Remembering Chuck Colson, bipartisan federal panel aims to reform prisons

Chuck Colson turned seven months behind bars into an opportunity to start over. Now the Justice Department is looking to his example as it tries to reform the federal prison system.

The bipartisan Charles Colson Task Force on Federal Corrections kicked off its work at the Capitol on December 9. Former representative J. C. Watts Jr. (R., Okla.), its chairman, said its aim is to make the federal prison system safer, less costly, and more humane.

“His faith encouraged him to believe that there was no such thing as a lost cause, in or outside of prison,” Watts said of Colson, who became a born-again Christian shortly before he went to prison in 1974 for his deeds on behalf of a disgraced President Nixon. The experience inspired Colson to build the nation’s largest prison ministry during the second half of his life. He died in 2012.