When he was governor of Texas, Bush invited Charles Colson's Prison Fellowship to start InnerChange Freedom Initiative, a fundamentalist prison-within-a-prison where inmates undergo vigorous evangelizing, prayer sessions, and intensive counseling. Now comes a study from the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society reporting that InnerChange graduates have been rearrested and reimprisoned at dramatically lower rates than a matched control group.
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But when you look carefully at the Penn study, it's clear that the program didn't work. The InnerChange participants did somewhat worse than the controls: They were slightly more likely to be rearrested and noticeably more likely (24 percent versus 20 percent) to be reimprisoned. If faith is, as Paul told the Hebrews, the evidence of things not seen, then InnerChange is an opportunity to cultivate faith; we certainly haven't seen any results.
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...if you're smart, you don't listen the political advocates of "faith-based" this and that when they say they're only asking us to support programs that have been "proven" to work.
Once again, fuzzy math to support faith-based science, undoubtedly to cast a voodoo economic magic spell. Why doesn't Dubya just appoint Colson to serve as the Secretary of the Department of Exorcism, Leeches and Alchemy?
The United States of America — marching toward medievalism!
Link via Tapped. We most recently wrote about Chuck in June.
