"Hi, Fellas. Come on in." Norman Carlson, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and the Rise of Prison Fellowship

Abstract

It is the creation story of the world's largest prison ministry. On a sunny morning in June 1975, a car pulled up at the entrance to the Federal Bureau of Prisons in Washington, DC. Sitting inside the car were Charles Colson, disgraced former aide to President Nixon, Harold Hughes, recently retired U.S. Senator from Iowa, and Fred Rhodes, who had just stepped down as chairman of the Postal Rate Commission, concluding a long career in government service. As the cars behind them sounded their horns, the three men took a minute to pray together. Then Colson and Hughes headed into the bureau to meet with its director, Norman Carlson. Carlson was initially welcoming—“Hi, fellas. Come on in.”—and he did not object when Hughes asked to open the meeting with a prayer. Thereafter, as Colson explained why they had come, Carlson remained silent, “his expression inscrutable.” Colson told Carlson that his prisons weren't working. They failed to rehabilitate. In some states, Colson observed, the recidivism rate was 80 percent. There was only one person in the world, he declared, who had the power to remake lives, who could break the desperate cycle of habit and deprivation that led many prisoners, after their release from custody, to quickly re-offend. That was Jesus Christ. “[S]till not a muscle moved in Carlson's face.”