Erzen - God in captivity: the rise of faith-based prison ministries in the age of mass incarceration

To the
FEPPS students
at WCCW

ITS HARD TO FOCUS ON ANYTHING , much less the Book of Jeremiah, when the air presses against your skin like steam, and its not even 9 a.m. In Louisiana, a May morning like this portends a truly oppressive day, and for prisoners, one without the reprieve of shade, air-conditioning, or privacy. For the three women missing from the college class, sent to disciplinary segregation for violating one rule or another, the small room each is confined to twenty-three of twenty-four hours a day is a sweltering prison within a prison. The chapel classroom is an alternative to the hole, even with the cinder-block monotony of its walls disrupted only by a map of Jerusalem in the time of Jesus. Monica renews her focus. She has a final exam next week, and this is the professors review session. What are the symbolic acts in Jeremiah, the professor asks. Monica, scrutinizing her Bible on the battered table, must describe the meaning of the basket of figs and which prophet saved Jeremiah, if she is going to pass.

In the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women (LCIW), her home for fifteen years, Monica is one of twelve hundred women. Here in class, she is one of only twenty. The defining facts of her existence are numerical: forty-six years old, eight children and three grandchildren, Louisiana Department of Correction number 405636, a forty-seven-year sentence, a one-in-a-thousand chance of a pardon in a state where pardons are rarer than snow. Monica is also a student working on her college degree in Christian ministry. Shes sassy and weary. Others listen when she speaks in class. With her sharp cheekbones accentuated by hair piled high on her head, she exudes a flair that defies the drabness of her prison-issued blue shirt.

As Monica and others listen, the professor, Dr. Kristi Miller, drills them on potential final exam questions: How long were they in captivity in chapter 25? The class answers automatically, Seventy-five years. There are a lot of murmurs and sighs. Class discussion veers suddenly from exam prep into existential territory. Jeremiah is a book about being oppressed by a foreign power (the Babylonians) but also about how faith in God freed the Israelites. God does not play with those who oppress others for their own gain. God takes seriously those who abuse their position of power, Miller explained. The discussion becomes more animated, and theology suddenly seems sharply relevant. Is the book of Jeremiah implying that punishment and suffering are necessary before freedom? Monica asks. Captivity, according to this interpretation, is an inevitable prelude to freedom, and captivity is meaningful as long as one has faith. The chilling lesson resonates in this maximum-security prison where most students are lifers without even the possibility of parole, and freedom, in the absence of any real hope of release, can only be a state of mind.

Monica is grateful to be in school. There is no other way to obtain an associates degree or four-year bachelors degree in a Louisiana prison except through the Baptist seminary. For the past five years, I have directed a secular college program, almost weekly, in a maximum-security womens prison. I visited the Louisiana program and other prisons to understand how faith-based groups are shaping the religious life of prison and as someone engaged in the field of higher education and incarceration. My dual role as a professor, writer, and program director enabled me to gain access to many prison programs that might otherwise have been closed to me.

Prison is about time, relentless and banal, and Monica has the relative privilege of spending her days in the chapel, in class, and in the computer lab or library. Monica and her classmates are a sea of pink, yellow, gray, and blue T-shirts and prison denim, as each woman quietly defies the prison garb regulations. For a moment, it seems they could be in an adult education class anywhere. Three women are assigned to each of the coveted laptop computers, and tensions surface over who gets to use them. Like harried college students, they fret about their papers, due in a few days. Monica is nonplussed. Shes been in prison for many years and has already graduated from culinary arts, tutored other women preparing to take the General Educational Development or GED test, and worked in the hospice program and infirmary. How difficult could it be to understand the symbolic acts of the book of Jeremiah?

When Monica completes her bachelors degree in Christian ministry as part of the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminarys (NOBTS) first graduating class, she wont return to the free world. She and her classmates will be sent forth to spread the word of God and, the seminary hopes, reduce violence throughout the vast state prison system. Monica also studies English composition, math, and world history, but the college degree is secondary to NOBTSs ultimate purpose: widespread conversion. Monica and others will become emissaries of moral rehabilitation and, according to the seminarys statement of purpose, will evangelize their peers within all areas of the prison and other institutions of the Louisiana Department of Corrections. The seminarys mission is to win unbelievers to Jesus, and the prison system hopes to find a way to manage the vast numbers of people who fill its cells: the state of Louisiana has a higher incarceration rate than any country in the world. The prison system has placed its faith in Christian prisoners who will, it is hoped, spread moral reform and produce an acquiescence to their own captivity.

Today, all over the United States, with federal assistance and private volunteerist zeal, a quiet faith-based revolution is taking place in fits and starts in state and federal prisons from minimum to maximum security. Christian prison ministries, religious volunteers, policymakers, conservative politicians, fiscal conservatives, private contractors, and evangelical and nondenominational Christians all attest to the power of faith to transform people in prison. Whereas prison authorities and outsiders have long viewed prisoners claims to religious conversion and transformation a ruse, a way of convincing others that they were reformed, supporters of ministry tout faith-based interventions in prison as the most effective form of rehabilitation. Once derided and trivialized by skeptical prison authorities, prison ministry is now a legitimate rehabilitative program.

The prison ministry or faith-based group and the prison dovetail neatly because they attend to both the spiritual and material aspects of life in prison. Pat Nolan is a longtime champion of prison ministry and leader of Prison Fellowship, one of the largest Christian prison ministries in the world. Nolan, who first convinced politicians like Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist to champion prison reform, says that Prison Fellowship will help bring volunteers inside prisons to do the work the state just cannot afford to do on its own. And these volunteers will provide something that government employees cannot: love.

The intervention of faith-based groups is based on the expectation that men and women in prison will become religiously redeemed, rather than simply rehabilitated subjects, by becoming conversant in or strengthening an already existing religious identity. Spiritually, faith-based groups argue that men and women in prison are not incorrigible criminals. Instead, prison ministries view people in prison as beings who always have the potential to be reformed. They operate on the principle that incarceration requires spiritual, not just political or economic, solutions. Their message is that, ultimately, God, Jesus, or the Holy Spirit transforms the hearts of prisoners, and that such transformation requires unwavering faith in Gods power. The phrase heart change exemplifies the faith-based idea that religious belief will alter someone from the inside out. A transformed heart is a transformed prisoner who, in the view of prison ministries, will not return to prison. Thus, state and prison authorities desperate for a way to manage overcrowded prisons now support and sanction heart change.