or parent in prison -- a statistic that came into clear focus in Milwaukee.

But Prison Fellowship is doing more than describing the problem. We offer Christians an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of the children of prisoners through Angel Tree Christmas gifts. These gifts let kids know that someone cares.

In addition, they can serve as the beginning of a relationship with these at-risk kids -- a relationship that can lead to forgiveness and eternal life through faith in Christ. Programs like Angel Tree Camping and mentoring can help children keep from following in their parent's footsteps and can break the cycle of crime and despair.

Unfortunately, it's too late for those kids in Milwaukee. But there are other kids who are just as vulnerable -- thousands, hundreds of thousands -- kids who can still be helped before their actions capture people's attention in the worst way imaginable.

FURTHER READING & INFORMATION

Gina Barton, Jessica McBride, and Vikki Ortiz, "Where were the parents?", MILWAUKEE JOURNAL-SENTINEL, 14 October 2002. http://www.jsonline.com/news/Metro/oct02/87613.asp

Jessica McBride, Mary Zahn, and Tom Held, "Suspect, 10, may become youngest ever charged," MILWAUKEE JOURNAL-SENTINEL, 3 October 2002. http://www.jsonline.com/news/Metro/oct02/84732.asp

BreakPoint commentary no. 020607, "Breaking Down the Family Business: Loving the Children of Prisoners." http://www.breakpoint.org/Breakpoint/ChannelRoot/FeaturesGroup/BreakPointCommentaries/Breaking+Down+the+Family+Business.htm

Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey, THE PROBLEM OF EVIL (Tyndale, 1999).

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Copyright © 2002 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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[see note at bottom]

From mafia leader to Christian evangelist, Tom Papania has experienced so much about crime that he now shares it with others all over the world.

He started out in life with a mother who was very religious and prayed constantly for him to turn to God and become a priest. His father was very hard on him as a young man wanting his son to not know about the history of crime in their family. Wanting only to upset his father who never showed love to him, he set out to find exactly what his father was trying to protect him from.

Papania's main goal in life after entering the mafia at age 17 was to make Al Capone look like an amateur. After working his way up in organized crime to a trusted position in the New York Gambino family, Papania found himself answering directly to Paul Castellano. He killed and wreaked havoc in New York for years before finally coming to a point in his life that he realized nothing was there to keep him happy.

Having numerous conversations with God, Papania found himself attending church just to prove to God how much power he had. While attending the church he was introduced to Jesus Christ, one who would change his life forever.

He began speaking and telling others about his past and how he had been changed, when his past caught up with him and he was arrested. His trial was one of the longest in Atlanta's history, lasting 11 months, but while in prison, he learned more about the change in his life.

After almost a year, Papania was set free and continued his commitment to Christ and is now an ordained evangelist and is also the executive director of God's Saving Grace Ministries. He travels all over the world telling audiences about his life experiences and telling others about the difference Jesus Christ made in his life. From the prisons to the schools, Papania seeks to keep others from choosing the path that he chose.

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Others claim Papania's testimony is heavily embellished and borrowed: see http://tompapania.info/. Papania's own site is http://www.tompapania.com/

A defendant was on trial for murder in Philadelphia. There was strong evidence indicating guilt, but there was no corpse.

In the defense's closing statement the lawyer, knowing that his client would probably be convicted, resorted to a trick.

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I have a surprise for you all," the lawyer said as he looked at his watch. "Within one minute, the person presumed dead in this case will walk into this courtroom."

He looked toward the courtroom door. The jurors, somewhat stunned, all looked on eagerly. A minute passed. Nothing happened.

Finally the lawyer said, "Actually, I made up the previous statement. But you all looked on with anticipation. I, therefore, put it to you that there is reasonable doubt in this case as to whether anyone was killed and insist that you return a verdict of not guilty."

The jury, clearly confused, retired to deliberate. A few minutes later, the jury returned and pronounced a verdict of guilty.

"But how?" inquired the lawyer. "You must have had some doubt; I saw all of you stare at the door."

Answered the jury foreman: "Oh, we did look. But your client didn't."

You may have been listening on June 18 when Mark Earley commented on the recent, peer-reviewed study by the University of Pennsylvania documenting dramatically reduced recidivism in the Christian prison we run in Texas, known as the InnerChange Freedom Initiative, or IFI. The report not only documents reduced recidivism; it also analyzes and documents what a conversion is. The more similar studies like this come out, the more undeniable our witness becomes.

We had the opportunity to present this report to President Bush in the Roosevelt Room of the White House two weeks ago. There were about fifteen of us assembled, including three graduates of the program, one of whom was Robert Sutton. That’s the inmate that Bush had embraced six years ago when he was governor of Texas and dedicated the prison. The day after that, the Houston POST had featured a picture of Bush with his arm around, as the caption put it, “a convicted murderer.” Not good politics!

But this time Bush walked into the Roosevelt Room and saw Sutton standing there. Sutton has been released from prison; he’s back with his family, rehabilitated. He’s working to disciple other men still in prison. Bush went straight over to him and said, “You’re a good man, and I’m glad to see you here!” and threw his arms around him and embraced him. It was an amazing moment — prisoners witnessing to the president of the United States.

Prisoners witnessed to kings in biblical times, but I never thought I’d live to see the day when I would not only return to the White House, but bring ex-inmates with me who could tell the president of the United States about Jesus. We had a magnificent time that morning discussing the University of Pennsylvania study and its implications.

In the press briefing afterwards, Dr. Byron Johnson, author of the study, laid out the five spiritual transformation themes that the researchers have discovered and that, he said, were the causes of the reduction in recidivism. These are “I’m not who I used to be,” spiritual growth, God versus the prison code, a positive outlook on life, and the need to give back to society.

Do you realize what this means? We have a leading academic institution reporting a five-year study, peer-reviewed at Harvard and Princeton, that lays out the elements of spiritual transformation, the very anatomy of a conversion. The report caused the WALL STREET JOURNAL to title its editorial, that appeared on the Friday after the meeting in the White House, “Jesus Saves.”

When your friends tell you that your faith is merely private and you ought to keep it to yourself, tell them about this report. Faith isn’t just a private experience. Faith, when it is lived out, changes not only people — it also changes cultures, countries. It reduces recidivism. It eventually will reduce crime. And it results in inmates witnessing to presidents.

We have an amazing apologetic opportunity in this report, for it documents in academic terms what happens when somebody comes to Christ — they are transformed, and the public is better off for it. Wouldn’t you rather have people like this coming out into society instead of hardened criminals?

This is an example of exactly what we’re committed to here at BreakPoint — presenting the biblical point of view of life, which can be empirically validated. It works because it is true.

FURTHER READING AND INFORMATION:

“GRADUATES OF FAITH-BASED PRISON PROGRAM LESS LIKELY TO RETURN TO PRISON,” Prison Fellowship press release, 18 June 2003.

BreakPoint Commentary No. 030618, “SHUTTING THE REVOLVING DOOR: IFI AND TEXAS.”

The study is available at the CENTER FOR RESEARCH ON RELIGION AND CIVIL SOCIETY’S WEBSITE. (ADOBE ACROBAT READER required.) Or call 1-877-3-CALLBP for a free copy of the executive summary.

“JESUS SAVES,” WALL STREET JOURNAL, 20 June 2003.

See also this WHITE HOUSE PHOTO OF THE INNERCHANGE FREEDOM INITIATIVE BRIEFING.

Learn more about the INNERCHANGE FREEDOM INITIATIVE at http://www.ifiprison.org/

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Copyright (c) 2003 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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Patrick Hutchinson was sent for a mental exam in February after police in Lexington, Kentucky, accused him of murdering his wife. Hutchinson explained that she had been taken over by aliens and that he (as one of only 735 “true humans” left in Lexington, out of 260,000 population) had to stop her, using a weapon supplied by a cobra that was speaking on behalf of God.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate in KeruxID 25837-26027]

For years I have heard on television and read in newspapers that a poor person who could not find a job was, if not expected to turn to crime, at least excused for doing so. Unfortunately, the more this idea is promoted, the more likely it is to occur, especially among those who do not have a strong character base. The facts concerning this issue are interesting, and as a friend of mine was inclined to say, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but no one is entitled to the wrong facts.”

I was raised during the Depression, so I was familiar with an occasional knock at the back door by someone asking for something to eat in exchange for some work they could do around the house or garden. Interestingly enough, virtually no one asked for free food -- they wanted to work for it instead. Statistics clearly validate that the crime rate coming out of the Depression was actually lower than it was when we entered the Depression. An article in The Financial Post by David Frum points out that the identical situation occurred in Canada. He said that statistics confirmed that in Canada there was “an overall five percent drop” in criminality between 1992 and 1993. This, despite the fact that 1993 should have seen an increase in crime. Instead, faced with plant closures, job losses and shrinking social services, the Canadians became less inclined to break into houses and steal from the owners.

The reality is people do what they're taught and expected to do. If we will eliminate the concept that poverty breeds crime and more carefully teach that the right way is the best way, we will see further reductions in crime. In many cases an economic belt-tightening is a character-building experience that helps us learn to get along without many of the so-called “necessities of life,” so we emerge from the economic challenges stronger and better prepared to build a more successful future.

A few weeks ago I participated in “Justice Sunday,” a nationwide simulcast urging Christians to lobby their senators against the Senate's filibuster on judicial nominations. The next day, I appeared on HARDBALL WITH CHRIS MATTHEWS. I argued that justice was getting judges appointed to the court who would interpret the Constitution instead of making up laws. On the other side was Albert Pennybacker, a minister representing the Clergy and Laity Network United for Justice. He argued that we need justices who “serve the well-being, particularly of minority people and people who are in jeopardy.” We both appealed to the same standard: justice.

What is JUSTICE? That's the threshold question for any society. The classic definition is seeing that “each person gets his due.” Fair enough. But for liberals, “getting their due” means giving benefits to the needy; for conservatives, it's punishing wrong-doers. Liberals believe that people are born good, but corrupted by society. So in the sixties, Ramsey Clark, then-Attorney General, said baldly that poverty causes crime — so government's job is to fix society. The Johnson Administration's “Great Society” programs spent billions. The result: Welfare soared, and so did crime.

Along came the conservatives, of which I was one, arguing for retributive, law-and-order policies. This fueled a huge prison-building boom. Today, there are 2.1 million people behind bars — ten times the number thirty years ago. And crime remains stubbornly high.

You see, the real answer is not an either/or approach; it is the biblical way, which embraces both the distributive and retributive models. Biblical justice recognizes that both punishment and meeting social needs are essential to a just society. The Bible calls for punishment, not necessarily because it deters, but because justice demands it. But Scripture also demands social justice: Ancient Israelites were told to leave gleanings on the field for the poor to eat, to feed the hungry, and to clothe the naked.

Secularists, both liberal and conservative, fail because they see people as objects — either to be punished or to be serviced. Biblical justice is much grander, seeing people as humans made in God's image. God seeks shalom, which in the biblical definition means, not just the absence of war, but also genuine accord and harmony, a society in which people care for one another.

The problem is that humans don't behave as we should in order that society would function as God intends. This is why the Christian view of justice must be aimed toward restoring the shalom that is marred by human sin. It means restraining and punishing wrong conduct, but it also means, in the words of the great scholar Neal Plantinga, promoting human flourishing.

This is why Prison Fellowship promotes what we call “restorative justice,” that we must go beyond punishing wrong-doers and reconcile criminals and victims, make criminals pay restitution, and restore offenders to the community.

Christians today line up on both sides of the ideological divide, but if we really understood the biblical model of justice, I doubt we would. Sure, we want strict constructionist judges to preserve the rule of law. But we also want to help those created in God's image. If we seek both, we will go far toward creating the true SHALOM that God desires.

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Copyright (c) 2005 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

*

Many years ago two young men with long records of crime and delinquency robbed the YMCA on the Lower East Side of New York City. On their way out of the door they noticed a man at the telephone switchboard. Fearing that he would call the police, the young men grabbed him and beat him savagely with brass knuckles and a black jack. Thinking that he was dead, they then stuffed him behind a radiator near the swimming pool and left.

Later that evening Gertrude Ederle, the famous swimmer, was walking near the pool and stepped in some blood, slipped, screamed, and then found Donald Tippet's body. Tippet was rushed to the hospital where for days he lingered between life and death. Eventually he lived, but one eye had been so badly damaged that it could not be saved.

Meanwhile the two young men were caught and brought to trial. Their past record assured they would get a long sentence. At this point, Donald Tippet did an amazing thing. He asked that the two young men be put in his custody. He believed in them, believed they could be changed.

One of the boys refused to change and was soon caught for another crime. The other boy however was more receptive. He went on to college. Eventually he went to medical school and became a surgeon, an eye surgeon. The late Bishop Everett Palmer wrote of this surgeon, “I wonder if he ever performs one of those delicate operations without stopping to think of that night in the YMCA and of a young man, who later became Bishop Donald Tippet of the San Francisco area, whose confidence changed his life.”

There is something life changing about that kind of love. Who could help but be touched by it? What we need today is not a revival that would bring more people into church. What we need is a revival that would motivate us to take Christ's redemptive love out into the world.

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Collected Sermons, King Duncan, http://www.eSermons.com; source: Illustrations, http://www.cybersaltlists.org

*

The three brothers quickly gathered in their small town's empty fire station to compare notes on the photographs they had happened across on the Internet.

In horror, the three agreed that the older man in the dust mask, dark glasses and golf shirt in the surveillance photos of a string of bank robberies across downstate Illinois looked an awful lot like their father, William A. Ginglen, a former marine, once president of the local junior chamber of commerce, a member of both the Moose and Elks lodges, even an auxiliary town police officer.

In case there was any lingering hope of doubt, the gun perched on the bank counter in one picture was a nickel-plated .45, a cherished gift one of the brothers, Garrett Ginglen, had presented to his dad a few years back; another image revealed the waiting getaway car: the Ginglen family's black Mercury Cougar.

So, the three brothers walked out of the fire station, feeling as though “the whole world was spinning,” and did the only thing they felt they could. They turned in their own father, who will be sentenced on Thursday to what is nearly certain to amount to a life sentence in prison for the 64-year-old.

“There was never a question among us about what to do,” said Garrett Ginglen, 41, who said he had nonetheless vomited into a waste paper basket when he first glimpsed the surveillance photos.

“In a way, he's responsible for his own capture,” said Clay Ginglen, 36, another of the brothers. “He actually raised us to do exactly what we did.”

Growing up in Lewistown, 200 miles southwest of Chicago, the three boys - Garrett, Clay and Jared - looked up to their father the way many in the town of 2,500 people did, two of the brothers recalled in telephone interviews this week.

For years, William Ginglen was known as a respected neighbor, his lawyer, Ron Hamm, said, working as an industrial engineer and supervisor at companies like International Harvester, attending the Illinois Street Christian Church since age 5, and serving on a neighboring community's volunteer fire department, its village board, and as chairman of Lewistown's zoning board of appeals.

His moral compass was uncomplicated, his sons said: “What's right's right and what's wrong's wrong.” He told them once that if they ever messed up, they had better hope the law got there before he did. “I wanted to be just like him,” Garrett Ginglen said.

But in recent years, William Ginglen, by then a husband of more than four decades and a grandfather, fell on hard times. He changed jobs and struggled to find steady work that suited his background. He said he had gotten a job collecting receipts for video poker along a route around downstate Illinois. Money seemed tight at home, but his sons said they noticed few other signs of turmoil.

At about the same time, in late 2003 and 2004, local sheriffs began reporting a puzzling rash of bank robberies in some unlikely places - relatively safe little Illinois towns like DeLand, Tallula, Versailles and Kenney.

The nearly unprecedented wave set off worry among the region's small banks. They created new rules and installed new security systems, but the crimes continued. Then on July 12, 2004, the robber hit his seventh spot - the Bank of Kenney - for a second time, said Sheriff Roger Massey of DeWitt County, and new camera equipment netted clear images of the robber.

Sheriff Massey, whose office had no crime-fighting Web site at the time, rushed to get an Internet site built just for the new bank robber images. A few days after the pictures were posted, Sheriff Massey said, the Ginglen brothers - a music teacher, a police officer and a company's project manager on safety issues - happened upon the images.

After the brothers' meeting at the Lewistown firehouse (where two of them are volunteers), they went to their father's house to confront him. He was not home, but they saw the very clothes the bank robber had worn in the pictures, they said, and called the authorities immediately.

Also found in the house were the elder Mr. Ginglen's lengthy, meticulously kept writings. Sheriff Massey described the works, typed into a computer, as a diary of Mr. Ginglen's day-by-day descent into adultery with a girlfriend who lived in Champaign, into drug use and drug parties, into gruesome financial strain and, ultimately, into bank robbery.

“It turned out that he was leading a secret life, a double life,” Sheriff Massey said. “The bizarre part was that he wrote it all down. He was the most documented person I've ever seen. If he spent $5.98 on lunch, he wrote it down. And every time he bought cocaine or had sex, he documented it all.”

Mr. Ginglen, who was arrested on Aug 20, 2004, the day after his sons called the authorities, has since pleaded guilty to armed robbery and firearms charges, accused of netting more than $50,000. Efforts to reach him by telephone in the Christian County Jail failed this week, but he faces at least 32 years in prison when he is sentenced on Thursday in Springfield.

“I can only say that this is conduct that is something that one would never expect based on his character and history and background,” Mr. Hamm, his lawyer, said. Mr. Hamm said he intends to appeal the case based on questions about the government's use of evidence, including the writings, which Mr. Ginglen earlier told The Chicago Tribune were merely a “fictionalized” outline for a book he was working on.

Gina Burton, who works in Mr. Hamm's office, said Mr. Ginglen was still working on a book from jail. He has sent her pages of handwritten notes to type up on her computer, she said. The latest chapter, she said, was called, “Turning Your Father In.”

For now, relations between the father and his sons remain chilly. “I wouldn't say he's angry with his sons,” Mr. Hamm said. “He raised them to be law abiding.”

Garrett Ginglen said he has not spoken to his father since he was arrested. “The thing is, we turned him in for robbing banks,” he said, “but then we saw his journal. I'm really mad for what he did to my mother.”

“I really miss the guy that was my dad,” he went on. “I'm not sure about this bank robber guy.”

Clay Ginglen, meanwhile, has spoken to his father on the telephone four or five times. The quick talks have touched on grandchildren and work, he said, nothing more. He is busy on Thursday, he said, and will not attend his father's sentencing.

Rarely does the tug between doing the right thing and sparing a loved one carry such weighty consequences, but Clay Ginglen said he and his brothers have reluctantly agreed to speak publicly about what they did in case anyone else faces such an ugly choice.

“We don't regret this at all,” he said. “We would do the same thing again.”

*

A recent cover of NEWSWEEK magazine jarred me. In bold type across the face of the magazine cover were these words: “Freud Is Not Dead.” Just being reminded of Sigmund Freud, the Viennese psychiatrist who redefined modern psychiatry and dismissed God as the figment of our imaginations, gave me cold chills. Here was the man whose influence has ushered in the age of therapy — excusing anyone's behavior because they sucked their thumb too long as a baby. He's also one of the great intellectual influences that led to the sexual revolution of the 1960s, for which we pay dearly to this day.

NEWSWEEK placed Freud on its cover to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth — May 6, 1856.

I was reminded how tragically true the NEWSWEEK banner headline is when I read an analysis of the decision made by the jurors in the Moussaoui terrorist trial. When asked for the mitigating factors in the case that caused them to give this terrorist a life sentence instead of execution, the top two factors cited by the jury were, first, Moussaoui had an “unstable early childhood and dysfunctional family” life, and, according to the NEW YORK TIMES, “a hostile relationship with his mother that led to his being placed in French orphanages.” And second, that Moussaoui's father had a violent temper and physically and emotionally abused his family.

No other reasons were cited by more than five jurors, but these two points were cited by nine of the twelve.

There you have it. Freud is not yet dead.

In the book HOW NOW SHALL WE LIVE?, written with Nancy Pearcey, I devoted several chapters to the consequence of the Freudian revolution, the development of the excuse mentality — the blame somebody else and refuse to take personal responsibility syndrome. What's really tragic about this is that I've seen it face-to-face as I've worked in hundreds and hundreds of prisons over the past thirty years. The thousands of Prison Fellowship volunteers encounter it every day: inmates justifying their behavior, excusing their crimes on the basis that they had an abusive childhood (at least, that's what they define it as).

Yet sociologists are scrambling all over themselves trying to find an explanation for America's soaring prison populations. When I got out of prison thirty years ago, there were approximately 230,000 people in prison in America. Today there are 2.3 million.

I believe crime is not caused by environment or poverty or race or any of the other factors sociologists for generations thought it was, but instead — as the latest scholarly studies show — it is caused by people making wrong moral decisions and the lack of moral training during the morally formative years. If that's so, the worst thing we can do is tell people that they are not responsible for their own behavior. What they need is a bracing dose of biblical realism — that we are fallen creatures and are responsible for our sins — not more of the Freudian excuse mentality.

This month we celebrate, if that's the correct word, the 150th anniversary of Freud's birth. And we saw him alive and well, sitting in the courtroom, when the jury decided to send Mr. Moussaoui off to life in prison instead of sending him to the executioner, not because of what he did or his knowledge of right and wrong — he was determined perfectly sane — but because of his lousy childhood.

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Copyright (c) 2006 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Kevin Holder's rap sheet is 43 pages long, dating back to 1980, and he just got another entry ---his 226th arrest.

Lincoln, Nebraska, Police say they caught him Sunday morning after a brief chase and found burglar tools in his possession.

“He's very well-known to Lincoln police officers,” Police Chief Tom Casady said.

Holder's convictions include criminal mischief, marijuana possession, violation of protection order, assault, resisting arrest, assault on an officer, possession of cocaine. Many were misdemeanors, but he also has been sentenced to at least three prison terms for felonies, including a four-year stretch starting in 1996.

“Your average Nebraskan thinks after a prisoner has committed a certain number of crimes (he) will be put away for a long period of time. That doesn't happen,” Casady said.

Lancaster County Attorney Gary Lacey said Holder was charged Tuesday with felony possession of burglar tools and prosecutors will urge a judge to treat Holder as a habitual criminal. With another felony conviction, that could result in a sentence of up to 60 years. Holder remained behind bars Tuesday afternoon.

Holder's list of arrests doesn't come close to setting a record for Lincoln-Lancaster County. He's No. 40, police spokeswoman Katherine Finnell said Tuesday.

A number of people have more than 500 arrests in the city of 226,000 people. The record was held by Edward Rooks, who died in 2004, with 652 arrests.

Mendy Nantz was on the way to a funeral when it happened.

“Don’t scream or do anything stupid or I will kill you,” a well-dressed man commanded the 33-year-old Southern Baptist missionary.

Idling outside the Africa Inland Mission counseling center in Nairobi, Kenya, Nantz had spent the past few minutes honking the horn of her red Toyota RAV-4. She was waiting for someone to open the steel gate that protected the compound’s entrance. But instead of a friendly wave, Nantz was greeted by the barrel of a gun. She was being kidnapped.

As the man shoved her into the RAV’s passenger seat, she managed to hit the horn one last time.

“That was stupid,” he snarled, throwing the Toyota into reverse.

Immediately, Nantz began to pray.

“Lord, do not let that honk be in vain,” she cried out, silently.

Within seconds, the RAV’s back doors flew open and two more men jumped in, both carrying guns.

“I was trembling,” Nantz recalled. “I started thinking, ‘This is the end -- how do I want to end my life? Do I want to end my life praising God? Or do I want to end my life in fear?’

“I had guns on me all the time. I couldn’t cry, I couldn’t scream for fear they would shoot, but I could pray,” she said.

As the SUV sped away from the compound, the gunmen demanded money and began to rifle through Nantz’s belongings. One of the men was ordered to get rid of more than a dozen blue balloons that filled the RAV’s backseat.

“Those were for my friend; he died and his funeral is today,” Nantz pleaded.

The man pushed the balloons out the window.

Minutes later, the Toyota pulled off the main road, and Nantz started to panic.

“I began to imagine all the horrific things these men could do to me,” she said. “I had nothing else to give them. I began to pray specifically, ‘Lord, You are my King and my God. You are in control of all situations. Please do not let them touch my body in any way.’”

Nantz considered what she would do if the men tried to rape her. She was ready to kill them -- or herself -- to prevent it.

“It was right then that an overwhelming peace came over my soul,” Nantz said. “Even though I think I know what I can and can’t live through, God knows better than I do.”

Abruptly the RAV came to a stop. Nantz knew they were near the Langata cemetery, an isolated area of Nairobi. If her kidnappers were going hurt her, it would be here. The Toyota’s doors opened, but no one got out. Seconds passed sluggishly, and the uncertainty was agonizing. What were her kidnappers waiting for? She continued to pray.

Suddenly the doors slammed shut, and the RAV rumbled to life. They were heading back to the main road.

“I really believe the Lord convicted their hearts of their wicked ways and spoke to them,” Nantz said. “I don’t know if it was a vision. I don’t know if it was angels. I don’t know if He spoke words to them that they heard. But it was the Lord.”

Her thoughts now turned to the prospect of escape.

“I knew the Lord was in control -- I just needed to be aware of when He was going to allow me an exit from the situation,” she said. “I’ve always heard that if you try to befriend them (kidnappers), they react more nicely to you.”

The gunman in the RAV’s backseat gave Nantz her first opportunity. Still rummaging through her things, he found a pack of gum.

“You can have it,” Nantz remembers telling him. “I want to give it to you as a gift.”

He smiled at her, quizzically.

“When he took all that stuff out of my bag, I decided, ‘I don’t want him to steal from me, so I’m just going to give it to him,’” Nantz said. “I just felt much better. Maybe it was more of a mental thing.”

She even felt confident enough to crack several jokes with her assailants, at one point asking if they were taking her to the beach, which was a seven-hour drive.

“They didn’t respond. I laughed though,” Nantz said.

But any rapport she managed to build was quickly shot down by what had become her kidnappers’ standard response: “Shut up, or we’ll kill you.”

Though her words didn’t seem to be making much of a difference, Nantz knew there was one that would. Remembering a devotional about the power of Jesus’ name, she began to whisper it aloud.

“I decided that if nothing else I could at least fill the entire RAV with the name of Jesus,” Nantz said. “I’m a believer that if you speak it out and you speak it boldly, His name is powerful enough to change any situation, any circumstance.... Because the enemy cannot stand the name of Jesus. He hates it.”

“We are Islam,” the driver responded.

Once again Nantz was overwhelmed with calmness. Noticing her Bible stuck between the seats, she grabbed it and held it tightly against her heart.

The RAV was now rolling down a long, dirt alley, heading toward a large, red gate. Another wave of fear began to grip her.

“Once I’m in there, I’m lost forever,” Nantz remembers thinking. “I thought this was the end of my life.”

Stopping short of the gate, the gunmen exited the Toyota and forced Nantz behind the wheel. All three guns were trained on her.

“Drive!” the group’s leader ordered.

This was her chance. The kidnappers were letting her go. And then something happened that Nantz said she will remember for the rest of her life.

Reaching out, the man gently touched his hand to the side of her head.

“Good job,” he said.

She punched the gas and the RAV shot down the road. She was safe, and for the first time during the terrifying 45-minute nightmare, tears streamed down her face.

Nantz said she has no idea what the kidnapper meant by his final words but believes God was speaking through him.

“I don’t know that he knows he even said it,” Nantz said. “I think it was the Lord’s words saying, ‘Good job, Mendy. You did what I wanted you to do. You praised Me through the whole situation. You trusted Me, and you allowed Me to work things according to My will.’ In my heart, that’s what I believe. Others may think I’m crazy.”

EVIDENCE OF GOD’S HAND

Months after her kidnapping, Nantz said it’s evident the Lord was at work throughout her ordeal, beginning the moment she was taken.

Remember that final, defiant honk she prayed wouldn’t be in vain? It wasn’t. A neighbor heard the RAV’s horn and came to the window just in time to see the gunmen jump in and speed away. The neighbor immediately informed Nantz’s friends, who put out the alert she had been kidnapped.

And the blue balloons the gunmen pushed out the window? They were seen floating through the air by an AIM AIR pilot returning from the Congo. Putting two and two together, Nantz’s friends used the balloons’ location over the city to direct a search plane to look for her red RAV-4.

But perhaps the most remarkable demonstration of God’s provision and protection that day was Nantz’s personal safety. She said it’s taught her the true power of prayer.

Within 10 minutes of the kidnapping, a prayer chain was mobilized. Literally hundreds of people, some scattered around the world, were on their knees, interceding on Nantz’s behalf. She credits those prayers for saving her life -- and her purity -- during those terrifying moments near the Langata cemetery.

“I believe that’s why I had the overwhelming peace; I believe that’s why they started the car and shut the doors,” Nantz said. “I don’t know what these gunmen saw or felt at that very moment, but I do know they had evil intentions and were stopped by the power of intercessory prayer.

“I didn’t realize that when I prayed for them not to touch my body, they didn’t touch anything on my body -- nothing. When we pray, ‘Lord, keep me from a situation,’ or, ‘Lord, bless me in this way,’ He’s literal about it.

“I was thinking purity-wise, ‘Keep them from harming me.’ And He answered, ‘Mendy, I can do so much better. I can keep them from touching you anywhere -- from laying a finger on you.’ That’s amazing to me.”

ASPIRING PRAYER WARRIOR

The experience has galvanized Nantz to bolster her own prayer life, moving past what she calls “half-hearted praying” to become a true prayer warrior -- and she’s got the perfect role model in mind.

“When you think of Southern Baptist women, the faithful ones, they’re prayer warriors,” she said. “They get down on their knees, and they pray daily for their missionaries, their families, their church, their pastors.

“That’s something I’ve always wanted to be. I used to think, ‘I’m too young to be who they are now. When I get older, when I retire, that’s when I’ll become this missionary prayer warrior.’ But through this experience, I know I can be that lady right now,” she added. “And now I have an insight to what drives them to prayer -- they know how to pray specifically.”

Although the kidnapping has forced her to make some lifestyle changes, Nantz said it hasn’t shaken the Lord’s calling on her life as a Southern Baptist missionary.

“I don’t get in my car and just drive off to anywhere now,” she said. “I am more aware and more cautious. I’m a little bit more jumpy. But that doesn’t stop me from continuing on. ... If the Lord can take me through that, He can take me through anything.

“There’s nothing scarier than being out of the will of God. And there is nothing more calming, more peaceful than being in a terrifying situation but right in the middle of His will.”

Above all, Nantz said the kidnapping has also strengthened her relationship with the Lord.

“My perspective has changed. I want more than anything [to have] a true, intimate, worshipful relationship with God,” she said. “And I do praise Him for every day. I praise Him for everything. Even for the hardships, because they make us stronger.

“This could have happened to any other woman here. However, they have children and they have husbands, and I don’t know that their reaction would have been the same as mine. And I give Him praise for allowing it to be me. For allowing me to go through it and be the example and allowing others to learn through my experience.”

HOPEFUL WITNESS

Kenyan authorities have told Nantz it’s unlikely they will ever catch her kidnappers. But whether or not they are brought to justice in this world, Nantz hopes she will see them again in the next.

“I do pray that they come to know the Lord; that this experience wouldn’t be in vain, but something for the Kingdom would come of this,” she said. “I’d love to see them in heaven and hear them say, ‘You’re the girl that spoke the name of Jesus into our lives.’ I would love to see that. I would love to hear that someday.”

Wisconsin and Ohio are considering bills that would require serious sex offenders, particularly those who prey on children, to affix neon green license plates to their vehicles. Sponsors say that the goal behind this legislation is not only crime prevention, but also to raise public awareness.

That leaves an obvious question: raise public awareness so that we can do what? Unleash a wave of vigilante-style violence against former sex-offenders? Terrify people in parking lots? Or perhaps our goal is to assure that these offenders will never re-integrate into society again.

Wisconsin and Ohio are not the first states to go this route. Last year, Mississippi plastered the faces of imprisoned sex offenders on one hundred billboards across the state. Yet this well-intentioned effort to protect children may actually end up traumatizing them: The billboards send the signal that danger is lurking around every corner. And I know of no evidence that this, in any way, deters further crimes.

Let me be clear: Sexually based offenses, as the announcer on LAW AND ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT puts it, are “especially heinous” — none more so than those committed against children. We must protect children and hold offenders accountable for their crimes.

But at the same time, we have also got to give them the opportunity for change: Prison Fellowship volunteers to do this every day, bringing the transforming power of the Gospel into our nation’s prisons.

But what do we do about sex offenders once they have served their time? How do we protect the public and potential future victims? It’s a really tough issue, because the repeat offense rate is so serious. But I know this: Neon green license plates are not the answer.

They are not the answer because laws inspired by fear or the need to “do something” — whatever “something” might be — are seldom good laws. Look at the three-strikes-and-you’re-out legislation in California. The state felt it had to do something about repeat offenders. So, three felonies, and you go to prison for life.

That sounds good, except when you consider what purpose is served by sending a shoplifter to prison for twenty-five years to life. Oh, and then there is the problem, too, that the state cannot manage its exploding prison population.

But there’s another dynamic at work here. Now, I am not Freudian, but if I were, I would wonder if there is not a bit of compensation going on. Could it be that our society punishes sex offenders harshly out of displaced anger over the sex-soaked society WE have created?

Seeking newer and harsher penalties for sex offenders coincides with the hyper-sexualization of our children. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

A recent WASHINGTON POST article describes 10-year-old girls sliding low-riding jeans over “eye-candy” panties, while 12-year-olds blurt out lines from sexually suggestive pop songs. Meanwhile, preteen boys pose provocatively for Calvin Klein ads.

And pornography — one of the leading causes of sex offenses against children — is held to be a right that trumps the protection of children.

Let’s get smart! These are things we can do something about, instead of just sitting around debating the color of license plates.

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Copyright (c) 2007 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Alan Golder once strolled the markets and museums of Paris, where he lived with a view of the Eiffel Tower. But today the man who bragged of being a top burglar - and was nicknamed the “Dinnertime Bandit” by police - is in a noisy U.S. prison after nine years on the run. “I was living so good over there,” Golder told The Associated Press in a jail interview. “My heart aches when I lay in bed and think of Paris.”

Golder was arrested in 2006 in Belgium and extradited in November 2007 to Connecticut, where he pleaded not guilty to nearly 40 felony counts, including burglary, larceny, robbery and kidnapping. If he is convicted, the charges could keep him behind bars for the rest of his life.

Police say he burglarized Connecticut’s wealthiest residents by scaling mansion walls wearing a black “ninja”-type suit and hood, slipping through second-floor windows during dinnertime while alarms were off and stealing precious jewels.

Wearing a yellow prison jump suit and white sneakers, the 52-year-old Golder described how he began his life of crime in New York, burglarized the homes of celebrities including Johnny Carson and Glen Campbell, turned on his Mob-connected associates and led a stealth life in Europe.

Even behind bars, his bright blue eyes still twinkle, and he grins like a proud father when he talks of jewels. “When you see something so small,” he said, describing one of the necklaces he stole. “It was beautiful.”

Golder grew up near the railroad tracks in Lynbrook, N.Y., a town of about 30,000 on Long Island. One of his brothers became a police lieutenant, but Golder began his life of crime early by stealing toy cars and baseball cards.

Then he started robbing stores and targeting houses around the country. He joined one of the world’s largest jewelry theft rings, which put him in touch with Genovese family boss Vincent “The Chin” Gigante and others.

Once, he sold stolen jewelry to an associate at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, he said. “I felt bad,” he said. “I’m a Catholic.”

Golder said he burglarized hundreds of homes from 1975 to 1980, including the Kennedys’ home in Florida.

“I liked the planning,” Golder said. “I liked the execution. I liked the reward.”

But in 1978, real estate developer Lawrence Lever was fatally shot by Golder’s accomplice during a break-in at his home. That’s when Golder started cooperating with authorities, telling them about the jewelry theft ring. Golder reached a deal in which he served 15 years in prison.

The burglaries in Connecticut began three months after Golder was paroled in 1996. Authorities estimate nearly $1 million in goods were taken from homes in Greenwich and Darien.

Golder was named in an arrest warrant filed in 1998, but had already left the country, flying from Chicago to Amsterdam on Thanksgiving Day 1997 on a fake Polish passport. He said he was forced to flee after he was assaulted by one of his associates.

Golder visited some 10 countries from Switzerland to Britain, and authorities say he used seven aliases. “I always dressed in a nice suit,” Golder said. “I always traveled with a nice bag.”

He worked for a bathroom tile business, he said, which provided him access to apartments. But he denies burglarizing them, saying they were “nothing fancy.”

“When I turned 50 years old, I was the happiest I ever was,” Golder said. “I was in great shape. I lived a simple life. Watched what I ate.”

Golder was walking to get a haircut one day when police suddenly pulled up and demanded his identity card, then arrested him. Golder later figured out that a friend had made a call on his phone to a number that was apparently recorded. U.S. officials started extradition proceedings to bring him back to Connecticut. “Based on his record and the nature of the charges, we’re going to ask for a lengthy term of incarceration if he’s convicted,” said state prosecutor Joseph Valdes.

Golder’s public defender, Howard Ehring, said Golder made bad choices early in life, but tried to make amends by cooperating with authorities later. “I really believe on the Connecticut charges there were a couple different groups of people doing the jewelry robberies out of people’s bedrooms,” Ehring said. “It’s not a signature crime that people go into bedrooms to steal jewels, because that’s where the jewels are.”

What is the best approach to reducing or eliminating crime?

The idea that the threat of punishment can act as an effective deterrent to crime goes back to the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria. Beccaria’s 1764 essay, “On Crimes and Punishments,” was among the first works in Western literature to argue for a humane and rational system of criminal justice and against torture and the death penalty. Beccaria thought that punishment should be proportional to the crime and preventive, not retributive. In order for the threat of punishment to be an effective deterrent, he wrote, the punishment itself had to be swift, severe, and certain; Beccaria added that certainty and swiftness were the most important of these qualities, and severity the least.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham elaborated on Beccaria’s ideas, arguing that rational men, faced with the choice between pleasure and pain, freedom and incarceration, and benefits and sanctions, will make the choice that yields the greater happiness. This assumption is one of the foundations of the American criminal-justice system.

Of course, humans are not entirely rational. Philosopher Immanuel Kant also studied the role of deterrence in matters of crime and punishment, and proposed that morality predicated on external pressures alone is never sufficient. Something more is needed.

The rise of gangs and the drug trade has had a huge impact on crime in America in recent decades. The two traditional approaches to crime -- the liberal remedy, which attacks root causes like poverty, education, and social and economic injustice; and the conservative approach, which relies on the criminal-justice system -- have proved insufficient in dealing with the problem. A third approach that incorporates traditional elements and deploys police in creative ways has been more successful. They don’t think of crime as just individual acts, but as the outgrowth of group dynamics and shared values. When these are addressed, widespread change can happen.

In 1994, the National Institute of Justice gave a grant to David Kennedy and Anne Piehl to work out a problem-oriented approach to youth violence. The use of force and the threat of prison seemed to have little effect in deterring gang members’ behavior. But certain moral authorities from within the community -- clergy, ex-cons, outreach workers with street credibility -- could sometimes get through to the offenders, especially when their pleas were coupled with the promise of help.

One aspect the researchers came up with is a “call-in.” Call-ins are intensely dramatic events, like modern-day morality plays, where gangs are brought into one location and challenged. At one of them an older ex-gang member named Arthur Phelps, whom everyone called Pops, wheeled a thirty-seven-year-old woman in a wheelchair to the center of the room. Her name was Margaret Long, and she was paralyzed from the chest down. “Seventeen years ago, I shot this woman,” Phelps said, weeping. “And I live with that every day of my life.” Then Long cried out, “And I go to the bathroom in a bag,” and she snatched out the colostomy bag from inside the pocket of her wheelchair and held it up while the young men stared in horror. When the final speaker yelled, “Your house is on fire! Your building is burning! You’ve got to save yourselves! Stand up!,” three-quarters of the group jumped to their feet, as if they had been jerked up like puppets on strings.

In some communities, gang-related murders have dropped by half when these new enforcement policies are used.

John Seabrook of the New Yorker magazine wrote an in-depth article about Dr. Kent Kiehl’s research into psychopathy titled SUFFERING SOULS.[1] As part of his work with the Mind Research Network, Dr. Kiehl is using a portable fMRI machine to image the brains of hundreds of prison inmates and juvenile delinquents. The work is impressive and illuminating, but prone to Overclaim Syndrome as is evident near the end of the article:

Psychopathy also raises fundamental issues about justice. At the

core of our judicial system is the assumption that someone who

appears sane is culpable for his actions. (In the U.S., there is

no insanity defense for psychopaths.) As Jean Decety, of the

University of Chicago, put it to me, “We still basically work out

of a Biblical system of punishment — we don’t consider, in most

cases, to what extent the offender’s actions were intentional or

unintentional.[*] But what neuroscience is showing us is that a

great many crimes are committed out of compulsion — the offenders

couldn’t help it. Once that is clear, and science proves it,

what will the justice system do?” Joseph Newman told me, “I go

around and give speeches to the staff in prisons, saying the

inmates are not just [jerks], and afterwards the guards come up

and say, ‘Enjoyed your talk, Doc, but are you saying these guys

aren’t responsible for their crimes?’”

Besides the fact that MENS REA is very much part of American criminal law [it is the Latin term for "guilty mind" and signifies that a criminal must be aware that they did something wrong, and intended to do so, in order to be held responsible], there exist at least two problems with this sort of conclusion. First, despite the weight of neuroscience showing abnormalities in the brains of psychopaths, the theory that psychopaths have UNCONTROLLABLE impulses remains unproven. This is no small matter as controllable impulses are writ large in human nature.

Second, what matters for the law is not whether the brain is compromised but whether such impairments are so substantial that they deprive one of the ability to know their behavior was wrongful at the time of the alleged crime. Predisposition for behavior - which is what the hard line biological psychopathy crowd is asserting - is not sufficient to reduce culpability - and for good reason. We are all predisposed genetically towards behaviors. And some people, unfortunately, suffer worse biological deficits than others. But legal culpability is grounded in a social heritage which sets the exculpating bar high under the assumption that everyone brings liabilities to the responsibility table.

Our society has determined that outside severe deficits in rationality, one is expected to conform their behavior according to the law irrespective of their biological imperfections.

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1. New Yorker magazine, November 10, 2008, page 64.

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* However, the Bible itself does consider the intentionality of a crime. The Old Testament makes clear that killing out of malice is a crime, but killing by accident is not. See Exodus 21:12-13 and Numbers 35:20-25.

On the night of October 23, 2009, a 15-year-old girl in Richmond, California, was brutally assaulted by as many as seven young men between the ages of 15 and 20.

One policeman called the events of that night a “barbaric act” and “one of the most disturbing crimes in my 15 years as a police officer.”

What disturbed him wasn’t only the overt criminal acts but the response — or more precisely, the lack of a response — of those in a position to help.

According to the police, the victim had left a dance at Richmond High School and was in the school’s courtyard when she was gang-raped. As heinous as this crime was, what made it a national story was that approximately 20 kids witnessed the attack and did nothing. Nothing.

Actually, it was worse than that. As word spread about the attack, people came to check it out. There are reports that some of the bystanders took pictures of the assault with their cell phone cameras instead of calling for help. Others laughed and a few even joined in the attack.

No sooner had police found the victim, semi-conscious under a bench, than attention focused on the behavior of the crowd. Comparisons were made to the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese in New York, in which her neighbors supposedly ignored her cries for help because they didn’t want to get involved.

While how many of Genovese’s neighbors actually heard her cries for help is in dispute, there are no such doubts in this case.

So why didn’t anyone do something to help? An obvious factor is fear. Richmond, California, has been described as “one of the nation’s most dangerous cities,” and its murder rate is higher than Oakland’s or Los Angeles’. The school even recently approved the use of surveillance cameras following a series of violent crimes on campus.

In this setting, people have reason to believe that authorities cannot protect them and, thus, getting involved will put them at risk.

Even so, many people live in dangerous neighborhoods where “snitching” is dangerous, but they don’t gather to watch another person being brutalized, much less take photos or laugh. After all, the attack ended when people down the street from the school learned what was happening and called the police.

The response that shocked the nation speaks to an indifference to the well-being of others among some of our children. Instead of empathy, these young people showed apathy — and, as one observer said, “a total indifference to [behavior], customs, mores, and sensibilities,” the things we associate with being civilized.

What happened in Richmond, California, is an unsettling reminder that the standards that make a good society possible cannot be taken for granted. It doesn’t take much to set them aside. That’s why those standards and the beliefs that make them possible must be taught and renewed continuously.

As one Oakland pastor wrote, what happened on October 23rd “is reflective of a societal breakdown that is not limited to the Richmond city limits.”

And that’s what should disturb us the most.

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Copyright (c) 2009 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Les Snodgrass, pastor of The Door Christian Fellowship Church in Melbourne, Florida, said a man had attended church services before, but wasn’t a regular. Then, while Snodgrass was delivering a sermon, the man stood up and showed a gun, allegedly pointing it at Snodgrass’s mother’s head. “I tried to divert his attention away from my mother,” Snodgrass said. “I kept calling out to him, ‘Johnny, Johnny, what are you doing?’”

As he talked to the man, Snodgrass worked his way closer, then lunged. “I just pushed against the wall with all my might,” he said. “I had him by the shoulders, and as soon as I did that, my son leapt from the platform into the air and pounced on him. He punched him twice in the head.” Snodgrass’s wife then held a stun gun to the man until police arrived.

John Grace faces 21 charges, including robbery. “I gathered my family at the church, and we all held hands and prayed and forgave him on the spot,” Snodgrass said. “But he will face justice and should.” [1]

Editor Randy Cassingham adds the comment: “Forgiveness and justice: not mutually exclusive.”

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1. WKMG Orlando

A priest in England preached a sermon that said it was morally justifiable for the poor to shoplift. Father Tim Jones said that he did not believe it was right for people to shoplift but maintained it was the “least worst option” for people in desperate situations.

He gave the example of prisoners being released from prison without benefits or other financial assistance. He said it was for better for people in such circumstances to turn to shoplifting from large retailers rather than turning to prostitution, mugging or burglary.

He said, “My advice does not contradict the Bible’s eighth commandment [do not steal] because God’s love for the poor and despised outweighs the property rights of the rich.”

A spokesman for an English supermarket chain Asda responded that shoplifting affected hardworking store staff more than the rich. He challenged the priest to repeat his sermon before the local store’s workers and see how they responded.

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Original article:

"Priest: Shoplifting is ‘Least Worst Option’ for Poor," by Charles Boyd, Christian Today reporter, 22 Dec 2009, .

A Church of England priest has found himself at the center of controversy after he told his congregation it was morally justifiable for the poor to shoplift.

Father Tim Jones of St. Lawrence and Hilda Church in York said this week that he did not believe it was right for people to shoplift but maintained it was the “least worst option” for people in desperate situations.

He gave the example of prisoners being released from prison without benefits or other financial assistance, saying it was for better for people in such circumstances to turn to shoplifting from large retailers rather than prostitution, mugging or burglary.

“My advice does not contradict the Bible’s eighth commandment because God’s love for the poor and despised outweighs the property rights of the rich,” he said in a sermon Sunday.

A spokesman for supermarket chain Asda, in response, argued that shoplifting affected hardworking store staff more than the rich.

“Maybe Father Tim Jones could repeat his sermon at our York store and see what reaction he gets?” he was quoted as saying by the York Press. “He’s one psalm short of a sermon!”

A young thug named Fernandinho had been a legend in the poorest neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro. His gang earned three hundred thousand dollars a month from drug sales, and perhaps even more from protection rackets. He had had many close calls with the police but they had never managed to capture him. In one attempt, a hundred armed policemen backed by two helicopter gunships and an armored personnel carrier came after him but he escaped by leaping from rooftop to rooftop. He was now the most-wanted fugitive in Rio, a city with one of the highest crime rates in the world.

Then Fernandinho became born again through the ministry of a Pentecostal preacher. He banned the practice of spiritism and African religious rituals in his neighborhoods. At 6:00 every evening, a pastor’s prayer is broadcast through the narrow alleys. Fernandinho had “Jesus Cristo” tattooed on one of his forearms in big letters and soon his neighborhood was covered with religious graffiti. The community swimming pool he had built now had a sign above it saying “This Belongs To Jesus Christ.”

Religious posters decorate the walls of his home. Fernandinho said he prayed a great deal and he even prayed for his enemies. As if to demonstrate the truth of his claim for a reporter, he closed his bedroom door, went to the edge of his bed, and got down on his knees. He prayed like a child, with his hands clasped, his eyes closed, and his lips moving in murmured prayer. He went and found his Bible and, sitting in front of the reporter on his bed, he opened it to a page where he had a tassel marker, about a quarter of the way in. He said that he was determined to read all the way through.

Fernandinho is saved. But he is still a thug. Even though he had reportedly ordered his gangs not to carry out “violent” crimes, at least four informants had been executed by them.

Reporter Jon Lee Anderson pointed out the contradiction between Fernandinho’s religious faith and his continued life as a drug trafficker. He asked him, “For you, where is the dividing line between right and wrong?” Fernandinho smiled, and said, “Who’s deciding?”