I posted this, replete with links, over at No Left Turns.

"Chris Suellentrop has a very nice piece on the politics of crime and punishment in last Sunday’s NYT Magazine. Ranging from a discussion of largely secular scholarship on what works in preventing or deterring crime (unsurprisingly, swift and certain seems more important than harsh when it comes to punishment) to a consideration of moves on the religious right, largely prompted by Chuck Colson, to reconsider prison reform, Suellentrop paints an interesting picture in which faith-based efforts at rehbilitation play a large part. This has been one of the President’s signature issues, and also marks the career of Sam Brownback (unfortunately for him, the most Bush-like of the current crop of Republican con[or is it pre?]tenders).

"Suellentrop spends some time discussing the Second Chance Act, which almost passed in the last Congress and may well go forward in the next. The question: will the prominent role of faith-based groups in prisoner rehabilitation and reentry be explicitly acknowledged in the legislation? Barack Obama, one of the Act’s co-sponsors, could show himself to be more than a garden-variety liberal with some leadership here.

"I wish I could be more hopeful, but this litigation, about which I wrote here (and about which I’m likely to write again, once I make my way through all the appellate briefs on both sides), has the usual suspects, as usual, lining up on different sides. I wish that folks on the Left would spend as much effort on providing secular alternatives to religious programs as they do challenging them in court."

I should add that when I wrote my piece for THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE ONLINE, I was more dubious than I am now about the constitutionality of Iowa's version of the InnerChange Freedom Initiative. I'm in the middle of reading the appellate briefs and am at the moment finding PFM's and Iowa's criticisms of the District Court ruling quite persuasive.

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