Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm Johnstone Street. Recently, Charles Lane described in an article for the Free Press that over the last two decades, the U.S. has a significantly reduced and less racially skewed prison population. In fact, the total incarceration rate has dropped by 28% since peaking in 2008, from 760 to just about 550 per 100,000 people as of 2023.
And according to the article, that reduction is due not to more lenient treatment of violent offenders, but to lower rates of violent crime. In fact, rather than being an irreparably broken system, as critics so often claim, the U.S. could be seeing crime and incarceration decline together. In fact, the Council on Criminal Justice projects the 2026 U.S. murder rate will be the lowest ever recorded.
Lane put it this way, and I quote: "The United States, it seems, is in the midst of a long-term shift toward both less violent crime and less incarceration." It didn't take a revolution to achieve, and very well might never have occurred if we really had defunded police or abolished prisons. Rather, a new approach to drug offenses, along with myriad other changes in law enforcement, demographics, and individual behavior, has generated gradual and potentially durable improvement. All of this is quite welcome news. Though the free press did admit it's really hard to nail down an exact reason for these lowering incarceration rates. One theory is a.
Liberalization of drug laws, but as they put it, "quote There should be as much or more study of what causes crime to decline as there is of what causes crime waves. We need to know exactly what we've been doing right, so we can keep on doing it." End quote. And here is where a Christian worldview provides very powerful instruction on both societal and individual levels. And how now shall we live? Chuck Colson wrote about the success of the broken windows theory of policing, which involves addressing low.
Level crimes in a community to prevent much larger crimes, as he documented. This approach has had staggering success in reducing violent crimes in cities across the nation. And yet, what makes this approach so effective is that it's rooted in a biblical view of communal order. This is perhaps best represented in the term shalom, which, although is often translated as peace, has a much deeper meaning. As Colson explained, when people living together according to God's moral order in shalom, there is civility and harmony.
Back in the fifth century, Saint Augustine taught in the City of God that peace or shalom is the tranquility produced by order. A just and responsible social order must be in place for true peace to exist. Only in an ordered civil life can fallen human beings, as Augustine put it, live and work together. Thus, even as we live in the city of man, we still have an obligation to keep evil in check, not just decriminalizing certain behaviors, but incentivizing virtuous behavior. This is necessary for true liberty, rather than license, to permeate society.
The transforming power of Christianity enables us not only to know what's right, but also to do what's right. In other words, to be virtuous. The Christian worldview also speaks to how individuals engage in reducing crime. As Colson described it, when discussing the power of prison fellowship and their ministry, most inmates get out of prison and do exactly what he did on the road to prison in the first place. They rationalize their bad actions.
That rationalization often leads to repeating the same. Behavior that puts them back into prison.
So in response, prison fellowship creates a community with intentional accountability built into the program, and that helps inmates work with each other to learn how to live a life of virtue. And of course, there's essential work for the families to do as well. The nuclear family is the greatest institution in society for accountability, for structure, for virtue formation, and as many have noted for decades now, it is the breakdown of the family that is the chief cause of the increase in the prison population. A truly reinvigorated emphasis on the family would not only promote a more virtuous society, but also lead to less criminal behavior.
So yes, reduced violent crime is good news, and yes, less incarceration is good news. We long for our permanent home in the city of God, but while we do, we have this duty in the city of man to reflect God's character and to restore His righteous dominion. The very best method to do that is through the truths of a Christian worldview, which promotes true shalom for all. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored with Andrew Carico.
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