Here's My Chance To Offend A Lot Of Other Bloggers

I don't know if the statistical claims for the improvement at Angola State Prison are accurate, or meaningful--there's not much real data here. It's still an encouraging story to read--and remember why they were originally called a "penitentiary"--they were a place to be penitent. Pennsylvania locked you up in a cell with a Bible. The rest was up to you:

The Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola, is the largest prison in the United States. Louisiana's most-hardened inmates end up at Angola. Most will die there. Angola is home to the state's death row and the most restrictive cell blocks. It's also where every man serving a life sentence in the state waits out his days. In Louisiana, life means life. No parole. No reduction of sentence. Nothing short of a pardon—or death—will release a lifer.

Until the 1970s inmates served as guards, and killing an escaping prisoner could earn one a ticket home. Prisoner-on-prisoner violence was common. Men slept with layers of newspapers and magazines under their shirts as rudimentary protection against nocturnal assaults with shivs, prison-made knives. An inmate's lawsuit in the mid-1970s forced reforms that ended much of the brutality.

Welcoming God into the prison has made even deeper changes for the 5,100 men locked up there. The faith-based programs that Warden Burl Cain has encouraged have led to genuine repentance—and to prisoners graduating from seminary and going as missionaries to other prisons. That is unique in a country of 1,850 prisons.

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One day in 1997, a few years after the federal government cut off grant money that funded college educations for inmates, Cain was complaining about the lack of higher education to Baptist ministers visiting Angola. Corrections officials see college courses as a good inmate-management tool, a privilege for only the best-behaved prisoners.

The ministers talked to the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary about opening a program at Angola. "It just fell right into our lap," Cain says.

The prison-based school needed a library to earn accreditation, and that also seemed to fall out of the sky. "We got in touch with Oprah Winfrey's company and, sure enough, they bit like a big fish," says Cain, who has a penchant for cowboy boots and draft horses. "She did something on her show, and the books started rolling in."

The prison was primed, according to Cain, for a four-year college producing trained ministers. "We had had all these religious groups come, and everybody was drinking the milk," Cain says. "They were ready for the meat. The meat was the seminary."

The first seminary class graduated in 2002. "They walked down the aisle in their rented caps and gowns, and their families cried," Cain says. "One mother came to me and said, 'I can't understand my emotions. My son came to prison and found Jesus, and he's graduated from seminary. He had to do this terrible crime to get to here.' I told her maybe the victim didn't die in vain."

One of those seminary graduates was preaching in the Main Prison chapel filled with inmates one drizzly Sunday in October.

"All men need to pray," Harold Savoy, wearing his cleanest pressed set of inmate denim, urged his congregation from the pulpit. "Pray for deliverance. Pray for doors to be opened here at Angola. Pray that we be delivered, not just from prison but from sin and death."

Alone or in pairs, they prayed, they cried. Many fell to their knees, buried their heads beneath clasped hands, and prayed. Their prayers murmured through the concrete block chapel with narrow stained-glass windows perched high on the walls, just under the roof, designed for beauty and security.

About 10 years ago, Savoy began looking at the direction of his life—to be spent entirely in Angola. When he rededicated his life to God, he had no idea he would graduate from seminary in 2002.

In the Main Prison chapel on a quiet weekday morning, as inmate workers sorted books with a bright sun lighting up the stained glass, Cain talked of sending seminary graduates out to spread the gospel.

"We had 80 graduates from the seminary, and what are we going to do with them?" he had asked himself. He had then said to himself, "Man, we need missionaries."

First they sent some seminary grads from the Main Prison to outlying block dorms. Recently Angola inmates have gone as missionaries to prisons across the state. (Prisoners can request transfers, which must be approved by the corrections department.) Leaving Angola was a big step for those inmates.

"They're leaving what's comfortable," Cain says. "This place has become their family. It's their culture, their society."

Chaplains at other camps and prisons were at first skeptical. But they came to see that these trained inmates could help them minister. Chaplains work from 9 to 5, but the inmate missionaries minister to their flocks all day, every day, Cain says. Missionaries will serve two years before returning to Angola.

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Bob Downing, a longtime volunteer in inmate ministries, has also seen the atmosphere change in Angola as more Christian programs came into the prison. Downing is an appeals court judge who, while serving as a district court judge in Baton Rouge, sentenced many men to Angola.

"You can just see the joy on the inmates' faces," he says. "Rapes have gone down, and murders have all but disappeared."

Nothing helps reduce the number of ex-convicts who return to prison, he says, like participating in religious programs while inside. Earning a high school equivalency degree in prison reduces the chance of returning by 4 percent. Having a job waiting on the outside is worth another 14 percent, he says, but participating in a religious program half the time they're locked up is good for a 36 percent reduction.

"The national repeat offender rate is 67 percent—Louisiana's is down to 50," Downing says. "We must be doing something right."

UPDATE: A reader tells me:

The Angola success numbers seem reasonable especially if they have some kind of follow through with the ex-offenders when they get out. I work with a program called Texas Reachout Ministries which provide a place for an ex-offender to live in a home enviroment with other ex-offenders when they get out of prison. They help them get a job and they provide mentors from local churches, Bible studies, counseling, mandatory drug testing, love and time for them to get on their feet and save money for a car, housing, etc. The ex-offenders have to pay rent, do chores, etc. and get along with their housemates. Texas Reachout has about a 75% success rate vs. a 90% recidivism rate in Texas. Success [is] defined as the ex-offenders move on to hold jobs, live on their own and become law-abiding
citizens again. I would however give most of the credit to the Holy Spirit.