1/22/01 4:30 p.m.
Fellowship Down
A conservative group in financial trouble.

By Eli Lehrer, a Bradley Fellow at the Heritage Foundation

he Justice Fellowship, the public-policy arm of Charles Colson's Prison Fellowship Ministries, has laid off all but one staff member and ended its lobbying activities. Pat Nolan, a former California State legislator who serves as the President and CEO of the Justice Fellowship wouldn't say exactly when the cutbacks happened or how many people lost their jobs. "It was a decision we made to focus what resources we have on our core mission of bringing the gospel into prisons," Nolan explained Monday.

As a lobbying organization, the Justice Fellowship advocates restorative justice programs which partner offenders with crime victims to try to undo the damage criminal acts cause. "We are going to step away from working on the nuts and bolts of it with state legislators to try to exhort the Church to take a more active role in it," Nolan said.

Nolan said that the Justice Fellowship hoped to resume its lobbying activities in the near future.

Like many right-leaning public policy organizations, the Justice Fellowship has recently encountered fundraising problems. Conservative activists blame both the stock market slump and donors' focus on George W. Bush's campaign for their financial woes.

"It's very unfortunate and sad. One of the great things about Prison Fellowship was that it was not only a ministry to the spiritual needs of prisoners across the country," said Michael Cromartie, the Director of the Evangelical Studies Project at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington. "It backed that up that spiritual aspect of the ministry with a real concern for the conditions that inmates were in across the country."

Colson, an aide to Richard Nixon who was convicted in the Watergate scandal, founded the Prison Fellowship Ministries after being released from prison in 1976. While conservative Christians hold all of the important positions in the organization, it has long advocated positions popular with the left such as reducing prison construction and making heavier use of parole and probation.