Second Chance Month

You’re listening to BreakPoint thanks to a few Christians who once gave an ex-prisoner a second chance.
Some 2.3 million Americans are behind bars. That’s more than any other nation in the world, in absolute terms and as a percentage of the population. The U.S., which has five percent of the world’s population, contains nearly 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. By some estimates, the number of Americans “under penal supervision . . . even rivals the number of Russians in the gulag under Stalin.”

What’s more, the explosion in prison populations continued even after crime rates took a nose-dive starting twenty years ago.

Making matters worse, the punishment doesn’t end when people leave prison. For many, their so-called “debt to society” can never be paid in full. By some estimates, there are 48,000 laws adversely affecting people with a criminal record. Many of them are applied automatically without consideration of “public safety, the seriousness of the offense, the time passed sin