Resources

Insights from Inside: Making Time Count

The book relates a decade of stories and testimonies about life change and the impact of the program on students, staff, and teachers. This ministry has been a partnership between the West Virginia Division of Corrections & Rehabilitation, Catalyst Ministries, and Appalachian Bible College.

“The majority of those graduating from the Bible College won’t be getting out; they will stay inside the system and help transform the system form the inside out. Inmates listen to their own; they give far great credence to the voice of their own than they to do the voices of the free-world volunteers. Inmates tend to look at the inmate minister as one of their own. They are more receptive to the Christian message because they look at the minister and know he is in there with them. This has proven to be more effective that if some stranger comes in from the outside and tries to minister to them.”

“The Bible College students, upon Graduation, will be sent to other West Virgina prisons in the state, where they will serve on the staff of the prison Chaplains. They will assist those Chaplains in their individual prison ministries. Their very presence will begin to change the culture of the prison to which they were assigned.”

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The Value of Seminaries in Prison

In 1995, Burl Cain, currently Commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Corrections, became the warden at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Angola, once called “the bloodiest prison in America,” was an out-of-control, maximum security prison of 6,000 incarcerated, with daily violence and hopelessness every where. Commissioner Cain often says he was not well equipped to know how to fix the problem, but he knew God could. He contacted the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, and they began training inmates at Angola in 1995 in liberal arts, ministry and biblical studies. The ongoing seminary’s purpose is to train inmates to be ministers to their fellow inmate peers.

Seminaries in The System: The Effects of Priosn Seminaries on Recidivism, Inmate VIolence, and Costs

Rehabilitation is one of the main goals of the correctional system, with numerous and varied programs being implemented for centuries. The United States spends millions on rehabilitation programs, yet recidivism rates, prison violence, and correctional costs continue to rise. This thesis explores how prison seminaries are addressing these issues and in the process, changing inmates’ attitudes and behaviors. Examining Angola, the first prison seminary that became a model for many subsequent prison seminaries, including interviews with inmates and prison staff, reveals how inmates’ attitudes and behaviors changed as a result of their seminary. Similar programs that follow Angola’s model were also reviewed to determine if there was a reduction in acts of violence and a change in inmates’ prosocial behaviors as a result of the programs. This thesis analyzed quantitative evidence in the form of prison statistics and inmate conduct records to determine if prison seminaries lower rates of recidivism as well as inmate violence. Legal case studies were used to evaluate the constitutionality of prison seminaries. Finally, this thesis identified reasons why prison seminaries are changing the overall culture of prisons, including individual identity transformations, the activities of inmate ministers, and participation in religious activities. The findings reveal prison seminaries are reducing both recidivism rates and inmate violence, which reduces the overall costs of incarceration.

U.S. Prison Seminaries: Structural Charity, Religious Establishment, and Neoliberal Corrections

Using archival and site-based research, this article explores operational practices at six U.S. prison seminary programs regarding concepts of religious establishment. Further highlighted is a shift toward faith-based volunteerism as a “structural charity” in correctional budgeting. While religious programs offer powerfully transformative access to social capital for many inmates, the recent insertion of Christian “seminaries” into U.S. prisons arguably fosters religious establishment in four key areas: a lack of state neutrality toward religion, excessive state entanglement with religious service providers, inadequate solicitation of alternative programming, and a de facto measure of coercion in delivery of services.

“First Stop Dying”: Angola’s Christian Seminary as Positive Criminology

This article offers an ethnographic account of the “self-projects” of inmate graduates of Louisiana State Penitentiary’s (aka “Angola’s”) unique prison seminary program. Angola’s Inmate Minister program deploys seminary graduates in bivocational pastoral service roles throughout America’s largest maximum-security prison. Drawing upon the unique history of Angola, inmates establish their own churches and serve in lay-ministry capacities in hospice, cellblock visitation, tier ministry, officiating inmate funerals, and through tithing with “care packages” for indigent prisoners. Four themes of positive criminology prominently emerge from inmate narratives: (a) the importance of respectful treatment of inmates by correctional administrations, (b) the value of building trusting relationships for prosocial modeling and improved self-perception, (c) repairing harm through intervention, and (d) spiritual practice as a blueprint for positive self-identity and social integration among prisoners.

Capitalizing on Religious Pluralism in U.S. Prison Ministry: Lessons from LSP Angola’s Inmate Seminary

The renewed growth of immersive “faith-unit” programs operating inside U.S. maximum-security prisons has brought with it a heightened emphasis on the practice of religion in correctional settings. Modeled from a prototype Christian seminary planted inside Louisiana State Penitentiary Angola, newer programs utilize outside religious educators for the credentialing of inmates into work assignments on behalf of prisons. As resource-challenged wardens deploy religiously credentialed inmates for leading new forms of prison ministry inside state facilities, research has not kept pace with the rapid growth of programs. Based on previous research, this article offers a retrospective account of the establishment of “offender ministries” at the Angola prison seminary planted at Louisiana State Penitentiary in 1994. While correctional leaders are obliged to accommodate the diverse religious identities of prisoners, private sponsors of immersive religious programs must balance doctrinal fealty with religious pluralism. Drawing from fieldnotes and on-site interviews in previous research, lessons from the history of Angola’s ecumenical prison seminary and “inmate ministry” programs are discussed while strengths and weaknesses are also highlighted.

Equipping Students for a “Specific Uprising” Toward Justice: Lessons Learned from a University Prison Initiative

Equipping students for citizenship has always been a core element of American higher education. Amid financial distress, changing technology, and global interconnectivity, the project of equipping citizens is becoming increasingly disembodied. Embracing the notion that one’s physical place matters, one application of an embodied practice has been the development of educational programs inside prisons in the United States. Beginning in 2015, Calvin University launched one such program inside the Richard A. Handlon Correctional Facility called the Calvin Prison Initiative (CPI) with the goal of extending Calvin’s mission to equip students to be “agents of renewal in the world.” The program offers opportunity for individual renewal through personal development in the context of a rigorous curriculum that culminates in a bachelors degree, as well as communal renewal through the transformation of the culture within the prison animated by the CPI students therein. After a description of the program and its context, this article describes a pilot study which sought to understand the impact of the CPI on its participants, particularly on how they see themselves as moral and spiritual leaders within Michigan’s prisons. Through analysis of 57 essay pairs—one when applying to the program, and one after a portion of the program was completed—the data suggest that CPI participants demonstrate growth in three key areas of personal, educational, and community formation. This article concludes with a discussion of implications for the program, future programmatic and research opportunities, and implications for embodied community engagement within Christian higher education writ large.

Prisoners Helping Prisoners Change: A Study of Inmate Field Ministers Within Texas Prisons

Research on incarcerated offenders trained to help prisoners change is rare because programs that equip inmates with practical capacities for helping others rehabilitate in prison hardly exist. An exception is the Field Ministry program in Texas, which enlists inmates who have graduated from a prison-based seminary to work as “Field Ministers” and serve other inmates in various capacities. We hypothesize that inmate exposure to Field Ministers is inversely related to antisocial factors and positively to prosocial ones. We applied manifest-variable structural equation modeling to analyze data from a survey of a random sample of male inmates at three maximum-security prisons where the Field Ministry program operated. We found that inmates exposed more frequently to the Field Ministry and for a longer time period tended to report lower levels of criminological risk factors and aggressiveness and higher levels of virtues and predictors of human agency as well as religiosity and spirituality.

Supporting Incarcerated Seminary Students

How can we provide access to theological scholarship for students in a maximum-security prison? This session will discuss how the North Park library supports seminary students in two different Illinois correctional institutions. We discuss the founding and history of the School of Restorative Arts, how Brandel Library built and managed remote prison collections, and how we support the research and writing of these students. We will then discuss future plans for SRA library services and questions for seminary libraries to consider as they plan to serve incarcerated students. Finally, Tony Pizarro will share from his experience and work within the SRA program and as the assistant director of North Park’s Writing Center.