This book is for penitential professional criminals whose involvement in the criminal/carceral world is of long duration and commitment. Professional criminals commit crimes for money and live by the ancient criminal way that precludes betrayal of partners or hurting women and children. To professional criminals, crime is their profession and way of life. To those professional criminals who are very good-and lucky-at what they do and never get caught, my work will have little value. It is for those professional criminals who do get caught and serve time in prison, comprising approximately 70...

The penitential criminal working to reform other criminals, wisely spends the rest of his life atoning for the harm he has done during his criminal life; not because the world requires it, but because the eternal balance requires it, his immortal soul requires it, and God wishes it.

This work is not about a theory of criminology, of which there are already many, nor a history of rehabilitation or of the prison, also many. My work looks at the terrain where crime, history, human and organizational behavior, and Catholicism walk along paths-through the criminal city-we cannot readily perceive, but within which I see a deep rubric of transformation, redemption, the prodigal son, and urban contemplative spiritual warriors, enriched by Catholic teaching.

This book is a defense of the scriptural and traditional Catholic position of support for capital punishment in response to calls for its abolition. Based on scripture and tradition, calls for abolition are premature, though, in a positive sense, the call has generated a renewed focus on not only the magisterial history of this most ancient of teachings, but also its theological resonance within the expression of that teaching by the Fathers of the Church-ancient and modern-who most deeply reflected on it. While Catholic social teaching has always supported capital punishment, it has been...

The foundational ideas animating the Lampstand prison ministry-that it takes a reformed criminal to reform criminals and that the conversion approach must be intellectual-are ideas I have been working with since the beginning of my reformation from criminality at age thirty five, as I began seeing the world from the perspective of a college education (leading to a successful criminal rehabilitative college-based educational program I developed and managed) and continuing to the final washing from my spirit the last remnants of a lifetime of criminal thinking twenty years later, in the waters...