Prison ministry fundraising for visitor lodging facility in Gatesville

Cindy Culp at the Waco Tribune Herald had a story picked up by AP about a prison ministry effort by the Central Texas Hospitality House to establish a facility for inmate families visiting prisons in Gatesville - including TDCJ's biggest women's units - for inmate families to stay overnight when visiting relatives in prison. Reported Culp:

Catherine Rohr finds life after PEP

Inc. magazine has a profile of Catherine Rohr, the founder of Texas' Prison Entrepreneurship Program (PEP) who left in disgrace when she revealed having had sexual affairs with program graduates following her divorce. As folks in Texas' prison milieu will surely recall:

Chuck Colson, RIP

While the web is filled with commentary on his passing, see especially a tribute from Christianity Today to Chuck Colson, the Nixon-era dirty trickster turned prison evangelist and reformer, who died last week of a brain hemorrhage. Cynics often pooh-pooh jailhouse conversions, and Colson's in particular has been derided by liberals for decades. But the prison stint served for his Watergate-related crimes transformed the compiler of Nixon's "Enemies List" into a pioneer of the conservative justice reform agenda whose influence will long outlive him. Whether one agreed with his theology or political views, without Chuck Colson, Grits certainly doubts the nascent Right on Crime effort could ever have materialized. May he rest in peace.

Does meditation promote prisoners' rehabilitation?

The Houston Chronicle on Sunday published a feature on a Buddhist prison ministry teaching meditation to Texas inmates at the Stiles Unit in Beaumont for the last eight years. The story opens:

Barefooted, eyes closed in reverie, bodies folded into lotus position, the men in white chanted the ancient Seven Line Supplication to Guru Rinpoche, who brought Buddhism to Tibet in the eighth century.

As their voices swelled, their leader, Galveston artist Terry Conrad, swayed with the cadence. Pe ma gey sar dong pol la. Yam Tsen chog gi ngo drub nyey

This could have been a scene from a 1960's love-in, with college-age acolytes - decked out in exotic garb - paying fervid homage to the wisdom of the East. But these men were not students, and their attire was anything but exotic.

They are inmates at Beaumont's Mark Stiles state prison; their duds, functional prison whites. And, under Conrad's gentle guidance, they were here to meditate.

Now in its eighth year, the weekly program offered through the prison chaplain's office, is designed to help prisoners, some guilty of the most heinous offenses, achieve "natural awareness."

Reacting to the story, Doug Berman asks "Should all prison inmates be offered meditation classes?" but IMO that question is premature. Like many privately run programs by religious groups in Texas prisons, the problem is nobody has kept data on participants' recidivism or disciplinary records, compared them to outcomes from a control group, etc.. Past research on meditation in prison appears promising but the cost-benefit claims seem overstated and too good to be true. While it may seem intuitively like a good idea, there's no way to tell definitively whether the meditation program at Stiles "works" to rehabilitate offenders.

That's why I'd like to see the Texas program studied - particularly since it's been going eight years and so has a substantial pool of participants to analyze. Until that social science work is done, programs like this will remain oddities and outliers in the system. It's one thing to implement a program aiming to help prisoners, and quite another to produce documentation proving that outcomes improved. The former motivation is enough to inspire such work by do-gooder prison ministry types, but to justify scaling up the idea on an institutional level, you'd need hard data to show substantive, real-world improvements in recidivism and/or in-prison behavior. It's not enough to try out-of-the-box ideas; the results must be measured and tested for such thinking ever to spread beyond the fringes of the corrections system.

Prison ministry by and for youth

Here's a nice article from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram about high school athletes at Southlake-Carroll taking time for a weekly softball game with TYC youth from McFadden Ranch. The story opens:

Take a 20-minute ride from the well-manicured community of Southlake through the back roads of rural Roanoke and you might, if you can find it, stumble upon McFadden Ranch.

The 48-bed facility set in the middle of a handful of acres serves as the centerpiece for this community-based residential program that, through the Texas Youth Commission, provides care and treatment to juvenile offenders.

The drive is one several members of the Southlake Carroll football team have become very familiar with over the last few months... for all the right reasons.

Nearly every week this summer around 15 Dragons, mostly offensive linemen, show up at 6 p.m. to engage in a friendly game of softball with the TYC kids. The groups share gloves, bats, watermelon and testimonial for about two hours each time.

This all started by Carroll senior offensive lineman Nathan Butler. His father, Steve Butler hosts a bible study for football players every Wednesday during the school year. Once summer commenced, Nathan came up with the idea to play softball at McFadden Ranch.

"[Southlake Carroll] Coach [Hal] Wasson always tells us to go out and reach out," Nathan Butler said. "My dad's been doing prison ministries for as long as I can remember. So I am just following in his footsteps and doing something to help the offensive line and defensive line come together."

State Sen.Dan Patrick dips toe in prison ministry waters

Here's something I didn't know:

Last year, [state] Senator [Dan] Patrick began a prison ministry in Texas through the showing of his documentary film, “The Heart of Texas.” The movie, which documents the powerful effect of forgiveness on a Texas community is a compelling and life-changing message for incarcerated inmates. Angola Warden Burl Cain saw the film and invited Senator Patrick to visit his prison and the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary located at the prison.

Patrick and Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire are presently visiting Angola prison in Louisiana, according to the blog West Side Story, to meet the warden and review Angola's prison ministry program.

Buddhism in Texas prisons

One usually thinks of prison ministries as a Christian or perhaps an Islamic calling, but according to an informative article by Zen Zheng in the Houston Chronicle ("Cultivating her faith," Nov. 12) "Buddhist volunteers work in eight of 113 state prisons." Buddhist prison ministries are spearheaded by Myokei Caine-Barrett, a Texan who was introduced to Buddhism in El Paso and Houston. She has performed weekly services at TDCJ facilities since becoming ordained in 2007.

Praise for PEP

There's a nice column in the Houston Chronicle about a visit by a group of businesspeople to Catherine Rohr's much acclaimed Prison Entrepreneurship Program ("What can we learn from prisoners?," June 7), which apparently made quite an impression:

In five years, 440 prisoners have graduated from the four-month Prison Entrepreneurship Program (PEP). The majority have landed good, honest jobs within the first month of release. Fifty-eight have started their own business, ranging from landscaping to software development. PEP´s volunteers number more than 450 MBA students and more than 1,000 business executives. ...

While first-time volunteers may have entered with an “It’ll feel good to help these less fortunate souls” attitude, we were all shocked to be learning from them.

The men were so polite and eager to learn, we couldn’t help but open our hearts. You’ve heard before that we have something to learn from everyone. I sincerely think that often, but am seldom able to consistently maintain that view. That day, I went with the attitude of looking forward to sharing my business knowledge. What was I, a business professional, going to learn from a murderer?

PEP is largely about building character. It’s making men act like real responsible men. Participants take classes on etiquette, substance abuse, relationships and fatherhood.

The businesspeople visiting gushed over the program:

The theme from the business leaders was summed up by one volunteer, “I came here in fear for my life, and I leave here dumbfounded at my misconception. Outside these walls are people that are so fearful of everything, especially in this economic condition — and the most joy, love and happiness I have seen in years is within this room. Thank you for your inspiration.”

From everything I've heard PEP is a wonderful but small program with a long waiting list. Particularly given the level of support Rohr has been able to garner from the business community, TDCJ would probably get a lot of anti-recidivism bang for the buck by investing state resources to expand it.

'Imprisoned by Stereotypes'

From Doc Berman:

Inside Out, the online magazine of the Prison Fellowship, has this interesting cover story with the same title as the title of this post. Here is how it gets started:

When the average person conjures an image of a prisoner, what is pictured? Does the mind’s eye see a lone shadow with defiance and anger on his face and evil and ill-intent in his heart, prowling for trouble and poised to wreak violence? And who or what provides this image? Movies? The news media? Fear?

When three people from Texas look into the faces of prisoners, they see an opportunity for repentance, a prospect for a second chance, a vessel of potential. Their perception of prisoners is not based on sensationalized images from any screen, or on what they think it means to be a prisoner. Among them, they have more than three decades of experience in prison ministry. And while they, too, acknowledge that there are prisoners who live up to society’s stereotypes, there are also those who reduce such notions into myth.

Here's a brief description of the three Texas prison ministry volunteers profiled:

With 15 years of prison ministry experience, Lloyd Knapp points out that people inside prison and people outside of prison have at least one major similarity: the capability of making poor choices. The difference between prisoners and nonprisoners most often lies within circumstance. “There are those of us who commit crimes, and there are those of us who don’t get caught. Obviously most of us haven’t committed murder or done drugs, but we’ve done things that we regret or wish we hadn’t. Prisoners make mistakes, too, but they habitually make those mistakes. They’re not evil at heart; they’ve just been down that road so long, it’s difficult for them to change.”

Judy Indermuehle, a prison volunteer for more than nine years, agrees with Lloyd. In fact, she says that looking inside a prison is like looking into a large cultural mirror. “The prison population is a large mix of society,” says Judy, “same as we have outside. Prisoners are bad and evil, just like we are. We are capable of what they’ve done, and unless we are able to view ourselves that way, it would seem we are full of arrogance.”

Adelaide Biggs, a volunteer with more than nine years of experience inside prisons, echoes Judy’s tenacious sentiment. “We need to remember that we’re all sinners,” she says. “Jesus changes us. Most of the people I see have lived a horrible life and made terrible choices, but they know they can be different people through Christ. And isn’t that the Christian faith?”

All three volunteers agree: Prisoners are neither more nor less evil than those outside of prison. The main difference between the majority of the incarcerated and the majority of the free is not something inherent, so much as it is something acquired.