UNLIKELY ALLIES ON A FORMER WEDGE ISSUE

During his years as the attorney general of Virginia, Mark Earley
periodically visited his state's prisons. In a very real way, he was
looking at the human consequences of his career as a public servant,
the men and women jailed for fixed, lengthy sentences without parole
under laws Mr. Earley had endorsed. Not surprisingly, many inmates
pulled back a few steps when introduced to their visitor.

Eventually, though, Mr. Earley took their measure. What he
discovered, he recalled in a recent interview, were "not the Ted
Bundys, the mass murderers" but "kids who reminded me of my kids,
serving 5, 10, 15 years for drugs and going out and being rearrested again."

In those moments of recognition, Mr. Earley began a startling
transformation from a tough-on-crime crusader to an advocate for
prison reform and a prominent critic of the very type of drug laws he
had formerly promoted. Since leaving the attorney's general's
position in 2001, Mr. Earley has taken his new cause to a position as
president of Prison Fellowship Ministries, a national organization
based in the Washington suburbs.

Motivated both by religious faith and a secular analysis of public
policy, Mr. Earley and the fellowship's vice president, Pat Nolan, a
former California legislator, have regularly testified before
Congress, written op-ed essays and given speeches on behalf of
efforts to roll back mandatory-minimum sentencing, equalize penalties
for crack and powder cocaine, and offer nonviolent offenders
treatment rather than incarceration, among other initiatives.

On the surface a redoubt of the religious right, firmly rooted in
evangelical Christianity and conservative politics, the Prison
Fellowship Ministries' liberal position on such issues underscores
the increasing irrelevance of such rigid categories.

The group's role in criminal justice bears similarity to the stance
taken by evangelical leaders like Rick Warren, pastor of the
Saddleback Church in Southern California, on global warming, AIDS
prevention and Third World poverty.

"What's distinct is that we're in an 'Aha!' moment now," Mr. Earley,
53, said in a phone conversation. "The crime issue used to be such a
driving wedge between liberals and conservatives, Democrats and
Republicans, and now it's not. In the presidential campaign this
year, when have you heard crime as a wedge issue? It's a
common-ground issue, and no one would have envisioned that in the
'70s and '80s."

Indeed, an earlier, opposite version of bipartisanship during the
1990s led to the proliferation of severe antidrug laws and a boom in
prison construction. President Bill Clinton in 1994 introduced a $30
billion anticrime bill, a main element in his effort to move the
Democratic Party toward the center, if not the right, on the
law-and-order issue.

To whatever degree the pendulum has now swung toward second thoughts
about drug laws, the efforts of a group like Prison Ministry
Fellowship have been both a cause and an effect.

What is indisputable is that those efforts have made for an
unexpected coalition. While heading into the Capitol one day last
year, Mr. Nolan recalled, he was spontaneously embraced and called
Baby by Representative Maxine Waters, a Democrat, who had been his
political antagonist when both served in the California Legislature.

"What the Prison Fellowship brings to the discussion is a different
approach, a different perspective, that says this is not a
liberal-versus-conservative debate," said Marc Mauer, the executive
director of the Sentencing Project, a group based in Washington, D.C.
"This is about what is effective policy and compassionate policy."

Last year the prison-reform movement won Congressional passage of the
Second Chance Act, which supports job training, education and other
services for prisoners being released. Also in 2007, the federal
Sentencing Commission amended its guidelines to stop penalizing
crimes involving crack more severely than those involving powder
cocaine. The governor of Florida, Charlie Crist, a Republican,
reversed the state's lifetime ban on voting by felons.

What brought Mr. Earley and Mr. Nolan into the debate was a mix of
factors. Before their arrival, Prison Fellowship Ministries --
founded by Charles Colson after he served a prison sentence for his
role in the Watergate scandal -- had already staked out reformist
positions on prison rape and prisoner rehabilitation. Mr. Earley
referred to his political evolution as "an attitude-adjustment by
God." Mr. Nolan, 58, experienced his own road-to-Damascus moment
while serving a two-year prison sentence in the mid-1990s on a
corruption charge.

"I went into prison believing in God, and I came out knowing him," he
said. "I understood how much he loved us, even in a dark place."

Practical reasoning coincided with revelation. Nationally, Mr. Earley
had seen the population of state and federal prisons triple to 1.5
million over 20 years, and spending on corrections increase by 125
percent. The result, he came to believe, was that "the people we sent
to jail were coming out without rehabilitation, without drug
treatment, more bitter and more antisocial than they went in."

Not every precinct of the religious right has been persuaded. Julie
Stewart, president of the advocacy group Families Against Mandatory
Minimums, said her organization had been repeatedly rebuffed by Focus
on the Family, the influential and powerful group led by the Rev.
James Dobson. Still, the drug war's dissidents now clearly exist on
both sides of the partisan and ideological divide.

"In a way, that's a religious experience, too," Mr. Nolan said of the
unlikely alliance. "Doesn't the Bible tell us the lion and lamb
should lie down together?"