Johnson, Larson, and Pitts (1997) examined the relationship between religious programming and recidivism among inmates in four New York prisons. They found that the most active participants in Bible study programs were significantly less likely to be rearrested during the follow-up period than inmates who did not participate or participated less frequently. The effect was particularly pronounced among the highest-risk inmates, suggesting that religious programming may be most beneficial for those who need it most.20

Clear and Sumter (2002) studied 769 inmates across twenty prisons and found that higher levels of religiousness—measured through self-reported prayer, Scripture reading, and participation in religious services—were associated with significantly fewer disciplinary infractions and less time in disciplinary confinement.21 This finding is important because disciplinary behavior within prison is itself a predictor of post-release outcomes, and because it suggests that religious participation affects behavior in the immediate institutional context, not merely after release.

The cumulative weight of these and other studies supports the conclusion that religion—and particularly intensive, Bible-based programming—is associated with positive behavioral outcomes among incarcerated persons. The evidence does not meet the gold standard of randomized controlled trials, and selection bias remains a persistent concern. But the consistency of the findings across studies, populations, and methodological approaches is striking. As a public policy economist, I am trained to identify patterns in data and distinguish signal from noise. The signal here is clear: the Gospel changes lives, and the data confirm what Scripture has always taught. The curious part is that America has such a high incarceration rate, indicating either that Gospel ministry outside of prison is not doing as good a job as it should, or that the state has learned to manipulate prison religion sufficiently—making inmates behave better while keeping the absolute number of people jailed largely unchanged, and thus preserving the prison-cycle lucre for those who receive its largesse.

Canada: A Brief Survey

Canadian prison chaplaincy deserves mention, though the literature is considerably less extensive than that of the United States. Canada’s correctional system, administered by the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) at the federal level, has historically maintained a chaplaincy program that provides spiritual care to inmates of all faith traditions. The system is broadly multi-faith in orientation, similar to the British model, though with distinctly Canadian characteristics.22

Beckford and Cairns (2015) examined the development of Muslim chaplaincy within Canadian prisons, documenting the challenges of integrating Islamic spiritual care into a system historically dominated by Christian chaplains. Their research revealed familiar themes: the difficulty of recruiting qualified Muslim chaplains, the tension between institutional expectations and religious conviction, and the growing demand for spiritual care services that reflect the changing demographics of the incarcerated population.23

Do Muslims have clear, unequivocal instructions in the Quran to visit believing prisoners, with hell as the penalty for not doing so, or to evangelize the heathen like Christians do in the Bible? If not, that fact might explain their lackluster interest in prison ministry implied by Beckford and Cairns. Nevertheless, the Quran does have several verses encouraging believers to feed the captive (e.g., Sura 76:8), and the hadith literature (which Muslims regard as authoritative alongside the Quran) contains explicit instructions to visit the imprisoned. Sura 9:60 lists captives among the legitimate recipients of zakat (obligatory almsgiving). Da'wah (calling people to Islam) is also mandated, including in prisons—and the documented growth of Islamic conversion in Western prisons (especially among Black and European inmates) suggests that Muslim prison ministry is more active than the rhetorical question implies. What seems clearer is that Christianity’s distinctive scriptural mandate for prison ministry—Christ’s identification with the Christian prisoner in Matthew 25:36, along with the apostolic call of Hebrews 13:3—has historically produced an institutional commitment to incarcerated persons that no comparable tradition has matched. This may help explain the disproportionate role of Christian organizations in prison chaplaincy across Western democracies observed by Beckford and Cairns.

The Canadian system, like the European systems discussed in the previous chapter, illustrates the tension between pluralist institutional frameworks and confessional Christian ministry. The Reformed or Historic Baptist minister working within the Canadian correctional system faces constraints similar to those confronting his counterparts in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands—though Canadian law, particularly the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, provides stronger protections for religious expression than many European human rights frameworks.

Yet Canadian liberty has notable limits. The state has shown a recurring willingness to imprison or penalize those whose speech or conscience departs from official orthodoxies. The most-cited Holocaust-denial case associated with Canada is that of Ernst Zündel, the German-born publisher who lived in Canada from 1958 to 2000. Canada’s “false news” provision, under which he had been convicted in 1988, was struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Canada in R v. Zundel (1992); but Canada later detained him under a national-security certificate and deported him to Germany in 2005, where he received the maximum five-year sentence under that country’s Volksverhetzung statute.24

Someone might believe there was a Holocaust but suspect the figure of six million was inflated from a smaller actual death toll for purposes of post-war advocacy and sympathy. Someone else might believe the consensus figure is correct. A third person might hold no settled view at all. The question is not whether any of these positions is right or wrong—it is whether the state should be in the business of imprisoning citizens for holding the wrong opinion about a contested historical question. It should not. Liberty of conscience that does not extend to dissenting voices is no liberty at all. Why should I care what someone thinks?

More recently, Canada’s own Holocaust-denial provision, Criminal Code §319(2.1), enacted as part of Bill C-19 in 2022, produced its first carceral sentence in September 2025: an Ontario resident received nine months in prison and two years of probation for online posts denying and mocking the Nazi genocide.25 The same pattern of state speech suppression appears in several other Canadian contexts. Bill C-16 (2017), which added gender identity and expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act and Criminal Code, has been used to threaten compelled-speech sanctions against those who refuse to use ideologically prescribed pronouns—most prominently in the Jordan Peterson controversy, which made the doctrine internationally famous.26

The Trinity Western University case (2018) saw the Supreme Court of Canada uphold the denial of law-school accreditation to an evangelical Christian university because of its community covenant requiring students to abstain from extramarital sexual activity—a ruling that effectively barred a confessional Christian institution from the legal profession on doctrinal grounds.27 During the Covid-19 era, Pastor Artur Pawlowski, a Polish immigrant to Canada and pastor of the Cave of Adullam Fellowship in Calgary, was repeatedly arrested, fined, and imprisoned for holding church services in defiance of provincial public-health orders—a clear case of a Christian minister jailed in a Western democracy for the simple act of gathering his congregation to worship.28 And throughout 2021 and 2022, Canadians who declined to comply with federal vaccination mandates were stripped of employment, denied access to domestic travel, and, in the case of the Freedom Convoy protesters, subjected to the unprecedented invocation of the Emergencies Act, frozen bank accounts, and arrest.29

The unifying thread across these cases is not the merit of the views being suppressed. The unifying thread is rather the willingness of the Canadian state to imprison or penalize dissenters for the content of what they say, refuse to say, or refuse to do. That is not a libertarian regime. It is not even a classical-liberal regime. It is a soft-authoritarian regime that has retained the architectural shell of free expression while evacuating its substance—much as the European prison chaplaincy systems described in the previous chapter have retained the architectural shell of Christian ministry while evacuating its substance. Liberty in Canada is a mixed bag, and the state in almost no other Westernized country—the Netherlands and Australia excepted—shows its devilish nature through public policies that tend to disproportionately harm committed Christians.

Challenges and the Libertarian Perspective

The challenges confronting prison ministry in North America are substantial, and they extend beyond the practical difficulties of access, funding, and volunteer recruitment. The First Amendment, which protects the free exercise of religion, also prohibits the establishment of religion—and critics of faith-based prison programs have argued that government-funded or government-facilitated religious programming crosses the line from accommodation to establishment. Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the American Civil Liberties Union have both challenged faith-based prison programs on Establishment Clause grounds, with mixed results in court. The concern is not entirely frivolous: when the state funds a program that requires participants to engage with Scripture and attend worship services, the line between accommodation and establishment becomes genuinely difficult to draw.30

The tension between the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause creates a legal environment in which prison ministers must navigate carefully. Programs that are too overtly religious risk legal challenge; programs that dilute their religious content to avoid legal challenge risk losing the very characteristics that make them effective. The IFI program, for example, was challenged in an Iowa federal court and found to have violated the Establishment Clause because it received direct state funding—a decision that was upheld on appeal and that forced IFI to restructure its funding model.31

From a libertarian perspective—and I write as both a Christian and a public policy economist trained in the tradition of the Austrian school—the fundamental problem with the American criminal justice system is not that it lacks faith-based programming but that the state holds a monopoly on the administration of justice. Like all monopolies, this one delivers an inferior product at an inflated price. The state spends approximately $33,000 per year to incarcerate a single prisoner—nearly double that in states like New York and California—and produces a sixty-eight percent recidivism rate.32 No private enterprise could survive with such dismal performance metrics. A company that failed to retain sixty-eight percent of its customers would go bankrupt. But the state does not go bankrupt; it raises taxes, issues debt, and continues to operate as though its failures were someone else’s fault.

The libertarian critique is not merely economic. It is moral. The state’s monopoly on criminal justice means that the state defines what constitutes a crime—and it has defined crime so broadly that victimless behaviors (drug possession, regulatory violations, tax offenses) account for a substantial proportion of the incarcerated population. Why are certain sins singled out to be jailable offenses and others not? Public policy is certainly not following God’s standard in its seemingly arbitrary selection of sins to punish. It intentionally creates an informal market with monopoly prices that yield irresistible profits for those in the business. It means that the state controls the conditions of incarceration—and it has created conditions that are more likely to produce hardened criminals than reformed citizens. It means that the state manages the reentry process—and it has managed it so poorly that just over two-thirds of released prisoners are back in custody within three years.

Faith-based prison ministry is, in this context, a partial libertarian corrective to a fundamentally broken system. It introduces a competing vision of justice, mercy, and human transformation into the state's monopoly—a vision rooted not in bureaucratic procedure but in the transformative power of the Gospel. The evidence consistently shows that this vision produces better outcomes than the state’s secular alternative. But it operates within the state’s system, on the state’s terms, and subject to the state’s constraints. The ideal solution would be a criminal justice system that is not monopolized by the state—a system in which churches, communities, and private organizations could administer justice according to biblical principles. That ideal is unlikely to be realized in this age, when so many profits and benefits accrue to the relatively few people in the criminal justice industry. But it remains the standard against which every existing system must be measured.

A better libertarian choice would be to eliminate prisons altogether and replace them with alternatives consistent with biblical justice. In volume III of Bearing the Cross, chapter XVI, I sketch one such alternative in some detail. Its three core elements are these: restitution to victims as the primary instrument of justice rather than taxpayer-funded incarceration; expanded home arrest of up to seven years for first-time offenders and those convicted of less serious crimes; and—for serious offenders—relocation by category of crime to one of six new countries obtained through competitive international bidding, governed by an allodial restrictive covenant rather than by legislation. Convicts in these new countries would be immediately free to work, raise families, build churches, and trade with the outside world; they could not leave until their sentences were complete, on pain of death; and missionaries would be free to enter and preach. The biblical model of justice—restitution, capital punishment for the gravest crimes, and the conspicuous absence of state-funded penitentiaries—would be honored, while the modern apparatus of taxpayer-financed prisons, parasitic expert witnesses, and revolving-door recidivism would be dismantled. Scripture nowhere commends the use of prisons. It is the devil who casts good people into them (Revelation 2:10), and it is evil states that run them—as Joseph in Egypt, the prophets Micaiah, Jeremiah, and Daniel, John the Baptist, Silas, and the apostles Peter and Paul all discovered. Faith-based prison ministry, indispensable as it is in the present age, is a faithful response to a fundamentally unbiblical institution.

In the meantime, the Christian’s obligation is clear. We must minister within the system as it exists—entering the prisons, preaching the Gospel, mentoring the incarcerated, supporting the families, and advocating for reform—while never forgetting that the system itself is part of the problem. The state is not our ally in this work. It is, at best, a reluctant host. The power that transforms lives behind bars is not the state’s power. It is the power of God, working through His word, His Spirit, and His people. “For I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth” (Romans 1:16).

References

Alper, M., Durose, M. R., & Markman, J. (2018). 2018 update on prisoner recidivism: A 9-year follow-up period (2005–2014). U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State v. Prison Fellowship Ministries, 509 F.3d 406 (8th Cir. 2007).

Beckford, J. A., & Cairns, I. C. M. (2015). Muslim prison chaplains in Canada and Britain. The Sociological Review, 63(1), 36-57. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-954X.12224

Carson, E. A. (2021). Prisoners in 2020—Statistical tables. U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Clear, T. R., & Sumter, M. T. (2002). Prisoners, prison, and religion: Religion and adjustment to prison. Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, 35(3-4), 127-159.

Colson, C. W. (1976). Born again. Chosen Books.

Correctional Service of Canada. (2019). Commissioner’s Directive 750: Spiritual services and interfaith committees. Government of Canada.

Cruz v. Beto, 405 U.S. 319 (1972).

Cutter v. Wilkinson, 544 U.S. 709 (2005).

Duwe, G., & King, M. (2013). Can faith-based correctional programs work? An outcome evaluation of the InnerChange Freedom Initiative in Minnesota. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 57(7), 813-841.

Hallett, M., Hays, J., Johnson, B. R., Jang, S. J., & Duwe, G. (2017). The Angola prison seminary: Effects of faith-based ministry on identity transformation, desistance, and rehabilitation. Routledge.

Holt v. Hobbs, 574 U.S. 352 (2015).

Johnson, B. R. (2011). More God, less crime: Why faith matters and how it could matter more. Templeton Press.

Johnson, B. R., & Larson, D. B. (2003). The InnerChange Freedom Initiative: A preliminary evaluation of a faith-based prison program. Center for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society, University of Pennsylvania.

Johnson, B. R., Larson, D. B., & Pitts, T. C. (1997). Religious programs, institutional adjustment, and recidivism among former inmates in prison fellowship programs. Justice Quarterly, 14(1), 145-166.

Mai, C., & Subramanian, R. (2017). The Price of Prisons: Examining State Spending Trends, 2010–2015. Vera Institute of Justice.