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 twelve books, one being about Lampstand and each one of the other eleven being 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—free to members—and 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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Diversionary Illusions of the Left
There are so many of them piled one upon the other as the years go by but let us focus briefly on those within the criminal justice system, as a superb article from City Journal does in their Summer 2017 issue.
For a long time liberal criminologists from the academy touted “root causes” as the public policy key to addressing crime and, as the article notes:
“On this thinking, billions of taxpayer dollars poured into ambitious social program—yet crime went up, not down.” (p. 50)
Then the mantra was that the police couldn’t really do much to stop crime either, and:
“In the 1970s and 1980s and into the 1990s, as crime rates continued to spike, criminologists proceeded to tell us that the police could do little to cut crime, and that locking up the felons, drug dealers, and gang leaders who committed much of the nation’s criminal violence wouldn’t work either.” (Ibid. p. 50)
But reality intervened and:
“These views were shown to be false, too, but they were held so pervasively across the profession that, when political scientist James Q. Wilson called for selective incapacitation of violent repeat offenders, he found himself ostracized by his peers, who resorted to ad hominem attacks on his character and motivations….In the real world policy arena, however, Wilson attained significant influence: the Broke Windows theory of policing and public order, which Wilson developed with criminologist George Kelling, became a key part of the proactive policing strategies that would be largely responsible for the great crime decline starting in the mid-1990s.
“In short, while academic criminology has had much to say about crime, most of it has been wrong. How can an academic discipline be so wrongheaded? And should we listen to criminologists today when, say, they call for prisons to be emptied, cops to act as glorified playground attendants, and criminal sentences to be dramatically reduced, if not eliminated?” (Ibid. p. 50)
The leftist criminologists—there are hardly any others—constantly create new narratives to drive the discussion in the academy and one they are particularly fond of is described:
“Most criminologists follow a “penal-harm” narrative, which seeks to account for all the ways that the criminal justice system hinders the lives of offenders and their communities, generating and reinforcing social inequality and harming minorities, since they are the primary targets. Purveyors of the penal-harm narrative assert that conservative legislators demagogically used the upswing in crime rates during the late twentieth century—including more than 20,000 murders and hundreds of thousands of rapes, robberies, and assaults per year—to incite racial animosity and arouse support for overly punitive crime policies.” (Ibid. p. 53)
But, in the end, the biggest problem with the criminologists of the Left, is, as noted:
“To understand why many criminologists refuse to acknowledge criminal behavior as potent predictor of life outcomes—including premature mortality, health disparities, arrest and incarceration, and even being shot by the police—one must understand that most liberal criminologists feel strangely protective about criminals. Criminologists who work collaboratively with the police have done important work in understanding how best to respond to crime and how to prevent it. Their research, which often includes complex spatial analyses of crime patterns and which targets specific, high-rate offenders for arrest and prosecution, has been rigorously evaluated and confirmed. Yet liberal-minded criminologists dismiss these scholars as “administrative criminologists”—meaning that they help the state impose unfair social and economic arrangements.
“Liberal criminologists avoid discussing the lifestyles that criminal offenders typically lead. Almost all serious offenders are men, and they usually come from families with long histories of criminal involvement, often spanning generations. They show temperamental differences early in life, begin offending in childhood or early adolescence, and rack up dozens of arrests. Their lives are chaotic and hedonistic, including the constant pursuit of drugs and sex. They produce many children with different women and rarely have the means—or inclination—to support them. Active offenders exploit others for their own benefit, including women, children, churches, and the social-welfare system. They commit many crimes before getting arrested, and they move in and out of the criminal-justice system for decades. Many report enjoying acts of violence; the social-media accounts of martyred gangsters shot by police often illuminate this subculture. Perhaps not surprisingly, they see the police as another competing tribe that has to be manipulated, controlled, and sometimes confronted. In sum, the lives of persistent criminal offenders are often shockingly pathological. The nature of this world is hard to grasp without witnessing it firsthand.” (Ibid. p. 56)
As someone who was a professional criminal—meaning virtually all of my criminal acts were for money—for about 20 years, with 12 of those years spent in maximum security federal and state prisons; then some years after my final release entering college and earning degrees in criminal justice, organization behavior, and public administration; developing and managing a criminal reformation program that used education and peer-counseling as reformative tools; I can verify that all of what is quoted here from the article in City Journal is accurate; and it is important that more articles like this continue to be published to counter the diversionary illusions of the left.
I would strongly recommend—to get a running start—the past work of James Q. Wilson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Q._Wilson and the current work of Heather Mac Donald https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heather_Mac_Donald .
Reference: John Paul Wright & Matt DeLisi. (2017, Summer). What Criminologist Don’t Say, and Why: Monopolized by the Left, academic research on crime gets almost everything wrong. City Journal: Summer 2017. Published by the Manhattan Institute. Volume 27, Number 3. (pp. 50-57)