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Obama and the Faith-Based Initiative

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0500

On July 1, 2008, Barack Obama gave a speech and interviews in Zanesville, Ohio in which he declared that, if elected president, he would constitute a “Council on Faith-Based and Community Partnerships” in his White House. That day he addressed three separate but related sets of questions about what “faith-based” would mean in policy terms to a President Obama and in an Obama administration.

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Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist

Wed, 01 Mar 2000 00:00:00 -0500

Lonnie Athens, a little“known criminologist at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, has written two books about violent criminals, the first published in 1992, the second in 1997. Based on in“depth interviews with over a hundred prisoners convicted of extreme acts of violence, he argues that, without exception, people who commit vicious crimes first undergo a four“stage process he awkwardly terms “violentization.” It begins with “brutalization”: a parent or other authority figure batters a child, allows the child to witness him physically subjugate others, and then taunts the child into settling violently even minor playground disputes. Next comes “belligerency”: the scared youth placates the mentor“menace by threatening peers who give the slightest provocation. “Violent performances” follow: the terror“in“training wins bloody fights, smells fear in others, and likes the smell. Finally, there is “virulency”: the child“predator preaches to himself about the virtues of violence, and bonds socially only with others who share, or can be brutalized into sharing, his savage“or“be“savaged worldview.

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The Truth About Crime and Welfare

Thu, 01 Aug 1996 00:00:00 -0400

Over the years, First Things has done a good job of highlighting the issue of prison overcrowding, the rehabilitative efficacy of faith-based treatment programs for inmates, and the negative social and moral consequences of employing such discredited and degrading (but once again fashionable) penal sanctions as “chain gangs.” Likewise, in commenting on my call to harness churches to the task of resurrecting the civil society of drug-and-crime-ravaged inner-city neighborhoods (The Public Square, April 1996), Father Richard John Neuhaus was right to remind us that to embrace religion solely for the sake of its social utility is to make a “dangerous embrace” and flirt with “a kind of blasphemy.” And, on the subject of welfare reform, I concur with the editors of First Things that some type of far-reaching reforms are necessary (“Moynihan’s Counsel of Despair,” March 1996). But there are additional facts, figures, and arguments about faith, prisons, and welfare policies that may be worth airing in First Things .

Compared to most policy-oriented academics who publish both in scholarly journals and in popular outlets, I am undoubtedly what Fr. Neuhaus termed me: “hard-nosed” and a “strong proponent of incarceration” for violent and repeat criminals, adult and juvenile.

Based on the best survey data, however, it is clear that most Americans of every race, religion, region, demographic description, and socioeconomic status are every bit as tough-minded and in favor of imprisonment as I am. That’s why crime has been among the top three civic concerns for most of the last three decades. And that’s why crime and crime-related social ills rank as the single biggest reason that the middle class continue to leave the nation’s great cities in favor of longer-commute, middle-of-nowhere, but safer (for now) ex-urban zip codes.

Politicians of both parties have used revolving-door justice as a campaign scare tactic, and sometimes as a racially polarizing law-and-order issue. Likewise, the media have often hyped coverage of crime, most especially the local “if-it-bleeds-it-leads” news shows. The fact, nonetheless, is that revolving-door justice is a reality that kills innocent people (many of them children) and destroys entire neighborhoods.

Consider just a few of the key facts. In 1993 Americans suffered over forty-three million criminal victimizations, including over ten million violent criminal victimizations, a quarter of them murders, rapes, aggravated assaults, armed robberies, and other injury—or fatality—causing attacks. According to the most recent National Institute of Justice study, each year violent crimes cost their victims and society over $40

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