A different kind of criminal justice
By Rebecca Cusey
Saturday, November 20, 2010; B02




Jesus left his followers with precious few commands: Love thy neighbor, feed the hungry, clothe the naked and visit the prisoner among them. So why do so many churches have such a hard time with that last one?

Oscar-winning actress Hilary Swank, for one, is waiting for a good answer.

In her recent film, "Conviction," Swank plays Betty Anne Waters, a real-life high school dropout whose 18-year quest to free her brother from a wrongful murder conviction led her from GED to the bar exam.

"As we're sitting here speaking right now, someone is in prison for a crime they didn't commit," Swank said at a recent screening of the film at a historic black church in Alexandria, "and that's not okay."

Waters's brother, Kenny Waters, was the 83rd prisoner exonerated and freed as a result of DNA testing, forced by the persistence of the New York-based Innocence Project. To date, 261 prisoners have seen their wrongful convictions overturned.

"I think we always have to have hope and faith that eventually the right thing will happen," said Swank, who said she believes in a higher power but doesn't subscribe to a particular religion. "I don't know how it will be solved, but I think in talking about it, we shine a bright light."

Prison Fellowship, the nation's best known church-based outreach to inmates, is teaming with Swank and her film to help show congregations prisoners' needs and lobby to reduce wrongful convictions, end prison rape and halt the shackling of female inmates during childbirth.

"I think it's hard to convince people these things are happening," said Kimberly Alleyne, spokeswoman for Prison Fellowship. "Who wants to believe that these women are being shackled and held down while they're giving birth to babies? It's almost unconscionable."

While Swank's movie highlights the problem of wrongful conviction, U.S. prisons are full of people who admit to being guilty. In 2008, the last year for which the Bureau of Justice Statistics data was available, 7.3 million people - one in every 31 American adults - were in jail, prison, on probation or on parole.

"I think some struggle with the issue of helping prisoners because by and large, many of the people who are serving sentences are guilty," Alleyne said. "Our approach is whether they're guilty or not - particularly if they are guilty - they still need to be embraced by the love of God. This is not a judgmental work."

Pat Nolan, a Prison Fellowship vice president who served 29 months in federal custody after pleading guilty to corruption charges as a California state legislator, knows what it's like. He maintained his innocence and says he accepted a plea deal to avoid the possibility of a long imprisonment.

"When you're in prison, it's like you're an amputee," Nolan said. "You're cut off from your family, you're cut off from your job, from your community, from your church."

"I still have every letter that was sent to me" in prison, Nolan told attendees at the screening, his voice breaking with emotion. "Within each of your churches are people who have sons, brothers, wives, sisters in prison. They suffer alone."

Prison Fellowship, which was founded by Watergate ex-con Charles Colson, currently partners with about 8,000 U.S. churches but says it needs more. Some churches are reluctant to join prison work because it involves "stepping out of your comfort zone and going to a place you haven't been to before," Alleyne said.

But she said it's not just about hardened criminals inside the walls, but what happens to them when and if they rejoin society on the outside.

"The local church is the backbone of our reentry process," Alleyne said. "People from the churches and the community are there waiting on the outside so that when a prisoner comes out, he or she has somewhere to go."

It's what happens at Shiloh Baptist Church, which hosted the film screening. Because inmates often serve sentences far from home, Shiloh runs a teleconferencing ministry to allow families to talk to incarcerated loved ones.

"I've done teleconferencing with prisoners who haven't seen their family in 16 years," said volunteer Lionel O. Smith, a 30-year veteran of the federal prison system. "They have just an emotional period of about 10 to 15 minutes where they're just so emotional they can't even speak."

Shiloh's pastor, the Rev. Lee A. Earl, said serving prisoners and their families is part of the church's mandate to address human need.

"Like Miss Swank said, it's a tremendous love story. That's what Christ was about, that's what he died for - receiving people that proper Christians or church folk didn't think he ought to be receiving. If we're not careful, we'll get into that same kind of religion."

- Religion News Service

Marriage is alive and well
By Kathleen O'Brien
Saturday, November 27, 2010; B02




The headline's a shocker: Nearly four in 10 Americans think marriage is obsolete. As in, over and done with, hold the rice. Holy matrimony has gone the way of the rotary phone, the butter churn and the eight-track tape.

The Pew Research Center's latest survey, released Nov. 18, detected a growing perception of marriage's obsolescence. It neglected, however, to ask people what they thought about it.

It turns out that Americans love marriage. They hope to marry, and most eventually will. Those who called marriage obsolete might be voicing a fear, not expressing a wish, said David Popenoe, a former Rutgers University sociology professor and co-director of the National Marriage Project.

After all, any society whose television menu includes "Say Yes to the Dress," "Four Weddings" and the entire Wedding Channel is hardly disinterested in the institution.

Popenoe has his theories as to why a fair number of people approve of marriage, yet don't actually get married.

"Everybody knows marriage is a weak institution, so they have to be a little more careful in choosing a mate," he said. "Marriage has become so fragile it's a sense of, 'Let's not go through a divorce if we don't have to.' "

The Pew study is titled, "The Decline of Marriage and Rise of New Families," but Popenoe would change that to "Family Decline."

"There's nothing particularly good about it, in my view," he said. "Strong families are important to a strong society."

The survey chronicles a slow sea change in attitudes toward new and different relationships:

l When it comes to gay marriage and families, the landscape is rapidly shifting. Acceptance of gay couples raising children has jumped in just the past three years, so that now a slight majority says it's a good thing or makes no difference.

l For the first time in 15 years of polling on the issue, less than half of respondents oppose same-sex marriage. Disapproval is waning abruptly, with declines visible year to year.

l Disapproval remains hardened in one area: Nearly seven in 10 (69 percent) say it's bad for society when single women have children. At the same time, 29 percent also say it's a bad thing for a woman to never have a child. So, if you're single, there's simply no pleasing them.

There continue to be sharp differences among racial and ethnic groups on the percentage of children being raised by a single (usually never married) parent, with African American rates continuing to be strikingly higher than those of other groups.

However, African Americans are especially disapproving of the trend, with 74 percent viewing it as a bad thing. Popenoe attributes this disapproval to the group's higher level of religiosity and to the fact that its members see the daily effect this family arrangement has on children.

But having parents who are married isn't nearly as important to Americans as simply having that second parent in the home, regardless of the parent's gender or sexual orientation. They voice the identical level of comfort with unmarried couples raising children (53 percent seeing it as a good thing or making no difference) as they do with gay/lesbian couples raising children.

The United States has the highest marriage rates of the Western industrial countries. Americans embrace marriage because the nation is more religious than its European counterparts, Popenoe said.

And in America's highly individualistic and mobile society, marriage might be an important way to forge a connection that transcends community. Yet young Americans are waiting ever longer to get hitched.

Sociologists previously noticed a trend in modern America for college-educated, economically successful people to marry at higher rates than their poorer, less-educated parents. Poorer people "are just as eager to marry," the study said, but they hesitate to get married until they perceive that they can afford it.

All this gloom and doom about marriage doesn't mean people are going through life all by themselves, Popenoe said.

"Most people still couple up - they're not alone," he said. "They're just not married."

- Religion News Service

Three books about religion
Friday, November 12, 2010; 10:31 AM




Religion is an endless source of lively conversation and disagreement, especially in the political arena. From private houses to statehouses, Americans have very different views about religion and how it should affect civic life. Here are three books that suggest answers.



1America's Four Gods: What We Say About God - & What That Says About Us by Paul Froese and Christopher Bader (Oxford Univ., $24.95). The authors, both associate professors of sociology at Baylor University, undertook a daunting task: to unearth what Americans believe about God by crisscrossing the country, canvassing thousands, joining worship services and speaking with religious communities. The study found correlations between what people think of God and how they live their lives. Is He authoritative, benevolent, critical or distant? (Or is He a She?) The authors conclude that "our picture of God is worth a thousand queries into the substance of our moral and philosophical beliefs."