Program Puts Prisoners On Right Path

This column recently described a remarkable Brazilian prison called Humaita, run by Prison Fellowship, in which the inmates have a total immersion in Christian principles. Only 4 percent of its ex-offenders are rearrested.

“Why not ask those running for office at state or federal levels to allow Prison Fellowship to run one prison in your state?” I asked in the column.

What I did not know when I wrote those words is that the Texas Board of Criminal Justice is likely to decide next week to allow Prison Fellowship to run a pre-release prison unit called Jester II, which houses 380 prisoners in Houston.

“It will be a Bible-based, Christ-centered community that brings all spiritual values into a prison 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” said Frank Lofaro, executive director of Prison Fellowship International.

What sparked the experiment was a visit by Carol Vance, an attorney who serves on the Texas Board of Criminal Justice, to Humaita, in Sao Paulo, at the invitation of Prison Fellowship’s chairman, Chuck Colson.

Colson, a former Nixon aide who ended up in prison for Watergate-related crimes, founded Prison Fellowship 20 years ago after his own conversion.

Vance says of Humaita, “It was like out of the Book of Acts. The prisoners had a very strong faith. Each prisoner had a family or mentor (on the outside) who had adopted them for life. The prison was run by one administrator and the prisoners themselves, who had moved up spiritually.”

Prisoners begin totally incarcerated day and night, and progress to where they are allowed to work. Then they move up to a status allowing weekend furloughs with their families. Finally, even after they move into productive work outside, the ex-offenders come back on Saturday mornings for follow-up sessions.

“It was amazing to see the transformation of their lives,” Vance said.

In Texas, Prison Fellowship won’t run a prison, but a program. It will not provide security, food, medical care or drug rehab. But inmates will wake up for a chapel service and a Bible study before breakfast. They will do productive work, attend classes and will be instructed in biblical principles.

They will also meet with crime victims who will tell how their lives were violently disrupted, to help the prisoners develop empathy for victims.

This will be overseen by six or seven Prison Fellowship staff members and 300-400 volunteers in the Houston area. The program will involve 100 prisoners initially, working up to 380 later.

How can Texas allow such an explicitly Christian program? First, prisoners will enter the program voluntarily. Second, The Texas Department of Criminal Justice has “secular objectives to reduce recividism (rearrest) rates, to increase public safety, and to make the released offender an integrated, contributing member of society,” asserts Catherine McVey, the agency’s assistant director.

“If we have a vendor who says he can rehabilitate prisoners through a religious program, it is coincidental. The prisoners do not have to be Christian. They have to volunteer to participate,” Prison Fellowship’s “values-based” curriculum is one of several rehabilitation approaches being experimented with. Outside experts will compare PF’s rearrest rates with those in other programs.

I predict it will not only succeed, but be a national model.

“Thinking patterns of a lifetime do not disappear,” says Dr. Stanton Samenow, author of Inside the Criminal Mind. He says that a conversion, “assuming it is authentic,” can be a major boost in the motivation to change.

“But a person can fall away,” Samenow says. “The conversion experience has to be solidified. That takes hard work, day in and day out, reaching only a minority of prisoners.” That is what is proposed here.

Dr. Byron Johnson of Lamar University found that only 14 percent of inmates who attended ten or more Bible studies in a year were rearrested vs. 41 percent of non-participants.

If that much impact can be measured with less than one Bible study a month, think what a total Christian immersion might spark.

“Crime is caused by sin, people making wrong moral choices,” Colson says. “The answer to crime is the conversion of the wrongdoer.”