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/

Lampstand also keeps track of rehabilitative programs that fail, and the one or two that appear to work, with the findings available at https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/evaluation-of-reentry-programs-3/

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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Criminal World Glamour

The law-abiding criminal/social justice practitioner who interviews the criminal after arrest or during treatment, in addition to bringing their law-abiding sense of moral judgment to the table, often brings a certain wonder at the criminal’s ability to act with such freedom.

I cannot count the numerous times revealing my criminal/carceral past garnered admiration from people who should have known better.

This makes getting at the truth of criminal causation conflicted. What the criminals say, in their private and contemplative companionship mostly happening inside prisons or jails, is a story of having their way with the world and getting away with it.

For a time, during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, a proponent of the criminal’s victimization by the conditions of society has been the often Humanism-driven relativist and the Marxist-driven radical, to whom the criminal is an exotic creature whose acts are threatening to the foundations of order and stability—which they also wish to shake—and they would have had criminals in the vanguard of their army.

The relativist and radical has—and even still, sadly, does—proclaimed in literature, film, drama, and poetry that the criminal is special and privileged to know things that terrify the common man.

Crime and the attractiveness of it to youth are strong, and though the forces against crime grow stronger, the attraction has reached so deeply into the life of Americans that there is widespread agreement it is a major social problem and it is one of the bedrock issues that has propelled social conservatives into political power.

Many social reformers feel that a return to the values of an earlier time will change the criminal world’s great attraction for youth. It won’t. The imperative of social evolution will not let us. Crime is as old as time and ever since the acts of the first criminal it has adapted to accommodate new realities.

Many people are beginning to understand that the ancient way of Christians in reclaiming the prodigal son—love that flows from knowledge of liberation—is the only way of criminal transformation that works.

The criminal world is an immense and powerfully compelling world that has clearly shown it has the ability to drive the agenda and change individual behavior on a very large scale. It offers sensuality, excitement, danger, and the possibility of a mastery of mystery, a coming to terms with darkness and fear.

Within each criminal/carceral ethnic culture there are stories from their cultural pasts; Aztec stories, Viking stories, Arabian stories, African stories, which shape criminal/carceral reality; one, centered on the life of the legendary pimp, Iceberg Slim, has particular resonance within black urban culture with many of those cultural leaders adopting forms of his name into their own.

Many major movie actors—past and present—have at some point in their acting career felt it imperative to play a prisoner, thus facing, even if only in a make-believe way, the terrifying reality of prison life, which the non-criminal sees as the most horrific reality they could ever face, but which the criminal sees as merely a part of their life with little to fear and much to learn.