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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Skull and Bones & Carceral World Culture

There is very little accurate information about carceral world culture out there, for good reason; but one important fact is to know that the elite prison gangs are the Skull and Bones Society—in its traditional sense—of the criminal/carceral world, and in the process of providing an effective criminal reformation ministry, not understanding this makes your work much more difficult.

Here’s what Wikipedia says about Skull and Bones.

Skull and Bones is an undergraduate senior secret society at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. It is the oldest senior class landed society. … The society is known informally as “Bones”, and members are known as “Bonesmen”.

Skull and Bones was founded in 1832…. William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft co-founded …. The first senior members included Russell, Taft, and twelve other members.

Retrieved January 22, 2018 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_and_Bones

An excellent movie with Skull and Bones playing center stage is The Good Shepherd and one of my favorite lines in there is when the protagonist—a CIA counter-intelligence executive and a Bonesman—is speaking with a Mafia Don who tells him that all of the nationalities that have come to the United States have something they call their own, but you have nothing; to which the protagonist responds: (paraphrasing) “We have the country, the rest of you are just tourists.”; a sentiment concerning the carceral world that could be made by the elite prison gangs.

Of course, the major difference between the secret society of the carceral and that of the free, is that the elite prison gangs, especially the leadership, has nothing to lose and will accept death to pursue their aims; whereas the free elite secret societies have everything to lose and will risk death more haltingly.

Within ministry, a few things related in this way are important to remember.

One, is comparing the existential power of the acceptance of death for gang culture with the spiritual power of saints and martyrs who accept death for faith can be a powerful argument.

Two, as can the world of absolutes each lives in, for it is absolutes that can convert criminals, not maybes.

Three, each member of an elite prison gang is a warrior, having taken a life to gain membership, and the lives of the warrior monks of the Church, such as the Templars, are powerful models for conversion and my favorite source book for that is The Monks of War: The Military Religious Orders, by Desmond Seward.