Charles Colson
Charles W. "Chuck" Colson was the chief counsel for President Richard Nixon from 1969 to 1973. His later life has been spent working with his nonprofit organization devoted to prison ministry called Prison Fellowship. Colson is also a noted speaker and author expressing his own personal faith.
Known as President Nixon's hatchet man, Colson could be counted on to break the china - do whatever was necessary - to achieve the desired political ends of his boss. The saying at the time was that he would be willing to run over his own grandmother if the President ordered it to be done. (Colson never did so.) Such a reputation showed him as an administration loyalist.
Though not prosecuted for any specific Watergate Scandal related crime, Colson voluntarily agreed in 1974 to a plea of nolo contendere (no contest) to obstruction of justice in the Watergate affair. Some months before this plea, Colson made a decision to begin a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. News of this decision was ridiculed in editorial comics in several U. S. newspapers, as well as in magazines such as Newsweek and Time. He spent much of his prison sentence at Maxwell Correctional Facility in Alabama.
In 1976, following his release from prison for his part in the Watergate Scandal, Colson founded Prison Fellowship. Colson is an active Evangelical Christian and author of over twenty books. The royalties from those books are donated to that fellowship.
Colson also speaks for a five minute radio broadcast he began called Breakpoint which discusses contemporary issues from a Christian worldview. Project Angel Tree, another Colson-led activity, is a Christmas gift giving project from participating churches to prisoners' family members with consent from participating inmates.
Notable for his work in promoting prisoner rehabilitation and reform of the prison system in the United States, Colson disdains the "lock 'em and leave 'em" warehousing approach to criminal justice. He has worked to begin faith based prisons whose populations come from inmates who choose to participate in them. One of these was begun recently in Texas with favorable results.
In October 2002, Colson, along with several other prominent American evangelical leaders, was a co-signer of the Land letter to President Bush which outlined a "just war" endorsement of the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq.
He is an alumnus of the University of San Francisco and Brown University.
