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Recently, Charles Lane described in an article for The Free Press that, over the last two decades, the U.S. has a significantly reduced and less racially skewed prison population. The total incarceration rate has dropped by 28% since peaking in 2008, from 760 to just about 550 per 100,000 people, as of 2023. According to the article, this reduction is due not to more lenient treatment of violent offenders, but to lower rates of violent crime.
Rather than an irreparably broken system, as critics often claim, the U.S. may be seeing crime and incarceration decline together. In fact, The Council on Criminal Justice projects the 2026 U.S. murder rate will be the lowest ever recorded. Lane put it this way:
The United States, it seems, is in the midst of a long-term shift toward both less violent crime and less incarceration; it didn’t take a revolution to achieve, and very well might never have occurred if we really had defunded police or abolished prisons. Rather, a new approach to drug offenses, along with myriad other changes in law enforcement, demographics, and individual behavior, has generated gradual and potentially durable improvement.
This is welcome news, though The Free Press admitted it’s hard to nail down an exact reason for these lowering incarceration rates. One theory is the liberalization of drug laws, but as they put it, “There should be as much, or more, study of what causes crime to decline as there is of what causes crime waves. We need to know exactly what we’ve been doing right, so we can keep on doing it.”
Here is where the Christian worldview provides powerful instruction on both societal and individual levels. In How Now Shall We Live?, Chuck Colson wrote about the success of the “broken windows” theory of policing, which involves addressing low-level crimes in a community to prevent much larger crimes. As he documented, this approach has had staggering success in reducing violent crimes in cities across the nation.
Yet, what makes this approach so effective is that it’s rooted in a biblical view of communal order. This is perhaps best represented in the term shalom, which, translated as peace, has a much deeper meaning. As Colson explained, “When people live together according to God’s moral order—in shalom—there is civility and harmony.”
In the fifth century, St. Augustine taught in his City of God that peace (shalom) is “the tranquility produced by order.” A just and responsible social order must be in place for true peace to exist. Only in an ordered civil life can fallen human beings, as Augustine put it, “live and work together.” Thus, even as we live in the “City of Man,” we still have an obligation to keep evil in check, not just decriminalizing certain behaviors but incentivizing virtuous behavior. This is necessary for true liberty, rather than license, to permeate society. The transforming power of Christianity enables us to not only know what is right but to do it—to be virtuous.
The Christian worldview also speaks to how individuals engage in reducing crime. As Colson described, when discussing the power of the Prison Fellowship ministry, most inmates get out of prison and do exactly what he did on his road to prison: they rationalize their actions. This rationalization often leads to repeating the same behaviors that puts them back in prison. In response, Prison Fellowship creates a community with intentional accountability built directly into the program, helping inmates work with each other to learn to live a life of virtue.
And there’s essential work for the family as well. The nuclear family is the greatest institution in society for accountability and structure, and—as many have noted for decades—it’s the breakdown of the family that is the chief cause of the increase in the prison population. A truly reinvigorated emphasis on the family would not only promote a more virtuous society but also less criminal behavior.
So yes, reduced violent crime and less incarceration is good news. While we long for our permanent home in the “City of God,” we have a duty in the “City of Man” to reflect God’s character and restore his righteous dominion. The best method to do that is through the truths of a Christian worldview, which promotes true shalom for all.
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The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of CrosswalkHeadlines.
BreakPoint is a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. BreakPoint commentaries offer incisive content people can’t find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion. Founded by Chuck Colson (1931 – 2012) in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today’s news and trends. Today, you can get it in written and a variety of audio formats: on the web, the radio, or your favorite podcast app on the go.
