COMMENTARY: The fight against crime should start with moral training

c. 1996 Religion News Service (Charles W. Colson, former special counsel to Richard Nixon, served a prison term for his role in the Watergate scandal. He now heads Prison Fellowship International, an evangelical Christian ministry to the imprisoned and their families. Contact Colson via e-mail: 71421,1551 at compuserve.com.) (RNS)-The bad news is that the forces […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Charles W. Colson, former special counsel to Richard Nixon, served a prison term for his role in the Watergate scandal. He now heads Prison Fellowship International, an evangelical Christian ministry to the imprisoned and their families. Contact Colson via e-mail: 71421,1551 at compuserve.com.)

(RNS)-The bad news is that the forces of cultural disintegration-and the resulting violence-have established strongholds throughout American society. The worse news is that they have millions of reinforcements on the way.


The bipartisan Council on Crime in America, which recently released an alarming report titled”The State of Violent Crime in America,”tells us that the upcoming increase in the adolescent male population, a group from which the bulk of violent criminals spring, will lead to as many as 40,000 killings a year early in the first decade of the next millennium.

The barbarians are not at the gates: They’ve broken inside.

The only silver lining is that most Americans seem to understand that we face a major crisis, so the question becomes: What do we do about it? We might best be guided by considering how we fought our most ill-fated war-Vietnam-and making every effort to avoid the same mistakes.

So far, unfortunately, we have fought crime largely as we did the Vietcong: in a war of containment. This will not work.

I understand that there is widespread approval of building prisons. Prisons have a role, of course, but a limited one-they will not, in fact, even contain the problem we already have. Like”vietnamization,”they simply slow defeat.

The Council on Crime in America, co-chaired by Griffin Bell, attorney general in the Carter administration, and William Bennett, education secretary under President Bush, said in its report that”80 percent of the most serious and frequent offenders escape detention and arrest.”This makes it very clear that we will not succeed unless we substantially reduce the number of criminals. If we fail, the demand for state intervention will result in a drastic reduction of our constitutional liberties.

How do we begin? First and foremost, we must stop trying to have it both ways. We must stop pretending that we don’t need moral standards in society and then turn around and moan about the rising crime rate.

Am I suggesting we attack the”root causes”of crime? You bet, and I say that with the full realization that conservatives have attacked liberals over the past 40 years for substituting”root causes”like poverty and racism for personal responsibility.


The idea isn’t wrong: The liberals merely misidentified the root causes. As criminologist James Q. Wilson and the late psychologist Richard Hernnstein showed in a seminal study, crime is largely caused by the lack of moral training in the formative years.

I hear the teeth grinding now. Morality? Are we to hear a sermon? Indeed, one complete with these unpopular ideas: Organizing full-scale boycotts of producers of pornography and other cultural garbage; demanding tax credits for families; ending no-fault divorce-and fast; stigmatizing sexual license; supporting, with some public funding, private organizations with a proven track record in rescuing individuals and saving families.

This isn’t a lesson everyone wants to hear, but better a sermon today than a eulogy tomorrow.

Where do we fight this war? Let’s start in the schools. We must first admit that value-free education has helped create value-free students. The New York Times once wrote a story about a New Jersey public school teacher who posed this question to his charges: If you found $1,000, what would you do with it? Every child said”keep it.”The teacher didn’t even suggest trying to find the owner. After the class, the reporter asked why not, and the teacher said it was not his duty to lecture the students about right and wrong, only to present options.

That is ethical malpractice. I’m not saying school prayer is necessarily the answer, though I do not suffer from what one wag has called”Jehovaphobia.”But all of us can surely agree that our schools be allowed to teach basic concepts of right and wrong, whose champions have been both religious and secular.

If we can allow horoscopes in student newspapers, we can also allow common-sense messages, to wit: premarital sex, whether”safe”or not, is wrong. In the same vein, we should finally acknowledge, as even some liberals are doing, that Dan Quayle was right about Murphy Brown.


We must show compassion toward single mothers without accepting single motherhood as normative and as good for kids as the two-parent family. After all, male children born into fatherless families face an increased risk of legal trouble in adolescence and young adulthood.

Too many people want to nip at crime around the edges but mock the suggestion that immorality has something to do with our problems, when in fact it is at the heart of the unfolding debacle.

If we fight a limited war, as we did in Southeast Asia, we will lose. As an old associate of mine once wrote, no more Vietnams.

MJP END COLSON

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!