The foundational ideas animating the Lampstand prison ministry-that it takes a reformed criminal to reform criminals and that the conversion approach must be intellectual-are ideas I have been working with since the beginning of my reformation from criminality at age thirty five, as I began seeing the world from the perspective of a college education (leading to a successful criminal rehabilitative college-based educational program I developed and managed) and continuing to the final washing from my spirit the last remnants of a lifetime of criminal thinking twenty years later, in the waters of baptism.