Helping prisoners adjust to life on the outside offers hope for reducing America’s burgeoning prison population.
What country has more of its citizens per capita behind bars than any other nation in the world? The dubious distinction now belongs to the United States. For years the U.S. ran third in per-capita prison population, behind South Africa and the Soviet Union. But a study released earlier this year by The Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C., think tank, shows the U.S. now has an incarceration rate of 426 prisoners per 100,000 citizens, ahead of the proverbially oppressive South Africa (at 333) and the Soviet Union (at 268). In all, slightly over 1 million Americans are held in federal, state, and local facilities, and the number is growing.
Faced with such overwhelming numbers, correctional officials have grown desperate for any ideas that offer relief to the problems of crime and overcrowded prisons. Some government officials and Christian leaders agree that a growing trend toward community involvement in prison ministry offers new hope for lasting solutions.
Repeat Offenders
One of the most troubling aspects of America’s prison problem is the rate at which offenders return. Fifty-five percent of them commit another crime within the first week after their release. Eventually almost 8 out of 10 return to prison. And they return to a prison system that Federal Bureau of Prisons director J. Michael Quinlin admits is operating at 160 percent of its capacity and is jailing convicts faster than new prison cells can be built.
Money won’t solve the problem, nor will tougher and longer sentences, Quinlin admitted at the National Jail and Prison Ministries Conference, held last month at Wheaton College in Illinois. “The critical period is not the period that the prisoner is in the institution, though that is important,” says Quinlin. “The critical period is during the first six to nine months after release.… If there were a friend there to counsel and be supportive, I think we [could] make a significant difference.”
Quinlin says he came to that realization afters years of guilt and frustration over the frequent relapse of ex-convicts into crime and after hearing people tell him that his bureau “should rehabilitate them because we have them as a captive audience.” He now says there are three elements to successfully reforming a criminal: a well-run correctional facility, the criminal’s own will to change, and involvement by people in the local communities. Quinlin is calling for a force of 62,000 community volunteers, one for each prisoner in a federal prison. That still would not take care of the estimated 710,000 people in state prisons or the more than 300,000 in jails or detention facilities.
“We can never do it alone,” Quinlin says. “Until we are able to somehow get the community to take a degree of ownership for that prisoner, we will never be able to change human behavior.”
Community Problem
Christian prison reform leaders could not agree more with Quinlin. Prison reform needs to come from outside the jail, they say. After all, says John Perkins, founder of Mississippi’s Voice of Calvary Ministries and a Prison Fellowship board member, “If people only went to prison once, we would be solving the problem. What has compounded the problem is within four years, those prisoners come out, and then they go back [to prison]. So the question is, How do you get them resettled back into the community?”
Prison Fellowship’s Daniel Van Ness, who, with Charles Colson, has helped lead the push for prison reform through such books as Convicted: New Hope for Ending America’s Crime Crisis, says the growing interest among Christian prison workers in “aftercare” is one of the most obvious developments since the first prison-ministries conference was held five years ago. “First, more people are talking about justice” issues such as victim’s rights and reconciliation, says Van Ness. “Second, more people are talking about aftercare.”
For instance, Christian-based halfway houses, such as one being started in Seattle, provide one common means of community-based aftercare. A church in Norman, Oklahoma, buses offenders to worship services in the community to help pave the way for their re-entry into society. A privately endowed scholarship plan has helped five ex-offenders graduate from Wheaton College; ten more are currently attending.
Don Holt represents the aftercare approach working at its best. A repeat offender, he was eventually sentenced to 500 years in an Oklahoma prison for robbery. Nevertheless, this fall the 51-year-old Holt, paroled and pardoned, will be a junior at Wheaton College. “It makes me feel very blessed by God,” says Holt. “For some reason, God shed his grace on me.”
But God’s grace, he notes, was manifested through people. There was the minister who heard about Holt, visited him, and eventually led him to the Lord while in prison. There was a Christian brother, himself a former prisoner, who made sure Holt joined a Bible-study group once he was paroled. And there was Don Smarto, director of Wheaton College’s Institute for Prison Ministries, who has helped Holt adjust to the rigorous demands of college.
In California, Match-Two Prisoner Outreach is doing just what Quinlin has been wishing for—providing prisoners with “a friend … to counsel and be supportive” (see “A Friend on the Outside”). The state-funded organization is run by Christians and matches volunteers (about 90 percent of whom are Christians) one-to-one with prisoners. While the nation’s prisoner recidivism rate is about 8 out of 10, only 3 out of every 10 prisoners involved with Match-Two return to prison.
Why do aftercare programs work? Long-time prison evangelist and exconvict Frank Constantino, who operates a 300-bed halfway house in Florida, says people expect too much of prisoners, who for so long have been barred from society, as they come back into the community. Despite federal and even Christian-sponsored programs that teach prisoners a trade, life skills, or how to read, the fact is that most of them need someone to hold their hands as they re-enter society.
“We reduce the number of decisions that they make [while they are in prison],” says Constantino. “Then we keep them at that state for ten years. Then, after we have reduced [their capacity to make decisions], we send them back into the community.”
Out Of Sight
Clearly, time spent with prisoners to help them re-enter society pays off in fewer repeat offenders. But that message must overcome long-standing attitudes. Prison reformers say that among the general public, including Christians, the mindset toward offenders is still primarily “lock them up and throw away the key,” “out of sight, out of mind,” and “let the government take care of them.” While Christian groups are catching on, a 1989 survey by the Institute for Prison Ministries showed that only 12 percent of prison ministries were involved primarily with aftercare, compared to 50 percent that conducted primarily prison evangelism and 28 percent that conducted prison Bible studies. About one-third of all prison ministries were involved in any consistent aftercare. The institute’s Smarto says those numbers are improving, and ministries are embracing the necessity of aftercare.
Perhaps, say some prison ministers, correctional officials are finally ready to take a serious look at prison ministries as an effective solution to their problems. Quinlin says groups like Match-Two are just what he has been looking for. And such groups say they are hoping to expand their work. That combination has Van Ness and other ministry leaders excited about the potential for significant progress. Still, he looks to the future with some uncertainty: “Whether the church [at large] will respond, that is the question.”
By Joe Maxwell.
A Friend on the Outside
“When I was in prison, I saw the evangelists come through,” says Sam Huddleston. “I saw the choirs and all the rest—and they are needed. But what I saw work was when one person became involved in another human being’s life.”
Huddleston is now president of Match-Two Prisoner Outreach, a growing California organization started two decades ago that matches a prisoner with at least one year left on his sentence with a volunteer (preferably of the same sex), who becomes a friend and mentor.
The Christian-run program, which has reached 38,000 prisoners in 40 California institutions, has been so successful that more than 70 percent of its multi-million-dollar budget now comes from three California state agencies. Ronald Reagan and former California governor George Deukmejian have publicly endorsed the program. Huddleston says politicians understand one thing—statistics—and Match-Two’s numbers chart its success.
Huddleston, now an ordained minister, sees a trend in prison ministries toward caring for offenders as whole persons, not only when they are behind bars, but also when they leave prison.
“We’re starting to really get down to the nitty gritty to what ministry—period—is all about. It is not just trying to help a man get his soul saved to prepare him for heaven. Jesus wants him prepared for this earth, however long he is going to be here. The Bible says, ‘Occupy till I come,’ ” Huddleston says.
Ironically, Match-Two does not have a formal re-entry program. What happens, Huddleston says, is simply this: “When a man or woman gets involved in the life of another man or woman who is incarcerated, and they become friends—genuine friends—then they care. And when that person on the inside gets ready to come out, there’s someone on the outside who wants to help him be a success, because they’re friends.”
Wanted: Black Leadership
The January report by The Sentencing Project notes that of the more than 1 million Americans now in prison, an estimated 454,700 are black males. “If we continue to pursue the policies of the 1980s in the 1990s, we can expect that black males may truly become the ‘endangered species’ that many have predicted,” the report states. John Perkins, founder of Voice of Calvary Ministries in Jackson, Mississippi, and of Harambee Christian Family Center in Pasadena, California, says reviving the community is the way to lower the black-male prison population.
You have said we know the communities where crime will occur tonight.
Not only do we know where the crime is going to happen, we know the family and the household it’s going to happen in. We know all these facts and we could fix it, but still we are looking to the government.
The alternative is the church. What happened in the sixties and seventies and eighties with integration and open opportunity is that blacks with education and resources moved away from the ghetto areas and left people there without the skills to produce leadership. Now we assume that money and agents can do what people and character need to do.
What forces have led to such a large black-male prison population?
There is a shortage of indigenous black leadership. The welfare system now substitutes for the family. So no longer is a family [held] responsible for its children, the government is. And the government makes the assumption that there is no man there. We have a generation of young men who have grown up without their fathers and without the influence of other men in the community to stabilize the families.
America’s prison population is almost 50 percent black males, but only 15 or so of the 120 delegates to the National Jail and Prison Ministries Conference were black. What does that say?
The lack [of black involvement in prison ministry] is probably even more serious than that. Of the 15 or 20 blacks that are here, most of them work for organizations that are 100 percent supported by white organizations. So there are no blacks that really represent black, church-supported organizations. It shows the lack of direction of the leadership. And the black leaders who are not living in the community don’t really understand the problem. Our politicians have made this out to be somebody else’s problem. We think we can still pressure society to fix what we need to fix.
When you talk about prison reform, you don’t necessarily start with chaplains or prison evangelists. You keep coming back to the community.
That’s where [the prisoners] started from and that’s where they are coming back to. I see the prisons now as almost an opportunity, like the military is an opportunity. Those boys who make it in the military get the internal discipline that is necessary to make it in life, discipline that they can’t normally get in the community. Those men that come back from prison have learned some of the same discipline. They have what it takes to be a leader. If we can get to them in prison, and help them back, we actually can build leadership for the community from them.
