Enron’s Criminals Should Not Go To Prison; They Should Make Money for Their Victims

Former Enron Corp. executives Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling were convicted of conspiracy and fraud yesterday, providing the government a major success in one a of the largest business scandals in U.S. history. (Fox News)

Lay, who founded Enron, was convicted of all six counts of conspiracy and fraud. He was also convicted of bank fraud and making false statements to banks in a separate trial related to his personal banking.

Skilling was found guilty of 19 counts of conspiracy, fraud, insider trading and making false statements. He was found not guilty on nine criminal counts.

Now the futility of the American criminal justice system will come into full view, as two extremely bright men who allowed greed to turn their talent into tragedy will be sentenced to long prison terms. Lay faces a maximum of 45 years in prison, and Skilling’s crimes carry a maximum sentence of 185 years.

Neither man should go to prison. While they have both caused severe damage to individuals who lost millions of dollars in personal pensions and holdings, and they had a terrible impact on the American economy and in national trust in American business, imprisonment is the wrong sanction.

Their punishment should be severe, but prisons are designed to warehouse people who are dangerous. These two men, and others like them, should be punished in ways that will enable them to help repay their victims and heal and restore their communities.

This is called restorative justice.

Former Enron Corp. executives Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling were convicted of conspiracy and fraud yesterday, providing the government a major success in one a of the largest business scandals in U.S. history. (Fox News)

Lay, who founded Enron, was convicted of all six counts of conspiracy and fraud. He was also convicted of bank fraud and making false statements to banks in a separate trial related to his personal banking.

Skilling was found guilty of 19 counts of conspiracy, fraud, insider trading and making false statements. He was found not guilty on nine criminal counts.

Now the futility of the American criminal justice system will come into full view, as two extremely bright men who allowed greed to turn their talent into tragedy will be sentenced to long prison terms. Lay faces a maximum of 45 years in prison, and Skilling’s crimes carry a maximum sentence of 185 years.

Neither man should go to prison. While they have both caused severe damage to individuals who lost millions of dollars in personal pensions and holdings, and they had a terrible impact on the American economy and in national trust in American business, imprisonment is the wrong sanction.

Their punishment should be severe, but prisons are designed to warehouse people who are dangerous. These two men, and others like them, should be punished in ways that will enable them to help repay their victims and heal and restore their communities.

This is called restorative justice.

“Restorative Justice equates toughness on crime with holding offenders accountable for making their victims whole again or "making things right", to the degree possible. Specifically, restorative justice sees the need to provide victims with a sense of fairness and access to a justice system that has few formal obligations to make things right for them. It does this through programs such as restitution, victim- offender mediation and policies that promote victims' rights.

Similarly, restorative justice recognizes that communities are hurt by crime. It seeks to involve communities in the solutions to crime and holds communities accountable for accepting the offending party back into the community once his/her debt is paid, as well as providing an environment for victims of crime to feel safe and secure.

Offenders are held accountable to their victims, communities and families under restorative justice. They are held responsible for making their victims whole again, to the degree possible. Offenders make community restitution to repair the harm caused to their community. By working to repair the damage done to both victims and communities, criminal offenders earn the self-respect essential to leading a productive life upon their eventual return to society.”

As a society, we want revenge, not restorative justice, so the Enron economic-thugs will do time. But they spend the rest of their lives helping to make things better. What a shame.

--Jim Jewell

Press Bungling of Katrina Coverage

Press bungling of Katrina coverage and complicity with Democrats in trashing the Administration is explored by Jonah Goldberg at NRO.

This excerpt from Instapundit:

Where to begin? As I’ve written before, virtually all of the gripping stories from Katrina were untrue. All of those stories about, in Paula Zahn’s words, “bands of rapists, going block to block”? Not true. The tales of snipers firing on medevac helicopters? Bogus. The yarns, peddled on Oprah by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and the New Orleans police chief, that “little babies” were getting raped in the Superdome and that the bodies of the murdered were piling up? Completely false. The stories about poor blacks dying in comparatively huge numbers because American society “left them behind”? Nah-ah. While most outlets limited themselves to taking Nagin’s estimate of 10,000 dead at face value, Editor and Publisher—the watchdog of the media—ran the headline, “Mortuary Director Tells Local Paper 40,000 Could Be Lost in Hurricane.”

In all of Louisiana, not just New Orleans, the total dead from Katrina was roughly 1,500. Blacks did not die disproportionately, nor did the poor. The only group truly singled out in terms of mortality was the elderly. According to a Knight-Ridder study, while only 15 percent of the population of New Orleans was over the age of 60, some 74 percent of the dead were 60 or older, and almost half were older than 75. Blacks were, if anything, slightly underrepresented among the dead given their share of the population.
This barely captures how badly the press bungled Katrina coverage. . . . And yet, an ubiquitous media chorus claims simultaneously that Katrina was Bush’s worst hour and the press’s best.

--Jim Jewell

Georgia Approves High School Classes on the Bible

Bible Brawl: Group Disses a Stellar Textbook on the Bible

In April, Georgia became the first state to enact legislation that calls for public high school courses about the Bible. The state school board is to develop the curriculum by February 2007, and local school districts, teachers, and even students will decide what version of the Bible to use as a textbook. My Christianity Today article on Georgia’s move is now posted at Christianity Today.

Here’s a bit more.

In Georgia, where it is sometimes difficult to distinguish party affiliation, four Democratic state senators spurred the Bible curriculum legislation. Sen. Tim Golden (D-Valdosta), Sen. Doug Stoner (D-Smyrna), and others proposed the concept behind Senate Bill 79, which was passed overwhelming in late March and signed by Gov. Sonny Perdue on April 20. Republicans—who now control both houses of the Georgia legislature—put their mark on the law by requiring that the Bible be used as the textbook, rather than the text The Bible and Its Influence, which was earmarked for use in the Democratic version of the bill.

The Georgia tussle is an extension of wrestling by national evangelicals over the reliability of The Bible and Its Influence for teaching the Bible in the public schools. Released last September by the Bible Literacy Project, The Bible and Its Influence is a textbook to be used with a Bible of the student’s choice. It is designed to meet constitutional standards for public school use as an elective in English or Social Studies programs for 9th to 12th grades. The National Association of Evangelicals and leaders such as Charles Colson of Prison Fellowship, Joseph Stowell of Moody Bible Institute, and Os Guinness of The Trinity Forum support the text.

I have the textbook. It’s excellent. I want to take a course using this book to explore the Bible as literature and historical record. Although The Bible and Its Influence was sadly dropped from the Georgia legislation, there is still a chance the state school board will use it. That would go against the legislation, which requires that the Bible itself be used—because the text is designed to be used with the Bible. Not instead of the Bible, which was some of the misinformation used in the campaign against it in Georgia and Alabama.

D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge and John Hagee of Cornerstone Church are among those campaigning against it, and they are looking silly doing it. They are lonely voices and they’re hitting a sour, discordant note at that. Hagee does a lot of odd things, but I’m surprised by Kennedy—who may have received bad information from someone.

Colson said: “[The Bible and Its Influence] is not meant to be a substitute for the teachings of the church, but rather a means of furthering the foundational knowledge of students.”

Alabama, Tennessee, and Missouri are also considering legislation this session to teach courses about the Bible in public schools. Randy Brinson, head of Alabama-based Redeem the Vote, suggested the Bible curriculum laws to legislators in Alabama and Georgia and recommended The Bible and Its Influence as a textbook that would withstand legal challenges.

“As we’ve worked to register Christian young people to vote, we’ve polled them about their concerns,” Brinson explained. “Religious liberty and education are at the top of the list, which prompted us to look at ways to bring the study of the Bible into public schools.”

But when Tommie Williams, the Republican majority leader in the Georgia senate, prepared the Republican version of the legislation, he consulted with Elizabeth Ridenour, president of the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools.

Ridenour says believes that it is important that the Bible be used as the main textbook in public schools so it is taught from a position of neutrality. She is opposed to the use of The Bible and Its Influence and may have done more to keep it out of the Georgia legislation than anyone is saying. It is revealing that the legislation opens the possibility of the state using the curriculum that her organization offers.

The National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools is featuring the strongly worded condemnation by Kennedy and Hagee on its Website. There seems to be some political games being played by Ridenour, and she clearly has a conflict of interest.

While welcoming a new law that will allow instruction on the Bible, Brinson calls the political jockeying tinged by evangelical in-fighting “looking for wedges in an area where common ground should be easy to find.”

In 1963, the Supreme Court prohibited the devotional use of the Bible in public school classrooms but ruled that academic study of the Bible is constitutional. The court said that teaching about the Bible is acceptable, but teaching what to believe is not.

The new Georgia law seeks to meet this standard, requiring that courses be taught “in an objective and non-devotional manner with no attempt made to indoctrinate students." But the use of the Bible itself as a textbook takes the law to untested ground. Georgia Senator Doug Stoner said he and his colleagues recommended use of The Bible and its Influence in the original legislation for this reason.

As to why there shouldn’t be similar courses on other religious works, such as the Koran, Stoner said: “In his works, Shakespeare has 1300 references to the Bible, not the Koran. Students need to know the Bible to understand western civilization and western literature.”

--Jim Jewell

DaVinci Deceptions

Walking from meeting to meeting in New York City last Friday—-it was a beautiful Spring day in the city and I preferred walking to a taxi or the subway—-I passed St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It is a stunning site at any time, but what stunned me was the sight of a bus stop placard adjacent to the Cathedral for the movie The DaVinci Code. It was a vivid symbol of Dan Brown and his sponsors “flipping the bird” in the face of the Church.

I read the DaVinci Code last year because it was being discussed so widely by non-Christians, and being so thoroughly criticized by Christian believers who hadn’t read it.

Now the movie is about to apppear, and those of us who are followers of Jesus have to deal with the question of how to react and what to do. Do we know how to answer those who come away from the book and movie with deep doubts and new, false information about the foundations of our faith?

Does the church have the moral authority or societal relationships to effectively respond to this great cultural affront to the fundamentals of historic Christianity?

I found the novel to be fine, about on par with dozens of Robert Ludlum novels, and not as good as most Tom Clancy stories. I found the ending disappointing—if you’re going to be bold enough to make the claims about Mary Magdalene, have the guts to find her grave.

But it is, of course, profoundly blasphemous, and historically inaccurate on so many counts. Christianity is based on many empirically proven facts and accounts, but it also requires what Francis Schaeffer called “the leap of faith.” But rather than find a basis of doubt in that leaping area, Dan Brown based the blasphemy on the wrong telling of known facts.

But Brown’s supposedly bold effort simply reminds me of being in 6th grade. During that year, north of Boston, I pursued grade-school rebellions of that time—-the mid-1960s—-sneaking off behind the big house on the hill with other prepubescent friends to smoke a pack of Kents from the purse of a friend’s mother. Pulling a fire alarm and running. And a variety of other stupid acts that were made delicious because they were so wrong according the rules my parents had communicated so clearly.

And so it is with Mr. Brown. He can call Jesus names and get away with it. He can say that the church made up all that stuff about Jesus Christ being God, and the church can’t touch him. He can make God Incarnate sexually active, and the culture will snicker and sneak off into dark theaters to watch the revelation, because Christians won’t declare a jihad against writers like others would.

There is much being written and said to equip Christians to confront the lies that have been presented as the truth behind Brown’s fiction.

CNN Online has a good roundup of some opposition.

Included are these examples:

To give just one example, Ben Witherington III of Asbury Theological Seminary is following up the criticisms of the novel in "The Gospel Code" with lectures in Singapore, Turkey and 30 U.S. cities. He's given 55 broadcast interviews.

Assaults on "Da Vinci" don't just come from evangelicals like Witherington. A senior Vatican official, Archbishop Angelo Amato, called for a boycott of the film Friday, saying it contained slanderous offenses against Christianity.

Among more liberal thinkers, Harold Attridge, dean of Yale's Divinity School, says Brown has "wildly misinterpreted" early Christianity. Ehrman details Brown's "numerous mistakes" in "Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code" and asks: "Why didn't he simply get his facts straight?"

The whole "Da Vinci" hubbub, Witherington says, shows "we are a Jesus-haunted culture that's biblically illiterate" and harbors general "disaffection from traditional answers."

But he and others also see a chance to inform people about the beliefs of Christianity through the "Da Vinci" controversy.

"If people are intrigued by the historical questions, there are plenty of materials out there," Yale's Attridge says.

And that may be the book and movie’s greatest contribution. We welcome the honest inquirer who asks: Who is this Jesus?


--Jim Jewell