Should we burden the taxpayers of America with more billions for bigger prisons, or is there a better way?

Crime in America is increasing at alarming rate! Crime has become a way of life for an ever growing army of lawbreakers, and the streets of America have become a jungle.

In our thermonuclear age, in this time of unprecedented technology, it has been forgotten that the Bible offers a stem, swift, fair and effective system of justice. That ignoble forgetfulness and the compromising of biblical law have caused America to pay a fearful price.

In the biblical epoch, there was no need for large prisons. Imprisonment wasn't used as a penalty. The secret of the wise ancients for avoiding prisons and dealing realistically with crime was two-fold: swift justice and restitution.

Lawbreakers were quickly brought before judges who meted out punishment immediately. It was a very direct type of punishment, which intimately involved the criminal and his victim. There were no loop-holes or such delaying tactics by clever lawyers as endless postponements and appeals. The only appeal for the malefactor, if he intended to mend his ways, was to God.

In the Old Testament, when a man committed a crime, he wasn't sent to a prison to be fed and sheltered at the expense of other people.

God's law was clear.

Exodus 22:1 declares: "If a man shall steal an ox, or a sheep, and kill it, or sell it; he shall restore five oxen for an ox, and four sheep for a sheep."

Again and again in the Old Testament the point is made about restitution:

Exodus 22:4: "If the theft be certainly found in his hand alive, whether it be ox, or ass, or sheep, he shall restore double."

Exodus 22:6: "If a fire break out, and catch in thorns, so that the stacks of corn, or the standing corn, or the field, be consumed therewith, he that kindled the fire shall surely make restitution."

Exodus 22:7: "If a man shall deliver unto his neighbor money or stuff to keep, and it be stolen out of the man's house; if the thief be found, let him pay double."

The tradition persisted in the New Testament. Zacchaeus, a dishonest tax collector before he was converted by Jesus, tells the Lord in Luke 19:8, "...if I have taken anything from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold."

With this system of restitution, the victim didn't lose. The taxpayer didn't lose. The loser was the criminal.

The methodology allowed people in biblical times to maintain an orderly society. There was a minimum amount of time and taxes. Exactly the opposite characterizes our society today.

From Exodus to Revelation, the criminal was punished severely but even-handedly. Under our contemporary system those who pay the least for their crimes are criminals.

Despite overcrowded prisons and rising inmate population. Mayor Thomas Maloney of Wilmington, Delaware, observes, "The tragedy is that citizens are now the prisoners in their homes, with chains, locks, bars and grates while the criminals are on the outside, roaming free."

The great need is to change and entirely restructure the way society deals with crime. The model should be the Bible. We need desperately to recall and re-create its procedures. With an ever-growing crime problem and a $4 billion bill for new prisons looming ahead, how much longer can we afford to forget the precepts of biblical justice?

Instead of penalizing the victim and the taxpayer, crime should be paid for by the criminals. We need less retribution and more restitution.

The result of this system is that the criminal is only inconvenienced while at the same time he is housed, clothed, fed and given free medical attention. That isn't justice, it's merely a form of comparatively mild retribution or punishment and it serves nobody well. The system totally ignores the victims and the taxpayers.

If the thief had been sentenced to repay the money he stole, three things would have resulted. First, the victim would be compensated. Second, the taxpayer would be relieved of a major part of the cost of the crime. Third, the lawbreaker would learn more and be more effectively rehabilitated by making restitution.

America, according to the Justice Department, is budding under the weight of $50 billion a year stolen by white-collar crooks (far, far more than is amassed by armed criminals). Rarely, if ever, is any of that $50 billion repaid when the "businessmen" in custom tailored suites arc convicted.

Stanley Goldblum, the forty-eight-year-old former chairman of the Los Angeles-based Equity Funding Corporation of America was responsible for the largest theft in American corporate history, a $2 billion assignation of assets, a sum that far exceeds the $1,351,128,000 assessed valuation of the entire city of Pittsburgh, Goldblum's birthplace.

Until 1973, Equity had been in the business of selling mutual funds and insurance policies to investors. Then two disgruntled former employees began talking to government investigators, who were astonished to learn that, with the help of a busy computer, the company had manufactured more than sixty thousand phony insurance policies, many in the names of dead people. A startling two-thirds of all its policies were spurious. Thousands of man-in-the-street investors had been bilked.

Pending trial, Goldblum, living in a $495,000 mansion, had no difficulty posting bail of $200,000.

Shortly after his trial began, Goldblum, facing a thirty-year sentence but a maximum fine of only $31,000, pleaded guilty.

The judge's sentence was eight years, and not a nickel in restitution. The fine wasn't even demanded. Goldblum, eligible for parole after serving one-third of his term, will presumably return to his mansion still, presumably, a multi-millionaire.

Here and there in our society a start toward the principle of restitution has been made:

In Minnesota, two new restitution programs are in force for the victims of such crimes as forgery, fraud, and theft.

The programs are working splendidly, and every state in the nation should follow the example of Minnesota. Every magistrate should also follow the example of Judge Lord (a most appropriate name).

The Penology of the Bible doesn't rely on restitution alone but on work as well.

We need to develop a creative alternative to prisons. For the most part, imprisonment should be limited to incorrigibly violent criminals. Society, obviously, needs that protection. But even those prisoners should be allowed the therapy of labor.

All inmates in our penal institutions, except the sick and infirm, should be made productive.

That's the situation in virtually all our prisons.

Penitentiaries should no longer be used as storage warehouses for human beings. Idleness breeds trouble and restlessness behind the walls, as it does outside the walls. The necessity is to reintroduce the Bible's bondservant concept The entire apparatus of justice must be refocused. In most cases, those convicted of crimes should be sent to prison only if they refuse to take a job and compensate their victims.

Inside prison, inmates should be required to work at meaningful tasks, and they should be paid prevailing wages. What they earn should be shared by those they victimized and the prisoners' families (in order to help reduce the nation's astronomical welfare bill).

Private industry and governmental agencies should farm out as much work as possible to prisons. Every state governor should appoint a tough, no-nonsense task force to determine in detail what profit-making businesses can be created in its prisons. The prisons should become anvils of labor, factories employing men rather than merely overseeing them.

The work-furlough program in some California prisons should be vastly expanded and copied by other states. Under that program, minimum security prisoners and those soon to be released are permitted to leave the institution in the morning, put in a full day's work as free men in the free world, then return at night.

Jesus says in Matthew 25:36, "...I was in prison, and ye came unto me." He was stressing helpfulness, sympathy, good works, compassion, brotherly love, and saying that visiting prisoners and winning their souls are the obligations of Christians. That spirit is the full thrust of my ministry. The Bible doesn't take the view that lawbreakers should be treated with maudlin sentimentality by Christians. The Bible takes the view that even though men and women have sinned and broken the law, they are still members of the human family. Their lives are precious.

All men are created in the image of God and are capable of redemption by the blood of the Son of God. No matter how ugly a man's life has been, no matter what crimes he's committed, if that man can be reached with the gospel and turned to Christ, he is a new creature.

My ministry is in no way related to the misguided liberals who still talk in hazy, unspecific language about the rehabilitation of prisoners; who assume that lawbreakers should not be punished because they arc the victims of an unjust society that did not create an ideal environment in which they have no inclination, need or desire to commit criminal acts.

I flatly and fully reject that thesis. It is not only unbiblical but contrary to reality.

Society does not owe man a living. Nothing is further from the truth. Every man owes it to himself to work for a living.

In my own family of ten - my father, mother and my seven brothers and sisters - there was sufficient poverty to start a national crime wave. But nothing of that land happened. No one in our family was ever sentenced to a day in jail. We were taught that the remedy for poverty wasn't crime but work.

Crime stems from the human heart. The Bible teaches that murder and villainy come from inside a man. That's why Solomon said in Proverbs 4:23, "Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life." Until the hearts of men can be changed through Christ they will continue to kill, rape, steal and embezzle.

Thus my ministry puts its major emphasis on curing the human heart of the virus of crime. When the heart is changed, the crime disappears.

Time and again I have seen that the human heart can be changed, that great sinners can become great Christians once they have met the Lord and received the transforming experience of salvation.