Chuck Colson Went From Watergate to Prison to a Ministry Behind Bars

Imagine you are writing a screenplay and your producer wants a redemption story. The studio notes say: make the hero a villain first. Make him the toughest operator in the building, the man the newspapers call the hatchet man of an embattled president. Send him to prison. Then, and here the test audience will groan, have him come out and spend more than three decades walking into other prisons, on purpose, for free.

The test audience would say it was too neat. Nobody would believe it. And yet that is the public record of Charles Wendell Colson, and if you tried to sell it as fiction you would be laughed out of the meeting for lack of realism. Let me tell you why his story matters, and it is not because it is heartwarming, though it is. It matters because the two things Colson spent his life insisting on, that a man must be held to account and that a man can be changed, are the two things our prison debate keeps trying to turn into a fight.

Who Colson was in the Nixon White House

Start with the facts, and let us not flatter him. Charles Colson was a Boston-born lawyer and a Marine Corps veteran who became a Washington political operative. In 1969 he joined the Nixon administration, and he eventually served as Special Counsel to the President. His reputation in the building was that of a man who got things done and did not much care about the etiquette. Reporters of the day attached the "hatchet man" label to him, and he did little to discourage it.

The Nixon White House produced the Watergate scandal, which began with the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex and grew, through a cover-up, into the resignation of a president in August 1974. Colson was not one of the burglars, and I am going to be careful here, because the precise charge matters. His own legal trouble came from a related episode: the effort to discredit Daniel Ellsberg, the former defense analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971. In that effort, an operation that included a break-in at the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist, Colson was implicated. The offense to which he ultimately pleaded guilty was obstruction of justice connected to the Ellsberg matter.

That distinction is not a technicality used to excuse him. He never claimed it was. It is simply the accurate account, and a column that is going to praise accountability had better be accurate about what the man was accountable for.

The 1974 plea and seven months

In June 1974, Colson pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice. He was sentenced to a term of one to three years, and he was disbarred. He served about seven months, in the federal prison camp at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, before his sentence was reduced and he was released in early 1975.

Notice what happened there in constitutional terms, because a Founding-minded reader should notice it. The President of the United States resigned. His closest aides went to prison. No one in that story was above the law, not the Oval Office, not the lawyers who served in it. The framers designed a government in which power checks power, and in which, as Madison argued in the Federalist papers, you cannot count on angels to run things. Watergate was a bad chapter, and it was also a proof that the machinery worked: a free press, a grand jury, a judiciary and a Congress together pulled a president out of office. Colson was one of the men that machinery caught. We can say that without gloating.

The conversion, and why the skeptics were not crazy

Here is where the screenplay gets difficult. Before his plea, Colson had a conversion to Christianity. By his own account, which is the only account there is, it came after a business executive friend who had become a believer gave him C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity.

The press reaction at the time was, as you might guess, a combination of raised eyebrows and sharpened pencils. A man with Colson's reputation announcing that he had found religion in the middle of a criminal investigation was bound to draw the oldest cynical joke in Washington: that he had found Jesus right when he needed a good defense. Some people said this out loud. I understand why. If I had followed the coverage in 1973, I would have been skeptical too.

But here is the thing about skepticism: it is a hypothesis, and hypotheses get tested by time. A cynic would have expected the faith to evaporate on the day the legal trouble ended, or to be dropped when the book royalties dried up. Instead, Colson pleaded guilty, which is not what a man does if his conversion is a defense strategy, and then spent the rest of his life devoted to the same work. The test of sincerity is what a man does after the cameras leave. By that test, the record is hard to argue with.

Born Again and Prison Fellowship

In the mid-1970s, Colson published Born Again, his account of his conversion, the Watergate years and his time in prison. The book was a best seller, and it did two things. It introduced millions of readers to the idea that a disgraced operative could come out the other side. And it gave Colson a platform, and a decision to make about what to do with it.

What he did was found Prison Fellowship in 1976, an organization built to minister to prisoners, former prisoners and their families. This is the part that I love, folks, because it is so completely contrary to what a man in his position could have chosen. He could have become a pundit and a consultant. He could have written his memoir and played golf. He had a famous name and a hundred open doors on the lecture circuit. He chose, instead, to walk through the one door most people in his position would pay to avoid: the sally port of a state penitentiary.

Prison Fellowship organized volunteers to enter prisons with Bible studies, mentoring and, later, programs on reentry and restitution. Colson himself kept going into prisons for decades, an odd sight for the former White House counsel who had once had more access to power than almost anyone in the country. Everything else he did is consistent with a sincere change of heart.

Angel Tree: the program that goes after the children

One of Prison Fellowship's programs has the clearest moral logic of any in the field, and it is called Angel Tree. The idea began in the early 1980s with a volunteer in Alabama and was adopted by Prison Fellowship: churches and volunteers purchase and deliver Christmas gifts to the children of incarcerated parents, on behalf of the parent who cannot be there. It later grew to reach many thousands of families through local churches.

Think about the policy logic. The child of a prisoner did not commit the crime. That child carries a heavy risk of his own, since children with an incarcerated parent face well-documented hardships. A program that reaches that child with a present, and ties the gift to the absent parent's name, does at least three things. It tells the child that he is not forgotten. It keeps a thread between parent and child alive. And it brings a church into a family at the moment the family most needs one. No government bureaucracy could have designed that, because no government bureaucracy believes in thin threads. That is the genius of the thing: the small, private, voluntary association that Tocqueville thought was the glory of American life.

The Templeton Prize

In 1993, Colson received the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. The prize came with a large cash award, a sum on the order of a million dollars, and Colson gave the money to Prison Fellowship. I mention it not as a trophy but as a pattern. A man who got the Templeton Prize for work with prisoners handed the check to the work. That is consistent with everything else in the record. He did not hold on to it.

Colson lived until April 21, 2012, when he died at age 80. By then he had written many books on faith, culture and the public square, had founded the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and had built Prison Fellowship into a major national ministry. He had also become a respected voice on criminal justice reform, and he was one of the conservative figures who helped bring a religious, accountability-first case for reform into the Republican conversation long before it was fashionable.

The numbered lesson: accountability plus grace

Let us build the argument, because the story is only worth telling if it teaches something. Here is the Colson model in four premises.

1. Accountability is non-negotiable. Colson never argued that he should have escaped punishment. He pleaded guilty, he served his time and he never relitigated it. He insisted all his life that justice has to mean something, that a man who does wrong should answer for it, and that excusing crime insults the victim and the law.
2. Grace is also non-negotiable. The Judeo-Christian tradition that conservatives rightly defend teaches that no man is beyond repentance, and that a society that cannot imagine redemption has stopped being a civilization and become a warehouse. A person is made in the image of God before he is a convict.
3. Neither one works alone. Accountability without grace produces a prison system that is merely a holding tank, and a man comes out the same man, only older and angrier. Grace without accountability produces a system that forgives so fast that no one is ever restrained, and the next victim pays the bill. The two together make a reformed man and a safe street.
4. The work is local and voluntary. The best version of this is not a federal program. It is a church volunteer, a mentor, an employer who hires a man with a record, a community that stays. The state can open the door; only neighbors can walk him down the street.

The steelman: is this just religion in the cell block?

The best objection to the Colson model is not that it is religious; it is that it is unproven, and that it can be a distraction. State it fairly. A critic would say: faith-based programs attract volunteers and the motivated, so any good results might come from who joins rather than what the program does. Prison is not a seminary. A governor under pressure to spend less should fund the program with the strongest evidence, whoever runs it. And a government that favors one faith in a prison raises serious questions under the Establishment Clause.

Those are real points, and I will answer them in turn.

First, the selection problem is real, and it is the same selection problem that haunts every voluntary reentry program, religious or not. It is not an argument against faith-based programs. It is an argument for careful evaluation of all of them, and a conservative who distrusts government programs should demand it of the secular ones too. We make the same point about measuring what we fund in What the Recidivism Numbers Really Say About Second Chances.

Second, the Establishment Clause concern has a straightforward answer: the First Amendment protects the free exercise of religion, and prisoners keep that right. Voluntary programs, open to all, run by private groups and funded by private donors, raise none of the issues that state-compelled worship would. The Constitution forbids Congress from establishing a religion. It does not forbid a man from visiting a prison with a Bible.

Third, to the point about spending: fine. Fund what works. A conservative who believes in redemption but not in waste should be the toughest grader of every program in the field, the ones that carry his own faith's name included.

What Colson's model teaches the prison reform debate

Prison reform has become one of the few areas where conservatives and progressives talk to each other. That is useful, and a little dangerous, because the two sides tend to want different things from the same words. The Colson model is a reminder to conservatives of what we bring to the table.

We bring responsibility. A prison sentence is a moral judgment as well as a deterrent, and we should not apologize for it. The victim's loss is real, and in a related post we explain what a victim is owed in What to Do if You Are a Crime Victim, Your Rights Step by Step.

We bring hope. A conservative is supposed to believe that human nature is fixed enough to demand rules and flexible enough to repent. That belief is the real thing behind our case for reentry programs, and it explains why states led by conservatives, Texas among them, were early to experiment with treatment over new construction, as we describe in Texas Chose Treatment Beds Over New Prisons in 2007, and Here Is Why.

We bring civil society. If a returning prisoner has a pastor, an employer and a family nearby, he is much less likely to be rearrested. Much of the federal government's reentry work is a poor substitute for a congregation with a casserole and a job lead.

And we should bring a note of humility. Colson's own story is a story about how easily a clever man in a powerful building can talk himself into the wrong thing. The temptation to reach for power when something is at stake is not a left or right vice; it is a human one. That is the deeper reason the Founders feared concentrated power and built a system of checks. The men who ran Watergate were not cartoon villains. They were ambitious people who stopped asking whether the means were lawful, which is the oldest mistake in politics. Colson, to his credit, said so.

A word on the coverage

One last thing, because it is the sort of thing that goes missing. For years the press covered Colson with a slightly raised eyebrow, as if the conversion were a story to be debunked. When the debunking did not pan out, the coverage turned a bit sheepish and a bit condescending, and the man at the center of one of the longest-running prison ministries in America was often described as a "Watergate figure" in the headline, as if that were the only thing about his life that counted. I have noticed that the press is generous with the word "redemption" when the redeemed man is on the right team and stingy with it otherwise. Colson did not need the coverage's blessing. But we should not let the decades of work get shrunk to the seven months that preceded them.

The case in brief

1. Charles Colson served as Special Counsel to President Nixon, pleaded guilty in 1974 to obstruction of justice tied to the effort to discredit Daniel Ellsberg, and served about seven months in federal prison.
2. He converted to Christianity before his plea, wrote Born Again in the mid-1970s, founded Prison Fellowship the same year, and spent the rest of his life working inside prisons and for prisoners' families, including through the Angel Tree program.
3. He received the 1993 Templeton Prize and gave the money to the ministry; he died on April 21, 2012.
4. His model is accountability plus grace: punishment that means something and a door that stays open, delivered locally by volunteers, churches and employers rather than only by government.
5. The fair objections, selection effects and church-state concerns, are answered by evaluating every program with the same rigor and by keeping the work voluntary and open to all.

What you can do: find out which volunteer or reentry organizations work with your county jail or your state prison, and call one to ask what it needs, whether that is mentors, job leads or rides.