A radical shift in thinking is sending ripples through prisons around the nation. Penitentiaries are becoming equipping grounds for mission. Churches are opening campuses behind bars and are empowering prisoners to reach their fellow inmates. Even seminaries are establishing degree programs on the inside. A movement is emerging, and it’s changing the landscape of prison ministry as we know it.
TRAINING INDIGENOUS LEADERS FOR PRISON MINISTRY
Louisiana State Penitentiary, a converted former plantation also known as Angola, is the largest maximum-security prison in the U.S. It was also one of the bloodiest, with a high rate of inmate assaults. But when Burl Cain took over as warden in 1995, he championed the concept of “moral rehabilitation,” the idea that prisoners could be transformed through theological education. He partnered with New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary (NOBTS) to open an extension program in the prison called the Angola Prison Seminary. The seminary offers a B.A. in Christian ministry and an M.A. in pastoral ministry. Since the program was instituted, graduates have planted around 25 churches inside Angola and other prisons around the state to which they’ve asked to be transferred as “indigenous missionaries.”
The once violent prison is now a model of rehabilitation. Kevin Brown, director of prison ministries at NOBTS, says the key to the transformation has been raising up leaders from inside the prison. “The challenge for a prison environment is allowing prisoners to assume the mantle of leadership; in an environment where leadership is typically reactive and anti-authority, this makes sense,” Brown says. “However, when you have a group of moral leaders who want to see positive change wrought in a hopeless environment, this dynamic changes.”
In a facility like Angola, most of the residents are serving life sentences or are on death row. Almost all of them will never leave. But by raising up “indigenous” leaders who can speak hope, change and healing through the gospel to their fellow prisoners, the moral temperature of the facility and the Louisiana prison system as a whole has changed.
“Our ability to train Christian leaders to enact the gospel inside prison walls is powerful and effective,” Brown says. “The fact that these men are leading others into relationship with Jesus Christ, to hope and a moral regeneration, is the important factor.”
Angola represents a fascinating grassroots movement of prisoners and former prisoners who are partnering with Christian institutions and churches on the outside of prisons to bring hope and restoration to the inside.
A PRISONER REBORN
Howie Close is the only man to have both a prisoner ID and a chaplain ID from Limon State Correctional Facility in Limon, Colorado. He literally holds the keys to the place where he was locked up for almost 15 years of his 20-plus year sentence. That this is nothing short of miraculous is not lost on him.
Close was the youngest of three children, a “surprise” baby. Though his parents called him a pleasant surprise, he always felt like a mistake. As a result, he grew up with a lot of anger. In 1990, when he was 17 years old, he assaulted a group of Japanese exchange students and was convicted under Colorado’s newly implemented hate crime law to a 75-year prison sentence.
To survive in Denver County Jail, he developed a reputation as a fighter. On one fateful day, he was sent to solitary confinement and discovered a Bible that the guards had missed in a sweep. As he began to read, something was awakened inside of him, and God began to draw him to himself. He started attending church services inside the prison, but when he was transferred to Limon—the most violent prison in the state—he reverted to his brawler persona and “put the Bible down and lived like the Devil for four to five years.”
Years and a couple of transfers later, he saw his new cellmate reading a Bible and unpacked his own from a black garbage bag. He threw it on the desk and said, “I’m a Christian too.” The man, who had been watching Close’s violent behavior, replied, “I can’t tell.”