“Since the 1960s, prison reform has been seen as a leftist cause,” Robert Perkinson, a historian and the author of “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire,” said this week. “But it used to be a Christian cause, and Colson played a big role in bringing prison reform back to Christian conservatism.”
Dr. Perkinson was referring, of course, to Charles W. Colson, the convicted Watergate felon who died last Saturday. In his first act, Mr. Colson was “Nixon’s hatchet man” and “the ugliest of the Watergate thugs, the most shamelessly vicious,” as one historian wrote this week in The New Republic.
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