Something's gone wrong.

In many states, the "corrections" system has explicitly given up on correction. In 1976, California removed the word "rehabilitation" from its criminal code and passed a law stating, "The purpose of imprisonment is punishment." In 1970, 73 percent of Americans polled thought that rehabilitation was the primary purpose of imprisonment; by 1995, only 26 percent agreed. Justice has been emphasized over and against mercy.

But Christians can't separate the two. For us, rehabilitation must always remain a key purpose of prison. We're not allowed to give up on anybody. So here are 15 areas for us to focus on as we seek to rehabilitate both the system and the people within it. Some of these remedies can be stereotyped as "soft" and others as "hard", but opposing the two approaches makes no sense. Hard approaches make soft ones possible - no prison can rehabilitate when inmates, guards, and visitors are unsafe -and soft approaches make hard ones effective. It's unlikely that anyone quoted in this article will agree with every single proposal, but most of them reinforce on another.

Remember the following are only excerpts from the 15 areas that author focuses on. I found the entire article to be excellent and had a very hard time deciding what to include and exclude.

Visit Prisoners

This is the most basic of all "fixes." We hear it in Matthew 25:36: "I was in prison, and ye came unto me"; it's one of the seven corporal works of mercy. But few of us actually visit prisons to see Christ behind bars. Peter Nixon has been visiting a minimum-security jail in California with a ministry team from his parish for two years. He explains, "I began to feel this call-to take on the visiting of the imprisoned. I didn't really want to do it," he laughs. "I'm a fairly well-educated, middle-class guy. What could I have to say to a bunch of guys in prison? But the call was something I couldn't say no to."

2. Treat Prisoners Like People, Not logistical Problems

Visiting prisoners is one way to respond to prisoners as people rather than as statistics, obstacles, or monsters. In many ways our whole lives are struggles to become more like humans; in the no-rehabilitation age, prisons are places where that struggle is often denied.

Prison disconnects people. Sometimes it disconnects prisoners from criminal networks or no-good friends, which is what it's suppose to do. But at least as often, prison disconnects people from the family and community members who would be able to offer them the hope of reconciliation. And if no connections are maintained or forged between prisoners and the outside world, when the prisoners are released they have nowhere to go and no one's expectations to meet.

3. Promote Reconciliation Between Crime Victims and Offenders.

It's possible to return offenders to the community while supporting, rather than ignoring, the victims of crime. Right now, victims often feel used by the criminal justice system. As Pat Nolan, vice president of Prison Fellowship Ministries, argues, "What's wrong with prisons is really a symptom of a deeper problem: The relationship that's been broken between the offender and the victim. We deal with crime as a legal problem, but it's also and more importantly a moral problem."

When a victim feels that other people acknowledge the damage that's been done to him, he's more likely to be ready to speak with the criminal. Many programs set up meetings between victims and offender, to "personalize the crime to the offender in a way that the system never does," Nolan says. The programs prepare both victim and offender beforehand, so that the situation can foster sincere repentance and forgiveness rather than the mouthing of pious clichés.

He explains, "Many victims tell me they go into that dialogue not intending to forgive. They want to give the offender a piece of their mind; and they're entitled to it. And yet, when they see sincere repentance on the face of the offender," many are moved to forgiveness. "It's truly the work of the Holy Spirit."

4. Promote Reconciliation Between Offenders and the Local Community

Nolan points to specific programs that bring victim, offender, and community together, such as Vermont's Reparative Probation Program, which won a 1998 Ford Foundation award for innovations in American government" "Volunteers from the community bring together the victim, the offender, the families of both, the witnesses, and whoever feels they've been impacted by the crime or is interested in that crime, and they have a discussion of that crime. It's not the traditional adversarial [format] of the courtroom: The victim is given a chance to talk. Then they discuss possible ways to make things right, and end up with a reparative contract that they all sign."

Although Nolan notes that these programs only work with carefully chosen offenders, he adds that "it's not limited to nonviolent cases." The Texas victim-offender dialogue program, for example, includes violent criminals. Nolan suggests that reparative contracts, because of their emphasis on strengthening communities, are especially effective in cases stemming from racial hatred - an underlying cause that a traditional prison sentence, where the offender often spends his time with members of racial gangs, is likely to exacerbate.

5. End the Drug War

A lot of things are illegal, but we don't have a "war" on them. The immense scope of today's drug war can be blamed in large part on mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related crimes, which are based solely on the weight of the drugs involved. In 1993, conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist called mandatory sentences "a good example of the law of unintended consequences"; the next year, Justice Anthony Kennedy concurred, saying in congressional testimony, "I think I'm in agreement with most judges in the federal system that mandatory minimums are an imprudent, unwise, and often unjust mechanism for sentencing."

Mandatory minimums were supposed to put drug kingpins away for good. Instead, kingpins bargain with prosecutors, trading evidence against other dealers for lighter charges, and leave the small-timers to face the mandatory sentences. In 1994, the Federal Judicial Center found that more than 85 percent of those receiving mandatory minimum sentences in fiscal year 1992 were low-level offenders, not kingpins, not even middle managers.

John J. Dilulio Jr., an expert on prison management and former head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, started out as a staunch drug-warrior who penned articles titled "Prisons Are a Bargain, By Any Measure" and "Let' Em Rot." He argues, "Many [drug offenders] would be and should be incarcerated even if the anti-drug laws did not exist." But in 1993, he began a series of studies that - along with other research being done around the same time-caused him to change his views.

In 1999, he told Reason magazine that although he still supported drug prohibition, he now believed that "With respect to these drug offenders, the mandatory minimums have begun to go haywire." He said his new position was "coerced by the data."

After writing Newjack, Ted Conover found that people constantly asked him how he thought the system could be fixed. His response began, "First, states need to repeal mandatory sentencing laws for drug offenses...I think that most prison time for drug possession does more harm-to families as well as offenders-than good. New York and California are just beginning to give first-time drug offenders treatment instead of prison sentences, and that's positive development."

The current rush to imprison users rather that treat them has caused our prisons to fill beyond their capacity. Very little rehabilitation can take place when four prisoners are jammed into single-occupancy cells, when there are too many people trying to crowd into too few education or ministry or job-training programs. Moreover, as Washington Post columnist William Raspberry has pointed out, our drug policies have created neighborhoods where going to prison is commonplace-ordinary, accepted-and breaking the law is even more common. Shifting away from automatically imprisoning drug users would ease the unbearable pressure on the prison system and make all the other remedies in this article much more likely to succeed. Innovative leaders like former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson have recognized this fact; unfortunately, national leaders are too afraid of being seen as "soft on crime" to take a realistic approach to drub abuse.

6. Build New Prisons Near Cities

Wall Street Journal reporter Joseph T. Hallinan noticed a disturbing trend as he reported on prison issues in the 1990's: Prisons were becoming big moneymakers. Texas towns reeling from the 1980s oil bust, coal-country towns seeking a new industry-all were finding that prisons could make them rich again. So in the time-honored pork tradition, politicians fought to get prisons in their counties as they had once fought for military bases. More and more prisons were built in the American hinterlands, far from the cities where most of the crimes were committed. A 1993 study in New York found that white, rural upstate districts had received more than 89 percent of the money spent by the state's Department of Corrections; 89 percent of prison employees hailed from those districts; but 70 percent of the state's inmates hailed from the Big Apple

The resulting problems should have been easily predicted: Prisoners were shipped away from any sources of support. Their families couldn't afford to visit or couldn't find transportation (since some rural prisons are not even accessible by bus). Educational opportunities were few. The resources for rehabilitating prisoners-the familiar churches, the charitable organizations, the drug-recovery groups-are concentrated in the cities, but the prisoners were somewhere else. Prison became an even more isolating experience, and prisoners were thereby left with even fewer ropes to cling to when they were finally released.

Prisoners and guards came from starkly different backgrounds. In Sing Sing, Conover found that some of his fellow guards were related to prisoners or had family members who had done time-because Sing Sing is close to New York City. In rural prisons, guards and prisoners are tempted to view one another as almost different species; racism, animosity, and violence flourish in that atmosphere.

Perhaps most troubling, the shift to rural prisons has given some towns and some politicians a strong vested interest in long sentences and stiff penalties for even minor crimes. Rural prison towns reap the economic benefits of the prison boom, while the cities suffer the consequences of shattered families, derailed lives, and absent fathers. This is a recipe for a criminal justice policy designed to maximize imprisonment without any incentive to foster rehabilitation. Some of the reluctance to overhaul the drug laws discussed above may spring from these perverse incentives.

7. Free the Innocent

This is the sort of reform everyone clamors to support...in the abstract. But when the discussion shifts to specific policy changes, things get more contentious.

The first and most obvious remedy is to support groups like the Innocence Project, whose teams of law students comb through the evidence in cases where DNA testing might lead to exoneration. We need more groups that investigate convictions, especially in the often-overlooked cased that do not involve the death penalty or DNA evidence.

Jeralyn Merritt, a criminal defense lawyer in Denver who teaches a course on wrongful convictions at Denver University's College of Law, describes cases in which men were imprisoned based on lab fraud; for example, a chemist named Fred Zain may have been responsible for as many as 182 false convictions. West Virginia, where Zain served frequently as an expert witness, ,ultimately paid $6.5 million to innocent people convicted on Zain's testimony. The chemist was indicted for fraud, but he died before the case came to trial. One of Zain's victims, William Harris, was sentenced to 20 years in prison at age 17, when he was convicted of rape in a trial based on Zain's false testimony. After seven years in prison, he was able to get his case reinvestigated, the DNA match was disproved, and a detective who testified in the case was convicted of perjury. Harris won a cash settlement of almost a million dollars. ("Such a nice kid...he wasn't even bitter," Merritt marvels.)

In 1996, the National Institute of Justice (the research arm of the Department of Justice) studied the cases of 28 men whose wrongful convictions were exposed through DNA evidence.

Merritt offers another major fix: Extend the time limits on filing habeas corpus claims. This may sound like legal detail work, but it's crucially important to many prisoners. The 1996 antiterrorism act prohibited prisoners from filing these claims more than a year after their last appeal is denied. Habeas corpus claims allege that a prisoner is being held unlawfully, so a restriction on them is necessarily a restriction on innocence claims.

Merritt also calls for a "wall of separation" between the police and crime labs. Laboratories should not be tied to either the defense or the prosecution. Lawyers for both sides should be informed of the entire testing process, not just the end results, and an independent reviewer should investigate allegations of lab misconduct.

8. Education

This is one of the most basic ways to expand inmates' horizons, keep them from getting trapped in prison life, give them hope for the future, and help them turn from being predators into productive citizens. And yet many prisons have sharply restricted their educational programs, viewing such programs as unnecessary frills. Ted Conover writes, "Studies have shown again and again that nothing lowers recidivism rates like education. Refusing to consider post-secondary education as a front-line attack on crime is a terrible mistake. Prisons should start teaching again, and with officers justly resentful at inmates being offered for free what ordinary citizens have to pay for it makes sense to me that officers should be allowed to take part in these same classes, of duty.

"Along these same lines, I think we should take the lead of European countries in trying to blur the sharp line that exists in our prisons between guards and other employees. The term 'correction officer' is imbued with the promise of reform and assistance. I think it would help to rehabilitate prisons themselves if officers taught some of the classes, did some of the counseling, were allowed to engage their own hearts and minds on the job, instead of just having to pretend they don't have any."

9. Track Performance and Enforce Accountability

When Rikers Island was boiling over with gangs and violence, Michael Jacobson and William Kerik teamed up to tame the prison. Together they cut inmate violence by 90 percent in just four years. Sick leave and overtime declined, two signs that officer morale was higher. Today Rikers is grappling with other problems-some officers have been accused of misuse of government property. Even while Kerik was still at Rikers, the old problems-guards covering up their assaults against inmates, escapes, poor medical care-remained; some improved, but others were merely holding steady. So Rikers is no miracle jail. But the startling decline in violence behind bars (by both inmates and guards) has persisted despite the scandal, and it's still worth studying the jail to figure out how other institutions can live up to that standard.

10. Expand Innerchange

Innerchange Freedom Initiative is a programs run by Prison Fellowship. Inmates, from check-kiters to killers, choose to live in a richly Christian atmosphere: Morning prayers at 6 am, days filled with Bible study, vocational training, classes on drug and alcohol abuse, and church services, all heavily salted with prayer. Innerchange units are separated from the rest of the prisons (no television, pornography, or swearing allowed), although Innerchange participants eat and spend recreation time with the other inmates. Later, after the initial six months of daily religious instruction, inmates also participate in community-service projects like Habitat for Humanity. The program is now offered in Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, and Texas. Participating in the program does not cut an inmate's sentence; in one case, Innerchange even lengthened a sentence, when a Texas prisoner turned down parole so he could complete his 18 months in the program.

There's no real way of measuring whether Innerchange is more successful at preventing recidivism than comparable secular programs. Because there are no comparable secular programs. So far, Innerchange inmates do seem to have significantly lower re-imprisonment rates that the general population. More importantly, one life-changing program should not be shuttered because there are so few alternatives to it; the obvious solution for those who worry that prisoners need non-Christian alternatives to Innerchange is to create those alternatives themselves. Even such de-Christianized programs would be far better than run-of-the-mill prison life.

11. Take Care of Ex-Prisoners

This is one of Innerchange's great contributions: It continues after the prisoners are released. Mentors from the program greet prisoners on release; the program guarantees them a mentor, a church, and a home and tries to guarantee a job wherever possible.

Ex-offenders are in a terrible precarious stage. They are coming from an environment governed by clear rules-when to eat, when to line up- in which all the basics of life are provided for them. They enter the normal, outside environment, and suddenly they're unsure where they'll sleep that night, whom they'll see in the morning, whether they'll return to their old friends and ways or seek a new way of life.

Prisoners leaving Rikers Island used to be confronted with an especially vivid choice: They were dropped off by bus at two or three in the morning on a New York City street corner where the main players were drug dealers and prostitutes. Few family members were willing to trek out to the dangerous corner at that hour, so even those who had family waiting were left unwatched and unaided. The New York City Department of Corrections fixed that policy; now inmates are released between 5 and 6 am., and a nonprofit association called the Fortune Society has opened a center for ex-offenders next to the new drop-off site. The center offers coffee, someone to listen, and referrals to services alike health care, education, job counseling, and treatment for drug and alcohol addiction.

Ex-offenders desperately need jobs; they need someone to give them a second chance. But they need that someone to have a hard head as well as a kind heart. Jennifer Wynn advises people who hire ex-felons to give them a firm structure, since they're coming from a highly structured environment, and to "be on the lookout for absenteeism and depression." She warns that an ex-convict is "dealing with a whole host of issues-stigmatization, fear, not being accepted"-and employers need to recognize that.

12. Fix Guard Training

In Newjack, Conover recalls the ways in which his training for Sing Sing sent mixed messages. The guards-in-training were told not to speak with the inmates who worked in the cafeteria. When the trainees reached Sing Sing, one woman asked whether they were supposed to talk with inmates at all. The lieutenant who took them on their first tour of the prison exclaimed, "Of course you have to talk to them! ...You'd better talk to them. How else are you going to let them know what to do and hear what they need from you? Oh, yes! The job is all about talking to them. That's really what it's about." Well, which is it? Are guards "keepers," human zookeepers, or are they dealing with difficult people who are nonetheless "created equal"? It's too easy for guards to slip into a cynical or desperate us-versus-them mentality, seeing themselves as trapped by prison life just like the criminals they guard. Their training should be geared toward helping guards avoid that mentality by maintaining a sense of what Conover calls "mission."

13. Support Guards and Their Families

Newjack includes a bleak joke told during the guards' training: "What the first three things you get when you become a CO [corrections officer]?" "A car. A gun. A divorce."

Guards and other prisoners are the people prisoners spend most of their time with. If guards are isolated and placed under intense stress, any number of bad consequences can result: Guards can become hopeless, frustrated, or violent. Guards can take their problem out on their spouses and children. Guards can come to resent education or other opportunities offered to prisoners, feeling as if the best way to get attention and help is to commit a crime.

A smaller, but still significant, reform would be to avoid requiring officers to put in mandatory overtime. Mandatory overtime is often used to cut costs in prisons, but it's so stressful for the guards that it can end up costing more money as guards passively rebel by taking sick leave and adopting a hopeless, resentful attitude, guards, like everyone else, work poorly when they're exhausted, stressed, and unhappy.

14. Take Steps Against Rape

Although there's no comprehensive national study of prison rape rates, one study of four Midwestern states found that about 20 percent of male inmates reported that they had endured a "pressured or forced sex incident" behind bars. Women's reported rates of sexual abuse varied widely.

Groups like Stop Prison Rape offer several proposals to make rape less likely. Most of them are simple, commonsense measures: When assigning inmates to cells, consider the likelihood of rape-don't place a slight 18-year-old with a known sexual predator. Corrections officials must take rape allegations seriously, whether the charges are made against staff or against other inmates. Guards should be trained to recognized likely signs of rape and to interview possible victims sensitively. Staff who have sexually assaulted inmates, or who have covered up assaults, should be fired; victims won't step forward and expose the crimes if they suspect no one will listen. Yet even these commonsense precautions are not being taken in many prisons.

15. Monitor Radical Islam

After the September 11 attacks, American woke up to the threat of violent jihad. Two of the post-September 11 terrorists-Jose Padilla and Richard Reid-first embraced radical Islam in prison. Prison is fertile ground for jihadist groups; prisoners are, as one might expect, often resentful toward the larger society and the law, and many embrace the purpose and structure Islam provides.

Some moderate Muslims have complained that radical imams are preventing Muslims in prison from receiving moderate literature, claiming that the literature is not legitimately Islamic. Nolan explains, "Most corrections officials don't understand Wahhabism or Salafism [another radical variant], and they're so eager to have an imam [to serve the growing population of Muslims behind bars] that they accept these folks without even checking who trained them. It's as if to fill a Protestant chaplain spot, they took somebody from David Koresh."

Time for Change

Some of these changes are much more difficult than others. Some seek to fix obvious ills of the body, whereas others hope to make a space through which prisoners will be more likely to allow God to heal the spirit. But all of them address the U.S. prison system's inhabitants, not as a mass of undifferentiated statistics but as the individuals behind the numbers.