Faith healing

Public Interest, Spring, 2004 by Joseph Loconte

Prison Fellowship

In 1975, when Colson finished serving prison time for his role in the Watergate scandal, there were about 229,000 individuals incarcerated in America. Today, there are over two million. Conservatives like to argue that crime rates are down because we have locked up more bad guys. That may be true, but the state prison population nearly doubled from 1990 to 2002, and it shows no signs of slowing down. Government spends nearly $50 billion each year on the "prison industrial complex," making it the single largest item in many state budgets.

Criminal justice officials have tried to alleviate the problem but have seemingly delivered little progress. A vast array of in-prison programs is now available: counseling, anger management, parenting classes, education, work programs, and drug treatment. Years ago, a state even gave a pot of money to recently released prisoners, hoping they would avoid committing new offenses. After a year, the experimental and control groups were rearrested at exactly the same rate--about 49 percent.

Officials at Prison Fellowship contend that secular approaches do not change the prison culture. Colson first saw what an alternative might look like on a trip to the Humaita prison in Brazil, where a private Christian charity ran an entire state facility like a spiritual boot camp. He found a remarkable mood of hope among the men, many of them hard-core criminals. The facility was orderly, experienced little inmate-on-inmate violence, and boasted a recidivism rate less than a third of the national average.

From its early days, Prison Fellowship has offered various services to inmates and their families, including Bible studies, religious literature, counseling, and a Christmas program for children. Colson's first effort to create a Christian prison for inmate volunteers was launched in 1997 outside Houston. The program, called the InnerChange Freedom Initiative (IFI), now also operates in Iowa, Kansas, and Minnesota prisons. Participants are housed together in a segregated wing, though they can interact with inmates not in the program. State guards provide security, but ministry staff runs the facility's daily operations.

What goes on inside IFI's prison walls probably occurs nowhere else in America's correctional system. Everyone is up by 6 A.M., rising not to watch television or pump iron, but to pray. Men carry Bibles and greet each other with a "hey, brother." Guests at the compound get a smile and a handshake. After breakfast, inmates go to Bible studies, supervised work, or education classes. High school dropouts typically are required to work on their G.E.D. In the evening are parenting classes, more Bible studies and meetings with church volunteers. Local entrepreneurs teach business courses, while others offer computer training. The schedule repeats itself every day, seven days a week, for the remainder of the inmate's term. "There are a lot of easier ways to do time in prison," says an IFI program manager in Kansas, a judgment confirmed both by offenders and corrections officials.