This website is the home site of my criminal reformation apostolate; here you can find details about the Lampstand Foundation which I founded as a 501c (3) nonprofit corporation in Sacramento, California in 2003.

I have written ten books and each one of my books is a response to a likely objection to Catholicism that will be encountered when doing ministry to professional criminals; and for links to all of the Lampstand books which are available at Amazon, go to http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=david+h+lukenbill

I also maintain a daily blog, The Catholic Eye, https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/

The work connected to the apostolate is listed under the home page categories (to your left) which I will be expanding as needed.

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Book Excerpt: Carceral World, Communal City (2008) by David H. Lukenbill

Every criminal act is personal, from a person it comes, from an idea shaping action, from desire and want, and as it moves from the person into the world, assaulting our neighbor—whom we have been instructed to love—it becomes crime against the justice balanced between individuals and the world, the justice we all have an inalienable right to expect, the dignity each of us deserves from each other.

22) Skotnicki (2004) notes foundational ideas of Catholic criminal justice:

There has been a hard-won synthesis in the development of the three foundations of Catholic thought on criminal justice; they form, in effect, a continuum proceeding from the warrant to punish, to the place and program of both penance and reform, and culminating in the ritual of return and reinstatement. One cannot limit the value of one of the three elements without significantly altering the meaning of the other two. (p. 812)

23) The Decalogue defines the wrong requiring punishment, prison time is the penitential place and program, and reentry—though still being sought in its new manifestations of success, one can see the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA) as a model—the ritual path to communal reentry.

Pope John Paul II (2000) has spoken to us of punishment:

Punishment and imprisonment have meaning if, while maintaining the demands of justice and discouraging crime, they serve the rehabilitation of the individual by offering those who have made a mistake an opportunity to reflect and to change their lives in order to be fully reintegrated into society. (#6 italics in original)

24) Many criminal justice scholars, who are attempting to come to terms with their own fear and trepidation about prison, see it as a central animating concept to modern life; and prison’s punishing reality, where the most intimate violations and terror clouding men’s minds is thus objectified, shaped, and placed within comfortable theories and explanatory ideologies.

25) For the Catholic perspective on criminal justice, the animating factor is justice. Seeing prison as the shaper of criminal world values, the central animating factor of Catholic criminal justice is the human being, the redeemable human being, shorn of his terror-creating presence and humble in the sight of God, a quiet neighbor to men.

26) We see how the classic expressions of justice from Catholic social teaching and tradition inform different aspects of the criminal path—distributive (fair social distribution of resources, the criminal feels it is his right to steal)—commutative (to each his own)—with the prison as penitential (justice for crime, do the crime, do the time), yet the criminal will rarely consider transformation, and transformative justice (seeing distance from God, spiritual interiority, the relation with our creator as root cause, as the city of men defines the truth as he lives it) and he must learn or, more correctly, be taught the eternal truth which will lead him out of the criminal city.

27) In the history of the saints of the Church we see great transformative stories.

We know the first criminal to become a saint was Dismas, the Good Thief, crucified alongside of Christ who Christ took with him from Calvary to heaven.

The first criminal to become a Pope and later saint, was Callistus I who died a martyr but was Pope for five years, from 217 to 222.

The first Catholic criminologist was surely St. Augustine, who in his developed reasoning around the city of men in his masterpiece, The City of God, essentially lays out the world whose truth criminals embrace in their descent into the criminal world.

28) It is fitting that the United States is a country where Catholic Criminal Justice might form strong roots—for though the term has possibly been used elsewhere, it is most congruent here, in America, where the prison world has grown in ways rarely imagined

The United States, even before it was the United States was a Catholic land, as Archbishop Gomez notes: (2007):

As you well know, your Catholic and Hispanic roots here in Arizona go even deeper. It is amazing to think that the Gospel was preached to the indigenous peoples here in the 1530’s, by missionaries sent from Mexico…long before the United States of America was even an idea, this land was Catholic.

Every American today, in some way traces his or her roots to the great Hispanic-Catholic missions of the 16th and 17th centuries. We feel this deeply here in the Southwest. In other parts of our country, Americans proudly trace their roots more deeply to the early Catholic missions of immigrants from other foreign lands, France, Poland, Germany, Ireland and Italy. (p. 3-4)

David H. Lukenbill (2008) Carceral World, Communal City. Sacramento: The Lampstand Foundation; Chulu Press. (pp. 24-28)