When Colson was serving time in prison in the mid-1970s, there were 239,000 incarcerated individuals. Now, that figure had increased ten-fold to a staggering 2.3 million people.

During an interview hosted by The King’s College on December 3, Colson contended that prisons in the United States had become bigger over the years because there was a lack of moral training and education, not because there were more bad people in society.

“The moral breakdown in our society is the real reason we’re building prisons,” said Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

He disagreed that longer and tougher sentences would deter crime, citing a study done by psychiatrists in the 70s that found people committed crimes based on wrong moral choices, not on their environment.

The former aide to President Richard Nixon said the incarceration figure could be reduced by half if moral training was provided to people during what he calls their “morally formative years”.

But part of the struggle to educate the next generation was the battle over what society thought was moral and ethical, explained Colson, who pointed to the fight to recite the Declaration of Independence in schools as example.

“The law can become moral teachers only because we incorporate what we have decided are moral values in that society,” he said.

The lack of teaching on moral law and ethics was what inspired his latest DVD series. In Doing the Right Thing, a six-part series timed for release in February 2011, Colson and a panel of scholars and ethicists tackle ethics and moral philosophy head-on as they examine the recent financial and economic crises, cultural shifts in attitudes towards marriage and family, human and civil rights, life and death, and what it means to be human, as well as basic principles of right and wrong. “Truth has got to be knowable for there to be ethics,” argues Colson in the video for the series.

Colson said he hoped that the series, a joint project between the Colson Center for Christian Worldview and The Witherspoon Institute, would be used at the undergraduate and graduate level to transform how students see and apply ethics in the marketplace and public life.