wfn.org | Texas prison: faith-based to the max

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Note #6494 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

20-April-2001
01136

Texas prison: faith-based to the max

For inmates in frankly Christian program, it's baptism by immersion

by John Filiatreau

Go to jail. Come to Jesus.

There is a prison out West where men who have lost their freedom can go to
save their souls. They get up every day at 5 a.m. to pray and sing together.
 They spend at least three hours a day studying Scripture. They put in
16-hour work-and-study days. They say grace over meals. They read the Bible
when they could be watching cop shows on TV.

The walls of this peculiar prison bear no centerfolds, but instead are
festooned with pictures of Jesus Christ. Guards and volunteer counselors are
apt to bark such orders as "God bless you!" and "Praise the Lord!"

No, Toto, this certainly isn't "Oz," the brutalizing prison in the HBO
series.

It's the Carol S. Vance Unit, a minimum-security institution in Sugar Land,
Texas - the first all-Christian lock-up in the United States.

President George W. Bush, a former Texas governor, points to Vance as an
example of the sort of public-private partnership he'd like to encourage
through his new White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives,
which will channel government money to faith-based programs that deliver
social services.

In 1997, when Bush was governor, he was a strong supporter of the
Christian-prison experiment, which was just getting under way. State
officials reluctantly agreed to provide prison space and pay the guards, but
insisted that payroll money for program staff would have to be contributed
by private donors.

Carol S. Vance, the person for whom the prison is named, is an an elder in
the Evangelical Presbyterian Church and a Houston attorney appointed to the
Texas Board of Criminal Justice in 1992 by former Gov. Anne Richards. The
board, of which Vance is now chairman, is responsible for overseeing Texas'
112 state prisons, 153,000 male and female inmates, and 600,000 convicts on
probation and parole.

The program in use at Vance, called InnerChange, was developed by Charles
Colson, the Watergate felon who became a Christian while doing time in a
federal prison and later launched a worldwide Christian prison ministry.
There are two other InnerChange programs in the United States, in prisons in
Kansas and Iowa. Colson also tried to get one started in Michigan, but
officials there told him the program was "too up-front Christian."

"Up-front Christian" it is. Participants get an intensive, two-year,
seven-days-a-week indoctrination in Bible teachings and Christian morality.
All 200 men in the Vance unit have voluntarily applied for the program. To
qualify, prisoners must be 18 to 24 months from release and have the
potential to read at the sixth-grade level. Once admitted, they move into a
special prison unit and bunk with fellow InnerChange enrollees.

The courts won't allow faith-based groups to entice participants with
promises of early release, cushy job assignments or nicer accommodations -
but there is no rule against promises of eternal life.

Vance says the InnerChange program works because the participants "learn
that the God who created the universe loves them and cares about them. A
basic understanding of that concept … can cause a person to change."

He adds: "I think the important thing is that they really grow in Christ.
Jesus Christ becomes the center of their life. ... They learn that they are
part of the family of believers. It's the first family many of them have
ever known."

Vance was an elder in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and a parishioner of
First Presbyterian Church in Houston for 24 years before switching to the
Evangelical Presbyterian Church. ("Denominations didn't really matter" when
InnerChange was organized, he says. "I never tell anybody I'm a
Presbyterian.") Speaking about crime and recidivism, Vance says he has
learned that men in prison have a lot in common.

"It's a father thing," he says. "In most cases, these criminals either had
no father in the home, or else the father was there but was totally
ineffective. There's a strong consensus that most of these people come from
weak homes, and that's the primary cause of their turning to crime.

"It's a male thing, mostly. Ninety-five percent of our inmates are male.
It's sort of an 'angry young man' thing. Eighty-five percent have been
abused as children. ... They weren't raised by anybody. They were raised on
the streets and through television, raised by the people they ran with on
the street.

"They dropped out of school in the ninth grade. They read at about the
sixth-grade level; 50 percent are functionally illiterate. They have holes
in their personality. They have low self-esteem. They have no idea what life
is all about. They have no goals, no vision of the future. They are
paranoid, and manipulative. And they have a lot of anger; they're walking
time bombs.

"They've never really been exposed to Christianity. You're not going to find
any strong Christian fathers (in their families), and even their mothers
have just about given up on them.

"That's why you have to really overhaul the person from the inside out,"
Vance says. "You've got to make a change in the person's heart."

He claims InnerChange consistently brings about that sort of transformation.

The president's new White House office is a clearinghouse for social-service
programs owned or run by faith groups, which now are eligible to compete for
billions of dollars in public funds. The office is a realization of Bush's
often-repeated (and broadly supported) assertion that government should
welcome, rather than discourage, the involvement of "people of faith" in
governmental social-service efforts.

Vance says he has met Bush on a number of occasions, and has been impressed.

"He's very enthusiastic about what we're doing," he says. "I think he's
100-percent sincere … and I think he's pretty smart. He's got a lot of
wisdom and discernment. When he was governor, he saw things he wanted to do
- and then he did them. It's wonderful to have a good moral leader in the
White House."

In the InnerChange program, each participating prisoner is matched up with a
personal mentor from a local church. Each one gets family and one-to-one
counseling, religious training and remedial education. As they approach the
final months of the program, participants begin a gradual transition from
prison life to freedom. Each man gets help in finding a job, a home and a
home church after his release.

One of the fundamental problems in the corrections field, Vance says, is
that when a prisoner is released, all support stops. "We normally don't pick
up on that person's life," he says. "But when men in our program are
released, they do six months of intensive work, meeting with a mentor at
least once every week, and they get family support, and they get into a
church."

According to Vance, the prisoners' relationships with individual mentors
brings about an "InnerChange": "For many, it's the first time they have ever
been around a normal male person who loves his wife, supports his family and
works for a living. ... (The program) is really based upon the volunteer
teachers and mentors ... just sharing Jesus with them."

InnerChange is just three years old. It may be too soon to decide whether or
not to call it a success. But the early signs are encouraging: In a state
where nearly 40 percent of parolees return to prison within three years of
their release, and two-thirds return eventually, InnerChange has graduated
80 men, and only two are back behind bars.

Some critics of the program argue that it discriminates against atheists,
Jews and other non-Christians, and that the government is subsidizing a
particular religion's efforts to convert others to the faith.

"He (Bush) thinks he's been elected national pastor as well as president,"
grouses Barry Lynn, a spokesman for Americans United for the Separation of
Church and State (and a minister in the United Church of Christ).

Lynn points out that churches "are by their very nature evangelical," and
says he believes the InnerChange program does discriminate against
non-Christians. He notes that the program has no mechanism to guard against
religious favoritism. InnerChange is permitted to choose its participants
with no constraints.

Vance says the program doesn't discriminate against non-Christians. "They
can apply, as long as they agree to cooperate," he says. "We've had several
Muslims in the program."

He adds that the Muslim faith is welcome to create a program specifically
for its own adherents in Texas prisons.

Lynn is not alone in opposing the president's plan to have the government
support faith-based programs.

"The loser there will ultimately be religion," predicts Democratic Rep.
Robert Wexler of Florida. "I find it hard to believe that federal money will
go to religious entities without the federal government then becoming
involved in the practice of religion."

The Rev. Elenora Giddings Ivory, director of the Washington office of the
Presbyterian Church (USA), says that, when denominational programs receive
government money, their management should be transferred to separately
incorporated tax-exempt agencies.

Bush envisions similar faith-based intervention in drug- and
alcohol-treatment programs such as Teen Challenge, an addiction-treatment
program active in Texas. He would also like to see religious groups get
involved in 21st Century Learning Center, one of the largest recipients of
federal money for after-school teaching.

"A compassionate society is one which recognizes the great power of faith,"
the president said as he unveiled his plan for the new office. "We in
government must not fear faith-based programs. We must welcome faith-based
programs."

The National Council of Churches operates under guidelines that say
faith-based programs that receive government money should be non-sectarian
and should display no religious icons or messages, and such religious
organizations "should guard against all forms of proselytization. ...
Services provided ... cannot be religious in character."

But the InnerChange program is explicitly and unapologetically religious in
character, and its proponents say that's precisely why it works.

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