J. R. Woodgates
Tag Archives: incarceration
Christianity Today tackles that question in its latest edition.
The “findings” seem so obvious, yet so few inmates benefit from them.
See also: NATURE’S SOLACE IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT
The second-fastest growing church in the USA is fast advancing the Kingdom of God behind bars.
John Turnipseed’s extended family included generations of violent criminals, including killers. Today more than 90% of them are living free – because John learned how to break the bloodline curses that had driven them – and him – into serious crime and prison time.
Danny Duchene got out of California’s prison system after 32 years, thanks to Rick Warren. Now, he’s hired Duchene as Saddleback Church’s director of Prison Ministries. It’s quite a story.
If the United States released all drug offenders from federal and state prisons, the country would still have the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world — by a significant margin.
Changes are likely coming soon to the laws governing sentencing and mandatory minimums. But how many current and future prisoners will actually be affected?
Watch this former head-busting drug slinger tell how receiving unexpected fierce love from a few Christians brought him to repentance…and a new sense of purpose. Then he entered California’s state prison system. Although he never read Daily Light on the Prisoner’s Path, his amazing ministry to fellow inmates modeled what readers of my book can also do.
John Oliver says, while NOT significantly deterring crime, they ruin the lives of those who receive them…while infrequent presidential and gubernatorial pardons only enhance the agony of those who must remain locked up. (Topic begins at 2:13) (Obscene language advisory)
It was two-and-a-half years between the one time I was interviewed by the FBI in late 2002 about my Internet activities at work and when I received notification from my lawyer that I would face a single charge for possession of child pornography. It was another year after that before I actually stood before a federal judge in Washington, DC and pled guilty to that charge.
Unbeknownst to anyone but a few prayer partners, clergy and family, I had spent those three-and-a-half years going through a rigorous process of church discipline, clinical examination and personal restoration. By the time I stood before the judge, I was a different man from the one who had been engaging in such disordered behavior in 2002. Nevertheless, he convicted me of my crime.
In the fall of 2006, just as I began a nine-month stay in a federal low security correctional institution in North Carolina, I divulged my situation in the parish magazine of my large suburban Episcopal church.* I was overwhelmed by the loving response it elicited. Six months later, I followed up that article with an epistle from prison.
Read both articles now to gain a better understanding of my full story…and the discoveries that inspired me to write Daily Light on the Prisoner’s Path:
* In 2009, having left The Episcopal Church, it became a founding parish of the Anglican Church in North America.