Quote of the Week: Christian Prison Love

And the quote of the week -- via a New York Times story on the effects of Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship -- goes to ... Robert Perkinson. The Times tells us, Perkinson is a historian and the author of “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire.”

In setting up the quote the Times writer Mark Oppenheimer explains that, "Dr. Perkinson once visited the Carol S. Vance Unit, a Texas prison that subcontracts with Prison Fellowship for programming.... "He was both discomfited and amazed by what he saw."

And then follows this gem from Perkinson:

On the one hand, it was flagrantly unconstitutional. If you didn’t believe God created the earth in seven days, and not just that same-sex relations were a sin but so was masturbation, you couldn’t graduate from this program. It was almost Taliban-style. But it was the only prison of all that I visited in Texas that was permeated with love.