AS YOU DRIVE THE HOUR south from Jacksonville, Florida, to Lawtey Correctional Institution, a medium security prison, the only signs of habitation are small billboards advertising fireworks, fresh peaches, the chance to glimpse a fourteen-foot alligator, and churches. There is the Church of Pisgah, the First Baptist Church, the Baptist Church of Lawtey, Florida Baptist Church, and Word of God Church. Lawtey Correctional Institution is located in the “Iron Triangle,” an area with a half-dozen prisons, including Florida State Prison, which still has an electric chair on its death row. The prisons in this area add more than seven thousand people to the local population, and the prison system is one of the main employers for the rural communities in the area. Lawtey is one of sixteen state prisons in Florida designated as faith- and character-based institutions (FCBIs) since 2003.1
The FCBIs provide a range of secular and religious programming for eligible men and women who have indicated an interest in personal growth and character development. But most faith-based programs remain overwhelmingly Christian, with other religious affiliations an afterthought. Florida’s Department of Corrections designed the FBCIs to include all religions, and a prisoner’s religious faith, or lack thereof, is not considered in determining eligibility for the programs. The Florida programs, for example, are supposed to be a neutral space for character development, where no one religion is promoted. In actuality, however, the Southern Baptist chaplain and warden have made their form of Protestantism the norm, with all other faiths and theological differences a deviation.
The success of Lawtey as an FCBI depends on religious volunteers, supervised by a chaplain, who function as instructors, group facilitators, seminar presenters, mentors, worship leaders, or musicians. Like most of the volunteers, the warden, chaplain, and staff identify as Southern Baptists. According to the Florida Department of Corrections, close to 70 percent of men at Lawtey characterize their religious orientation as Christian non-Roman Catholic with only 3 percent identified as Muslim and 1 percent as Jewish. Yet, 17 percent of men in the state system report no or unknown religious orientations. Approximately eight hundred men at Lawtey have volunteered and applied to be transferred from other prisons to Lawtey. More than one hundred volunteers visit Lawtey monthly, and the chaplain cannot observe most of the volunteer programs and classes. Therefore, oversight of the programs is sporadic, making it difficult to ascertain whether proselytization for Christian faith does occur, in violation of the Department of Corrections requirements.2
The inescapability of Christianity in a faith-based prison and the pretense of a secular character program entirely divorced from religion did not escape local commentary. The Palm Beach Post included a parodic schedule of a day at Lawtey when the prison opened under former Governor Jeb Bush in 2003. The daily schedule of events began at 6 a.m. with “Good morning, sinners!”
| 6:30 a.m. | Sunrise service; weight room. |
| 8:30 a.m. | Cellblock psalms. |
| 10 a.m. | Lecture: Speaking in tongues for confidential informants; law library. |
| 11:30 a.m. | Bringing in the shivs. Last chance to turn in weapons; no questions asked. |
| Noon | Radio club: Learning from Rush “Talent on Loan from God” Limbaugh; detox unit. |
| 1 p.m. | Seminar: Snake Handling for Dummies. One slot has suddenly opened up for this seminar. Admission: one cigarette or two candy bars. Not for beginners; Classroom 2. |
| 1:30 p.m. | Careers seminar: How to run a faith-based school in Florida and get state funding, with Gov. Bush on satellite linkup; Classroom 3. |
| 2 p.m. | Afternoon shift reports for work; Ten Commandments monument construction center (counts for gain time on any outstanding Alabama sentence). |
| 3:30 p.m. | Baptisms. (Note: Due to the recent escape, we will no longer be going to the lake for this event.) |
| 4 p.m. | Book discussion group: Chicken Soup for the Criminal Soul; rec. room.3 |
In most state prisons, depending on proximity to an urban center, you might encounter some Catholic services, Jehovah’s Witnesses, an occasional group from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), Muslim groups, and Wicca and Native American sweat lodges. In prisons adjacent to urban areas like San Quentin or Graterford, there are Muslim and Jewish chaplains. However, in the more isolated Bible belt of Louisiana, Texas, Georgia, and Florida, the volunteers reflect only the dominant religion of the area.
When Quaker silence, Presbyterian prayer, and Methodist discipline lost their hold on prison cultures, the conditions for the dominance of an increasingly nonspecific Protestantism within the prison were set. Though prisons in the United States are saturated by broadly Protestant theological ideas, mainline Protestants, Unitarians, or Quakers rarely hold services or studies in prison. Theorists of secularism and religion have argued that the unstated religious assumptions of secularism in the United States are Protestant, and Christian morality shapes legislation, policy, and jurisprudence in what scholars have called “stealth Protestantism.”4 In the same way, religious ideas shape secular laws about punishment.
The decline of mainline Protestant churches since the 1970s and the upsurge in nondenominational mega-churches are exemplified in the trends of prison ministry.5 Mega-churches with memberships in the thousands have thrived using the model of small groups of engagement. Prison ministry is a natural extension of this model, with a theological emphasis on conversion and Jesus as the original prisoner. Some Christians believe that prisoners have a special place in the Christian imagination because Jesus was a prisoner who died in custody.
Jack Miles, a professor of religious studies and author of God: A Biography, writes, “Christianity is a religion founded by men in deep trouble with the law, men familiar with the inside of prisons, whose message was ‘the last shall be first, and the first last.’”6 For many Christians, their religious ethics dictate that what is owed to their neighbor is simultaneously owed to God himself. Miles continues, “When doing good deeds for our fellow human beings, we as Christians seek to imagine that we are simultaneously doing them for Christ in person. Jesus taught his followers to imagine themselves hearing his voice saying, ‘I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you came to me,’ and finally: ‘I was in prison and you visited me’ (Matthew 25:35–36).”7 As a result of this theology and the organizational structure of large churches with individual ministries within them, evangelicals are dominant in prison ministry.
A sampling of the religious program schedule at prisons in Florida, Washington State or Texas, for example, reveals that the majority are made up of Protestant Christian groups. From 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., a prisoner can attend Way of Holiness, Harbor Covenant, Word of Life, New Jerusalem Church, Crossways Discipleship, Alpha Bible Study, Prisoners for Christ, New Life Baptist, Prison Fellowship ministry, Kairos, Spanish Bible group, Greater Life Church, Faith Bible Study, CWays Bible Study with a sprinkling of Jehovah’s Witnesses, LDS, and Catholic Mass. There is one Muslim group and a Wiccan meeting. Florida’s FCBIs are similar. The guidelines of the Florida Department of Corrections explicitly state, “Staff may not attempt to convert inmates toward a particular secular, faith or religious viewpoint or affiliation. Except as provided by law, state funds may not be expended on programs that further religious indoctrination, or on inherently religious activities such as religious worship, religious instruction or proselytization.”8 This injunction contradicts the basic principle of evangelical and nondenominational Christian ministries, which is to proselytize and convert others. The 2005 Florida statutes also state that “the department shall ensure that state funds are not expended for the purpose of furthering religious indoctrination, but rather, that state funds are expended for purposes of furthering the secular goals of criminal rehabilitation, the successful reintegration of offenders into the community, and the reduction of recidivism.” The state continues to open FBCIs based on the Lawtey model.9
The presence of state faith-based prisons raises constitutional questions, especially because many programs operate within state prisons, using state property and resources, even though they may not be state funded. Some faith-based groups comprise mainly volunteers, but in Florida or the Baptist seminary programs, the Christian program is an integral part of the prison itself, whether it is providing education, mental health counseling, or building a new chapel. In addressing similar issues, Prison Fellowship claims that it deploys government funds only to buy equipment like computers, while private money funds the religious aspects of the program. Yet, it is almost impossible to make this distinction in a program that believes rehabilitation occurs through faith in Jesus Christ. The principle of non-establishment means that tax dollars are not used to build facilities for religious groups. But Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State makes the case that these programs represent the government paying for a spiritual transformation and conversion: “Prison Fellowship is free to run evangelism programs on its own dime but has no business handing the bill to the taxpayers.”10
Lawtey is part of a national trend to remake state prisons into religious communities. The Florida Department of Corrections investigated the Prison Fellowship model and decided that a dormitory arrangement with long-term involvement would be the most effective model for its state.11 Kairos Horizon Prison Initiative became a nonprofit in 2001 and received a grant from Florida’s Responsible Fatherhood Initiative to hire a program coordinator to oversee the faith-based dormitories at Tomoka Correctional Institution in 1999.12 Other faith-based and multifaith units followed in Ohio, Oklahoma, and Texas, and at Wakulla Correctional Institution in Florida.
The Florida version of the faith-based prison began with dorms that were arranged in cubes with eight men making up a family group. Almost all the groups were Christian, although one was primarily Muslim men. The cubes had four double bunks, large lockers to house books and materials, bookshelves, and televisions. The families were based on the model of Kairos weekends, which had taken place for seventeen years in Tomoka before Kairos initiated the faith-based dormitories. All the prisoners attended the three-day weekend before becoming part of the dorms and were familiar with the aim of building trust and community.13 Initially, the DOC wanted those prisoners with short sentences to take part in the program, but Kairos found that they weren’t as serious about the program as those with long-term sentences.
Based on the success of Tomoka, in 2001, the legislature under Jeb Bush mandated establishing the faith-based model in six other Florida prisons, but the plan was suspended after September 11, 2001. That year, the warden of Lawtey requested that Pastor Steve McCoy, head of a nondenominational conservative Christian mega-church of a thousand members—Beaches Chapel Church in Neptune Beach—oversee seven faith-based dormitories operating at Lawtey. A minister for twenty-nine years, McCoy recounts being raised in the 1960s in what he remembers as the streets of a rough neighborhood, and he had a checkered background in drugs until he “found Christ.” A large, garrulous man, he relished the chance to transform the prison, viewing his ministry at Lawtey as a natural extension of his personal history. Eventually, as the success of the close-knit dorm programs grew, the program expanded to the entire prison. McCoy’s Beaches Chapel congregation has continued as the largest and most influential group at Lawtey. The Lawtey program began Christmas Eve 2003, and as it has become institutionalized, the once-volunteer religious program managers have become employees of the Department of Corrections.14 The faith-based prisons are now overseen by the individual prison chaplain and, thus, subject to his particular theological view.
When I visited Lawtey, McCoy was preaching to a group of several hundred men scattered among the gleaming wood pews of the modern and airy prison chapel that Beaches had built. In a sermon that had a distinctly pep-talk feel and seemed a clear attempt to generate interest for the Beaches classes and programs, McCoy declaimed, “God does not see you in an endless cycle of incarceration.” Beaches Chapel, with an income of $1.7 million, has contributed more than $30,000 to Lawtey, paying for computers, ceiling fans, musical instruments, and the renovation of the chapel, which is the most modern and comfortable building in the prison.15 Lawtey’s chapel boasts an elevated stage with a massive screen for viewing films and a sophisticated sound system. It’s also the only air-conditioned building in the central Florida prison.
The chaplain, warden, and McCoy are acutely aware that the prison treads close to promoting state-sanctioned religion and are careful to emphasize that attendance is voluntary, all religious groups are respected, and secular programming for building character is written into the rationale of the prison program. However, in other conversations, they reiterated their belief that rehabilitation is only possible as part of a theology of individual salvation.
When I visited Lawtey, the Muslim study group was meeting in a glorified broom closet without a religious volunteer. The warden was considering eliminating recreation time for the men so they would be forced to go to the Beaches nondenominational Christian services. (Immersion in religious texts, programs, and classes is supposed to reform and better the self.) Lawtey’s chapel claims to have weekly Qur’an and Torah study groups, as well as Catholic Mass, Native American pipe ceremony, gatherings for Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Hebrew Israel, a religious group based on the belief that African Americans are direct descendants of the ancient Israelites. But the explicitly Christian character of the prison became obvious when the chaplain informed me that many of these groups had not met for some time due to shortages in volunteers. The groups that held regular meetings included Monday-night Bible study, led by Beaches Chapel volunteers in the education building, as well as a class on practical Christian living, Praise and Worship Bible study, the Ken Cooper prison ministry on overcoming addictions, St. Dismas Prison Ministry, and Toastmasters International, an overwhelmingly popular public-speaking group. Many programs in health and wellness, mental health, anger management, and addiction are also administered by Christian faith-based programs. Some examples include a Jesus-centered twelve-step program for overcoming addictions and anger-management classes that are reframed as a religious endeavor with the motto “Only by God’s grace can we manage it.”
Information about other religions is limited. The chapel library at Lawtey has a more extensive collection than the regular prison library, which contains primarily law books and paperback fiction. Since most materials are donated, they represent the eclectic nature of the donor religious organizations rather than a systematized collection. (In any prison, chapel libraries exhibit the near impossibility of establishing a well-formed collection.) Texts range from a Hasidic Jewish calendar to one shelf containing the Qur’an, Zohar, and books on Scientology. There are multiple copies of the Left Behind series and films, and a section of Catholic materials and biographies of saints. The topic of Christianity is organized by subject matter: evangelical witnessing, Holy Spirit, social problems, marriage, conversion biographies, family, parenting, Billy Graham, Chuck Swindoll, Norman Vincent Peale, Christian life, the last days, and spiritual lives.
A controversy over what religious texts a prison should contain gained national attention in 2007. The US Department of Homeland Security ordered prisons to remove certain religious literature it deemed a threat to national security, in direct contradiction to the federal faith-based initiatives goal of providing more opportunities for faith-based learning in prison. The order to confiscate books was implemented and later rescinded due to pressure from various religious groups.16
The conundrum for faith-based prisons in Florida and the majority of US prisons located outside urban areas is the inability to find outside volunteers to facilitate a Muslim, Native American, or non-Christian group. Partly, this is due to the structure of religious programming in prisons in which chaplains, primarily Christians, determine the content. More than seven in ten chaplains (73 percent) in a Pew Research Center study on religion in prison consider access to high-quality religion-related programs in prison to be “absolutely critical” for successful rehabilitation and reentry, and about a third of chaplains (32 percent) who are mainly Christian report that some faith groups have more volunteers than are needed to meet inmates’ spiritual needs.17 Over 71 percent of chaplains in the Pew study are Protestant, with 13 percent identifying as Catholics and 7 percent as Muslim.
The role of a chaplain is a hybrid position for a person who is to serve as spiritual and religious advisor in ostensibly secular spaces like hospitals, the military, and prisons. One possible meaning of the term is keeper of the cloak, a Christian designation that may have emerged in the 1400s when a religious order was founded to provide consolation to those condemned to death. Now chaplains oversee religious life in prison chapels. In her book on the role of chaplaincy, religious studies professor Winnifred Sullivan calls a chaplain an explicit broker between the sacred and the secular.18 The chaplain is paid by secular institutions and beholden to secular authorities, despite the religious character of the work. Chaplains do not report to a church authority.
Many chaplains are trained in their own religious tradition but are required to minister to a wide range of religions. In prisons, chaplains’ myriad duties range from leading worship services in their own religion to facilitating volunteers for religious groups and holidays. The list of the chaplain’s duties in Florida was a page long and included religious education classes, crisis and bereavement counseling, notification of deaths, self-esteem seminars, anger management, cell-to-cell visitation, Ramadan and Passover services, Kairos weekends, and the chapel choir.
In the mid-twentieth century, patients, inmates, and soldiers thought that chaplains had specific ministerial resources particular to each denomination, such that Catholic priests, for example, could offer services that no other denomination’s chaplains could.19 Contemporary chaplains are trained to deemphasize their individual religious identities so that they can provide a nonimposing, noncoercive presence, letting parishioners instead take the lead in terms of any religious specificity. Chaplains have come to serve a role of ministering to what is increasingly understood as a universal spiritual need, which Sullivan labels “a ministry of presence.”20
Tom O’Connor, the former head prison chaplain for the state of Oregon, argues that chaplains have to create a pluralistic space for all faiths that is secular and spiritual. He believes that, like doctors helping patients, all chaplains should administer a spiritual questionnaire or history and ask four simple questions: What is your faith or belief? Is it important to your life? Are you part of a spiritual or religious community? How would you like to address these issues in your program/plan?21 O’Connor says, “Only professional chaplains and other religious services staff are in a position to have the appropriate vision, knowledge, skills and aptitude to engage, train and supervise a wide diversity of religious volunteers in an effective manner for correctional purposes, and in a way that maintains the non-establishment of any given religion and the separation of church and state.”22 This attention to the “spiritual” components of human life—rather than the “religious”—provides chaplaincy programs with legal space in which to maneuver. Spirituality stands for something that is universal and available to all, and thus sidesteps First Amendment restrictions about religion, which can be divisive and partisan.23
In their book comparing chaplaincy in the United States to that in the United Kingdom, James Beckford and Sophie Gilliat argue that the UK chaplaincy functions like a patron because of the established Church of England.24 Everyone is a member of the Church of England by default. It sets up a number of religious options, and prisoners have to accommodate themselves to the categories offered.25 Chaplaincy in the United States might better be characterized as a middle manager or vice president dealing with religious consumers. Chaplains have to recognize a multitude of religious affiliations, but they can simply deprive them of resources. The role of the US chaplain is thus administrative in some regards. In the United Kingdom, the prison has separate spaces for different religions, controlled by the Church of England, whereas in the United States, the chapel is meant to be a neutral space that accommodates everyone, despite the fact that it has the accoutrements of the Christian chapel. For instance, Jummah—Muslim Friday prayers—often occurs in a traditionally Protestant space.
With an estimated two-thirds of all current chaplains affiliated with evangelical and Pentecostal denominations, which often prioritize conversion and evangelizing, and a marked decline in chaplains from Catholic and mainstream Protestant churches, the ideal of neutrality is fraying. The chaplaincy is a professional organization that bestows necessary credentials and grants membership in the American Correctional Chaplains Association; most chaplains have earned a master’s degree and worked for an average of ten years in the prisons.26 But even if the credentialing process is, in theory, open to any person, from any background, not everyone can actually become a chaplain. Atheists and secular humanists may be consumers of chaplaincy services, but the government does not yet permit them to serve as chaplains in hospitals, prisons, or the military. Even the training of chaplains is uneven. Muslim chaplains must receive special training in Judeo-Christian theology, whereas Christians do not have to study Muslim theology; the rationale is that most prisoners express a preference for Christianity. Christian chaplains are also not required to study the history, theology, and practices of other religions, although some do on their own.27 Instead, chaplains with a nondenominational Protestant background are at once constrained by law to provide religious opportunities to all and impelled by their faith to believe fervently in a Christian God.
The result of the peculiar role of the chaplain in state prisons is that non-Christian prisoners are often subject to the whims of state law and of the chaplain; they must petition for space and religious texts. In Texas, the state is being sued for not providing adequate services for Muslim inmates, and in May 2014, US District Judge Kenneth Hoyt ruled that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) had illegally violated the rights of Muslim prisoners by making it almost impossible for them to practice their religion while behind bars.28 As far back as 1969, Muslim prisoners filed lawsuits to make the prisons comply with their religious requirements, such as meals without pork, and permitting them to receive literature about Islam. The state settled in 1977, but in 2012, Texas attorney general Greg Abbott argued that the state should no longer have to abide by that settlement. From 2012 on, the TDCJ regulations stated that groups of four or more prisoners could not meet without either staff or civilian supervision, and could not engage in religious gatherings for more than one hour a week, except with those same stipulations. In his opinion in 2014, Judge Hoyt wrote that “the TDCJ knowingly adopted a policy it knew would impose requirements on Muslim inmates’ religious services that could not be satisfied by volunteers or overcome by Muslim inmates.” By contrast, he said, the TDCJ illegally favored Christian inmates because there were ample civilians and chaplains of that faith in the state to conduct services in prisons.29 (There are only five imams employed by the Texas prison system’s 111 prison units.) The TDCJ seemed to target Muslim prisoners in particular: Jewish and Native American prisoners were intentionally grouped at the same facilities to enable them to practice their religions, unlike Muslim prisoners, who were separated.
To be a Muslim prisoner in a Texas prison is to exist at the lowest end of the religious hierarchy. Rodney is a student in the seminary at Darrington Unit, one of six Muslims, but he is the only one in his junior class. Serious, articulate, and thoughtful with deep wrinkles across his forehead, he always yearned to pursue a college degree, but the prison system is quite restricted. Rodney was incarcerated in Texas at age nineteen and is now thirty-four. When we first met, he seemed stunned to have the opportunity to speak with me. He says, “I cannot believe they asked me to talk with you. It is just . . . It is just shocking to me, you know what I mean?” “Why?” I ask. “Because I feel so out of place in a sense,” he answers. “You know, I mean, you, you . . . it is like a fish out of water, so to speak, and speaking to the curriculum is . . . like the majority of the curriculum is, I want to say, bashing towards certain pillars of my belief.” In order to obtain a college degree, Rodney had requested transfer from another Texas prison where he had been part of a strong, tight-knit Muslim community, but his alienation is intense. “I left a beautiful Muslim community that I was raised as a Muslim in, and I miss my brothers very much, you know. I want to go—I do not want to stay here per se.” He says he is toughing it out to get an education, and for the long haul,
I want to take the things that I am learning here to implement in my family’s life and in my personal life, because one day I plan on going home. I have been here my whole life, basically, so I need something to fall back on, you know. . . . What else is there for me to do while I am incarcerated? I cannot work; we do not get paid for working. I cannot go to college, because I do not have the money to pay for it. So, this is the best thing going.
Darrington, he explains, is decrepit, and people are disrespectful. After years of a measure of privacy, he has found it difficult to face the indignities of group showers and smaller cells. “Being incarcerated in Texas is a heck of an experience you know,” Rodney says. “So you got to make the best of it.”
With the specificity of the convert, Rodney can relate the exact date he became a Muslim: December 29, 2006, immediately after his twenty-sixth birthday. He was impressed by two Muslims he met in a vocational course, one black and the other white. He’d been the top student, but when they arrived, he felt mediocre. “And I was like, ‘Mmm, I been here for a while and this one come in running the show, right.’” One of the brothers read him a passage from the Qur’an that he recites to me, “In the name of God most gracious, most merciful, say he is God, the one and only, the absolute, the eternal. And, there is none like unto Him.” Rodney read it over and over and felt revolutionized in his thinking. He’d been raised a Baptist and believed vaguely in God, but this spoke to him because he no longer felt he needed a mediator in order to have access to God. He impressed the chaplain when he took a class with her called “The Search for Significance” and decided to apply for the seminary. He explains, “She was a good Christian lady, I guess, and when the applications came around for the rest of the year, I got shot down. The second year I was approved.”
In the middle of our conversation, Rodney’s lips curl upward and he pauses. “I’m trying not to smile, but I cannot help it,” he says. “I am enjoying this. This is, this is so unusual for me, you know.” He tells me that he is a stern person and shows me his ID picture; a stone-faced man stares back at me. “This is the most you will ever see me smile,” he says. We agree; it’s more of a grimace. The reluctant grin still in place, he explains, “Well, we do not have an avenue to speak here, really, you know, as a Muslim. This is a Christian program, funded by Christians. I honestly respect it, because even though I do not agree with everything, I am being allowed, I am afforded an opportunity to make history, so to speak. I do not campaign. I just try to do, try to be sincere, and I want people to respect me for who I am, not kissing their rumps and things of this nature.” Clearly, for Rodney, studying in an explicitly Christian program with proselytizing goals creates a constant tension.
Rodney takes a breath. “Okay, I am just going to be one hundred with you; this means me 100 percent real,” he says. He describes a hypothetical situation in which a Christian and Muslim debate, and the Muslim is “very sharp in understanding what he believes in and how to apply that,” whereas the Christian is “not as crisp as he is.” Speaking in the third person, Rodney explains that the Muslim is able to apply history and tangible proof for his beliefs, while the Christian simply relies on his faith. He intimates that it creates a problem with the professors and the students. His anecdote is full of ellipses, pauses, and significant looks because he feels censored, though no one else is in the room. “So this is a stepping stone for me. I am not using it as a platform, but I am using it because it is the best option for me right now. And I think any thinking person will, in my position, do the same. Eat the meat and throw the bones away,” he says. “Have you heard that before?” he asks, and when I tell him I haven’t, he is inordinately pleased. “Oh good, I want to say something original.”
Rodney says he longs for more intellectual discussion and less preaching. In our conversations, Rodney presses me over and over to tell him my religious preference, even when I tell him I am agnostic. “There is nothing that you like more than the other, nothing stands out more than the other to you?” he persists. I tell him that if I had to pick, I would choose Quakers or Buddhists. “I heard about Buddhism,” he says, “but I do not know much about them. Anytime we think about Buddhism, we think of some kind of chubby guy, Buddha.” I tell him a bit about nonviolence and non-attachment, and how even Buddha’s teachings would not constitute a dogma because the idea is to question all things. After considering for a long time, he says, “Yeah, that is good, about letting go of things of the world. We need stuff though.” He is obviously interested, yet the seminary has little material that would give him the sense of the teachings of other religions, their history, or how they are practiced today.
Accommodating non-Christians is an underlying anxiety for the seminaries and faith-based programs. At Angola in Louisiana, Cain seemed at pains to assure me that the Baptist seminary was not a partisan program, iterating the idea of moral rehabilitation. He repeated several times that the head of Louisiana’s ACLU had trained him well, and that he regularly called her on her cell phone. “Forget religion; it’s about morality. As long as it’s fair, I don’t care,” Cain said. However, evangelization to a captive population of prisoners inevitably raises ethical and legal matters; it’s a coercive use of power. To underscore the diversity of the seminary program beyond Baptists, Cain produced a list of all religions represented, like Methodists, Presbyterians, and Eastern Orthodox, but the highest percentage was nondenominational Christian.
The lack of books about and educators from other religions means students understand Christianity as the norm and everything else as an exception or aberration. In one seminary class at Angola, Robson asked the students, “How many of you were exposed to spurious belief like Wicca?” A muscular white man with a goatee and tattoos strode to the lectern and proceeded to sermonize about Wicca as brainwashing. He said that as a child he was exposed to Wicca and to the teachings of Aleister Crowley, a famous British practitioner of a religious movement in the early 1900s that combined beliefs about the occult, sexuality, magic, and paganism. With each of his statements about Wicca, most of them exaggerations, there were audible gasps of disbelief from the students in the room. Contrary to what Cain said to me, Robson told his Angola class, “There is only one liberty, the liberty of Jesus at work in our conscience enabling us to do what is right.”
Nestor’s book has this to say about other religions: “The religions of the world will tell you there are other ways to get to God. They are lying. Buddha, Mohammed, Mary, the Saints, Ellen G. White, Joseph Smith, C. T. Russell, Norman Vincent Peale, L. Ron Hubbard, nor any other religious leader has ever saved a soul from Hell.”30 Nestor’s advice to Christian ministry leaders is to never participate in the faith services of another religion, ever. “Do not speak, do not sing, do not play instruments, do not hand out literature, do not lend them financial aid, do not invite. While the invitation to one of these services may give you the opportunity to share the Gospel with someone and allow you to bring them to your service, do not participate in their rituals, or pray to their God.” In Nestor’s influential book, other forms of Christianity are potentially even more dangerous enemies because their claim to being Christians makes them enticing. These “perversions of Christianity,” according to Nestor, include “Word of faith (Name it and claim it or Blab it and Grab it), The Purpose Driven life, Calvinism, Seven Day Adventists, Hebraic Roots.”
The legal question is how explicitly Christian programs like the seminary operate in a state prison with private support, but also with the assent of the administration to use the prison space and staff. In an article in the Louisiana Law Review, Roy Bergeron, a graduate of Louisiana State University and a lawyer in Baton Rouge, argues that the Angola seminary program would fail both the Endorsement and Lemon tests used by courts to interpret compliance with the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The Lemon test, derived from the 1971 Supreme Court decision Lemon v. Kurtzman, has three criteria: Does the government action in question have a bona fide secular purpose? Does it have the effect of advancing or inhibiting religion? Does it excessively entangle religion and government? The Endorsement test simply asks: Does the government action amount to an endorsement of religion? Bergeron argues that the Angola seminary requires that men attest to the exclusivity of Jesus, and they must take the “Experiencing God” course in order to have the privilege of attending college. The seminary’s stated purpose is to “fulfill the great commission,” which it takes from Jesus ordering his disciples to spread his teachings throughout the world. This means the mandate of the seminary is to spread Baptist Christianity. In addition, the only men who can transfer to other prisons are members of the Baptist seminary. According to Bergeron, the seminary program therefore privileges one kind of religion.
Sitting in Robson’s class at Angola was Darren Hayes, arms crossed, a barely detectable annoyed look on his face. Unlike most of the men there, Hayes received a college degree before he was imprisoned at Angola. Now forty years old, he’s been in prison for eight years and has already graduated from the Baptist seminary. There have been only a few Muslim prisoners in the Angola seminary program since its inception. Hayes reads Qur’anic Arabic and some Hebrew and Greek and relishes comparing biblical and Qur’anic commentaries. Of his early years in the bachelor’s program, Hayes explains, “I was frustrated, and I was argumentative. I wanted to question everything. I had to understand I was a guest in the school. I had choice. They didn’t force me to come.” Now, he’s resigned. The seminary program hasn’t altered his beliefs, but he’s learned to temper his opinions. Of the five other Muslims who just started as freshmen, he says, “I explained to them they shouldn’t be argumentative. Take in the good. You don’t have to believe what he’s saying, and you can learn from them.”
There are approximately 180 Muslims in the main prison of Angola, with close to 300 in the entirety of Angola, including all the prison out-camps, and the prison has a part-time Muslim imam. Cain said, as though it were a positive sign, “We’re the only prison where the Muslim population is going down.” Recently, after becoming disillusioned with the imam, Hayes attempted to hold a Qur’an study session in the prison yard, but the administration shut the group down. “Security disapproves of a new group, thinks it is terrorism. If they did more research and study, maybe they could reconsider. If this were a Christian group, it would be fine. They have no knowledge of Islam. They don’t want groups fighting against each other. But we can have all kinds of Christian groups, right?” Hayes says. I asked Cain why he hadn’t built a mosque alongside the many new chapels. He replied that he simply couldn’t raise the money from the local Muslim community.
The person who paved the way for Darren Hayes is still at Angola. I met Andre Burns, in the oldest chapel in the prison, where he is the Muslim clerk. The chapel is in the central part of the prison where the main cell blocks are located. The administration and prisoners consider it an interfaith space because Cain authorized the construction of new Christian chapels in distant parts of the prison near its out-camps and other housing units, miles away. Burns, in many ways, represents the history of Islam in American prisons, with its attendant legal and political battles. He’s a weathered-looking sixty-five-year-old who has been in Angola for thirty-five years and was in the first Baptist seminary graduating class almost twenty years ago. As a young man in his twenties in 1970s New Orleans, he was a Black Panther party organizer and helped the neighborhood set up food programs for kids. In prison, he became a member of the Nation of Islam, which openly criticized the prison administration and treatment of prisoners. “I wanted a spiritual center to my life,” he explains. The Nation brought order to a violent and chaotic prison. “Our religion called for standing up for a person, if we see somebody trying to rape somebody. We were doing a lot to stop that. It’s a different atmosphere,” he says.
Norris Henderson, his old friend, who visits the prison for Jummah prayers, tells a similar story with more bite. Henderson can afford to, because he’s no longer locked up. He vehemently disagrees with the story that the seminary brought peace and order to the prison. “It happened with the black power movement, the Nation, and the idea that they were their brother’s keeper,” he related. There were five hundred Muslims out of five thousand prisoners, but they were respected, educated, and organized. Others knew that the Muslims improved conditions in the prison by brokering prisoner rights with the administration and different factions in the prison.
Henderson explains that Muslims have always been in the vanguard: “We were the ones to establish things legally, to get legislation for the right to meet.” Everything they have now, the institutional recognition, the Muslims got through struggle. For years, during Ramadan, the Muslims at Angola would have nothing but cornflakes to break their fast each day. Now they have specific meals that are held for them. When Cain arrived, he recognized that the Muslims were serious. Cain knew where they stood and respected them. Unlike Henderson, who completed every program at Angola except the Baptist seminary, Burns entered the seminary only when other educational opportunities dried up. It didn’t change his beliefs, but he says, “I see a lot of similarities between religions. I see there is one God.” The seminary provided Burns with a way to continue his education. Now he assists the imam, makes rounds to the cell blocks, and places people on the call-outs, the lists generated so officers know who should be permitted in which classes or religious services.
Henderson’s advocacy for Muslim prisoners and Burns’s journey from the Nation of Islam to more traditional Sunni Islam is part of a broader history of Muslim legal organizing and institutional shifts in the prison and beyond. The circumscribed diversity of the Angola chapel owes a debt to the Muslim prisoners, who waged an arduous campaign for freedom of religious expression in the 1950s and ’60s and pioneered the recognition of non-Christian practices in prison.31
The Nation of Islam grew simultaneously in the urban black neighborhoods of the North and the prisons that began to fill with black men between the 1950s and 1970s, but it emerged in Depression-era Detroit. It was a religion of resistance to white supremacy and prejudice as well as a new identity for African Americans who were beleaguered and oppressed by the institutional racism of white society.32 From the start, the Nation’s members positioned themselves as religious outsiders. When Elijah Muhammad, a fervent convert, took over from the enigmatic founder W. D. Fard, he solidified the teachings and assumed leadership. Muhammad taught followers a peculiarly American form of Islam, forged in the Southern Baptist church and the racism of his youth.33 His most controversial teaching was about Yacub, an evil scientist banished to an island where he created a bleached-out race of white people as revenge. This wicked race overran superior blacks and ruled the world through cruel oppression. A redeemer would appear after six thousand years in North America in the form of W. D. Fard to help oppressed people rise up.34
In 1942, Muhammad and others resisted the World War II draft and were imprisoned in large numbers. Sentenced to three years in a Maryland federal prison, Muhammad used the time in prison to recruit and to teach others within the degradation of prison. Also in prison in the late 1940s, Malcolm X, serving time for petty theft, encountered the Nation and, upon release, became Muhammad’s deputy and spokesman. The Nation of Islam took root in the prisons of the North, particularly, where they were influenced by Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose members were imprisoned for their refusal to salute the flag and serve in the military.35 Each group found allies in the other as religious outsiders fighting to practice and live separate and religiously focused lives, even in prison. The Nation struggled to prove it was a legitimate religion, when others saw it as a political movement.36
The Nation was one of the original faith-based organizations in prison. Both democratic and secretive, it provided protection to those within it and forbid violence unless necessary. Its members prohibited homosexuality and embodied the idea of being “their brother’s keeper.” Their outside temple supported communication with prisoners and provided them with religious training materials and financial assistance, while offering a broader critique of American society. Malcolm X wrote, “The black prisoner symbolized white society’s crime of keeping black men oppressed and deprived and ignorant, and unable to get decent jobs, turning them into criminals.”37 Prisoners stuck together, existing within and apart from prison population, and their members numbered between sixty-five thousand and a hundred thousand by 1960.
For their political and legal commitments, prison authorities did not want Nation leaders like Malcolm X in their prisons.38 The Nation advised and paid for lawsuits and organizing activities in the prison. The Nation’s foremost battles were legal, paving the way for freedom of religious practice for other religious groups in the future. According to nineteenth-century Virginia case law, prisoners were “slaves of the state.”39 Until the 1960s, prison administrators invoked the master-subject relationship to make sense of the status imposed by incarceration. By 1961, the Nation had one hundred separate lawsuits from prisoners for constitutional protection as a religious group, and it challenged the idea of the slave relationship through claims to religious freedom as a liberating force, even within the confines of prison. In New York, prisoners filed suit, saying that they had been unable to buy the Qur’an and communicate with their spiritual advisors. Prisoners at Green Haven Correctional Facility in New York filed petitions objecting to their inability to have religious services from a clergyman of their own religion. Authorities continued to argue that the Nation was political rather than religious, and newspapers smeared them as radical and potentially dangerous to prison society.40
The prisoners’ rights movement was built upon the activism of Muslim prisoners, who also lobbied for better prison conditions, the right to education, and the right to be free from violence. By 1966, the New York commissioners of the prison system had created a proposal to protect the rights of Muslim prisoners to practice, to recognize Islam as a legitimate religion, and to accommodate dietary needs. The ruling included the right to have Muslim teachers visit the prison, to hold weekly services, to wear religious insignia, to recruit new members, and to receive Muslim materials. The Muslim prisoners’ political agitation and savvy legal work had paved the way for access and the right to practice to all religious groups.
After Nation of Islam prisoners Martin Sostre and James Pierce were placed in segregation at New York’s Green Haven prison because the warden cited them as security risks, they filed suit for persecution and religious discrimination. Judge John Henderson, a federal district judge, ruled that they were members of a legitimate religion but decided against their claim of persecution. After more than a year in segregation, Sostre was transferred to Attica Prison, where he continued his organizing. The Attica uprising of 1971, one of the largest prisoner rebellions for education, resources, and religious accommodation, was organized and peacefully maintained by Muslim prisoners until the state violently quashed it.41
The radical politics of Malcolm X and other black Muslims has been largely repressed by the institutionalization of Islam as just another part of the prison chapel.42 After Elijah Muhammad’s death, his heir, Warith Deen, renounced his father’s version of Islam, while maintaining his social teachings of empowerment and unity. He established the American Muslim Mission and sent members to Islamic universities to study. Over time, the Nation became aligned with more traditional Sunni Islam. Louis Farrakhan, who viewed the mission as too integrationist, maintained the Nation of Islam as a separatist movement against white oppression, arguing that W. D. Fard was a prophet of God.
Men like Henderson and Burns, who came of age in the Nation, moved toward more traditional versions of Islam, while retaining the belief in the importance of unity and social organizing.43 Most Muslim men in prison today are members of traditional Sunni groups, although the Moorish Science Temple of America, a movement founded in 1913 that taught that African Americans were originally Moorish but their heritage was lost during slavery, and the Five Percenters, a Muslim group that splintered from the Nation of Islam in 1964, still have adherents. The other notable shift has been that Muslim groups and leaders are under the direction of the Christian chaplains in most prisons, rendering the group controllable and easily observable. They hire the religious leaders they deem appropriate to come to the prison and administer their programs.
Despite the roots of chaplaincy in the Christian tradition, Muslim chaplains are in prisons in California, New York, and elsewhere. As I’ve noted, even Angola contracts with imams. Through the National Association of Muslim Chaplains, a professional organization started in 2011, Muslim chaplains work in prisons, hospitals, universities, and the military. While the early focus of the Nation was on outreach, or da’wah, to prisoners who might never have heard about Islam, today chaplains and imams stress support and pastoral care. Most chaplains serve a Muslim community in which multiple interpretations of Islam coexist. But, still, Muslim chaplains in correctional facilities are sometimes accused of spreading a radical, dangerous interpretation of Islam to prisoners.
Chuck Colson, the former head of Prison Fellowship who vocally supported religious rights for prisoners, promulgated the idea of Islam as inherently dangerous. He once wrote in a Prison Fellowship newsletter that prisons are “breeding grounds for future terrorists.”44 Colson warned, “No religious sect should be allowed to preach a doctrine that promotes violence, especially in prison.” His solution: “The surest antidote to the poison of hatred and revenge spread by some radical Islamists is Christ’s message of love, forgiveness, and peace.” Colson made it clear that he would not support state funding for an Islamic immersion program in America’s prisons. In the 2012 Pew survey of chaplains, it was primarily the Christian chaplains who saw the potential for extremism in Islam.45
This perception of extremism exists at the faith-based prisons and seminaries I visited in Texas and Louisiana. At Darrington, Rodney told me he was frustrated that Islam is viewed negatively because of stereotypes regarding fundamentalist groups, while Christians escape the same judgments.
You never see the Christian people or whatever, religion being scrutinized as much. Catholics, sometimes because of the, the hanky-panky and stuff that is going on with the pedophiles and stuff like that. I am not being disrespectful, just being honest. But anytime someone commits a crime in America, religion never plays a part unless they are Islamic fundamentalists or someone practic[ing] Islam, and that is the very first thing they will say, instead of just saying this guy pulled a burglary or committed a robbery or something. When a Christian goes out and kills everybody in Columbine, they do not say he is a Christian terrorist. You see, and I think that people need to be more aware of how the media paints pictures of individuals first and foremost.
Christian groups have also played a strange role by arguing for religious liberty cases in prison while railing against Islam as a practice. The work of early Nation of Islam activists like Sostre lives on in contemporary cases about religious freedom, legitimacy, and expression in prisons. There is some irony to the fact that Colson’s InnerChange Freedom Initiative (IFI), a twenty-four-hour Christian immersion program sponsored by Prison Fellowship, owes its ability to practice and meet to the legal agitation of Muslim prisoners.
The contention over religious freedom within prisons is exemplified in the court case brought by Americans United for Separation of Church and State in 2006 against IFI program. The case claimed IFI owed the state of Iowa money for running a partisan Christian program in an entire wing of its state prison, which required participants to become evangelical Christians with attendant benefits and privileges. In June 2006, US District judge Robert W. Pratt ordered IFI to shut down and reimburse the state of Iowa the $1.5 million it had received to fund the program in the Newton Correctional Facility.46 The lawsuit argued that the program promoted evangelical Christianity at state expense. Coercion was a factor in the decision, as people in the program frequently received favorable recommendations from the parole board based on their enrollment and completion of the IFI program. Budgetary constraints had eliminated other programming, and men in the IFI program had larger cells, televisions, and better access to release. Judge Pratt wrote in his decision, “Left with only one true option with which to complete required programming, non-Christian, atheist and agnostic inmates were presented with the dilemma of choosing between early release and personal beliefs; it is understandable why an inmate would choose to compromise the latter.”47 The ruling further reads:
For all practical purposes, the state has literally established an Evangelical Christian congregation within the walls of one its penal institutions, giving the leaders of that congregation, i.e., InnerChange employees, authority to control the spiritual, emotional, and physical lives of hundreds of Iowa inmates. There are no adequate safeguards present, nor could there be, to ensure that state funds are not being directly spent to indoctrinate Iowa inmates.48
Colson and PF president Mark Early launched a campaign to discredit the ruling, solicit funding, and appeal the decision. Although IFI had existed for almost ten years, with six years in Iowa, Judge Pratt wrote: “There was no information presented at trial about whether InnerChange participants are more or less prone to recidivism than other inmates.” Colson and Early also argued that revoking the federal funds they received for IFI was an instance of discrimination and a violation of their religious freedom.49 Early wrote:
Prison Fellowship wants to see a level playing field for people of faith. People of faith should not be excluded from providing services in the public square to those who have volunteered to receive them. We want prisoners to be able to take part in a program—yes, even a Christ-centered one—that will help them change their lives for the better if they desire to do so.50
Neither Early nor Colson envisioned a level playing field for all faiths in prison. The idea of an all-Muslim faith-based prison or program would present an interesting challenge to their arguments. The US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit subsequently confirmed the judge’s ruling, but reversed the part of his decision that ordered Prison Fellowship to terminate the program and return state monies already paid to it. The program continued, without state funds, until 2008, when state authorities ended it.
To survive such constitutional scrutiny, many evangelical faith-based groups began to offer intense immersion programs on a volunteer basis, free of charge to prisons, emphasizing the character-building aspect of the programs, suitable for either religious or secular participation. State funds are now typically not allocated to pay staff or supply religiously oriented materials. Indeed, prisons often claim that community volunteers and prison chaplains can adequately and appropriately meet the diverse spiritual needs of inmates. Non-Christian groups still face obstacles at the state level when recalcitrant or hostile chaplains and prison administrations do not recognize their work as the norm.
The experience of Buddhists in prison is another example of the lack of equality for different religious and spiritual groups. In Donaldson Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison near Birmingham, Alabama, two men from a Massachusetts-based Vipassana Buddhist center ran a three-day silent-meditation retreat. The prison psychologist had seen the film Doing Time, Doing Vipassana, about a prisoners’ meditation program in India. He had encouraged the practice in the prison, and once a critical mass of men had become interested in Buddhism over time, the psychologist invited the Massachusetts leaders to visit. The prison officials allowed a member of the Vipassana center to film the retreat, and it eventually became the documentary The Dhamma Brothers, a name chosen by the men who participated in the retreat and went on to meet regularly to practice meditation together. I participated in a panel discussion with the filmmaker in 2009, and we discussed what had occurred.
During the retreat, the group of men spent three days in silent meditation, living and sleeping together the entire time with the Vipassana practitioners in a part of the prison gym that had been cordoned off for that purpose. It was a rare and unusual occurrence. The film follows the prisoners from their trepidation to the profound inner shifts they report as a result of meditation: “When someone cuts in front of you in the chow line, the first reaction is to push him. The Vipassana technique gives you a mental tool to observe the situation. If you give yourself time to think, you are gonna come up with a better solution.” In their interviews, the leaders and the men never uttered the word “Buddhism,” even when they wrote Buddhist teachings and ideas on paper on the walls. They spoke of the Vipassana program in secular language, stating that meditation was a therapeutic, pragmatic, and scientific technique, avoiding any reference to Buddhism as a religion.
Nevertheless, the Christian chaplain shut down the program and forbid the Dhamma Brothers from meeting informally together once the retreat was over and the psychologist had left. The men had to practice in secret or alone. Three years later, in 2006, when a new warden and commissioner who were more sympathetic took over, they allowed the meditation group to resume. Now they are considering establishing a Dhamma Brothers cell block.51 In the meantime, some of the original Dhamma Brothers were intentionally transferred to other prisons away from their brethren. The chaplain had to decide whether the group was legitimate or not. The chaplain who dismantled the group felt that the Vipassana program competed with his ability to minister to prisoners about Christianity, while the next superintendent viewed it as helpful to a safer-functioning prison.
The courts have a difficult task when asked to decide between the legitimate interests of inmates and the correctional facility. In deciding such cases, the courts now rely on a “balancing test” to help them weigh conflicting issues. The test, decided by the US Supreme Court in 1987 in the case Turner v. Safley, consists of four questions:
1. Is there a valid connection between the regulation restricting a religious practice and a legitimate correctional interest?
2. Are inmates allowed other ways of exercising their right?
3. How much will allowing the inmates to exercise their right affect others in the correctional facility?
4. Are there available alternatives that accommodate both interests?52
The Turner test stood until 1993, when Congress drafted another law that was to restore certain religious freedoms to all Americans, called the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act (RFRA). The act was passed and signed into law in November 1993. Under RFRA, restrictions on religious freedoms in prisons and jails would be upheld only if the government could show that the restrictions served a “compelling government interest.” Further, RFRA required that the religious restriction in question must be the “least restrictive means of furthering that interest.” However, in 1997, the US Supreme Court ruled that RFRA was unconstitutional because it did not maintain the separation of powers necessary in the federal government. The RFRA would apply to the federal government but not to the states. State correctional authorities returned to the guidelines outlined in the Turner test for regulating religion in prison.
The most recent legal ruling related to religion in correctional facilities was developed in the year 2000. The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) was adopted by a unanimous vote in both the US Senate and the House of Representatives in July 2000 and later signed into law by President Bill Clinton. Among other issues, the act ensured that those confined in government institutions such as prisons would be protected in the practice of their faith.53 Evangelical groups such as Prison Fellowship helped draft RLUIPA. In January 2015, the Supreme Court heard another case based on RLUIPA. In Holt v. Hobbs, Gregory Holt, a Muslim prisoner, sued the Arkansas Department of Corrections for prohibiting him from wearing a half-inch beard, which was necessary according to his religious beliefs. The prison warden argued that contraband could be hidden in a beard and thus presented a security risk to the prison.
Today, access to prisoners, money, corporate power, and political influence is not uniform for all prison ministries, and the concept of religious freedom can be used to trump the religious and civil rights and liberties of some groups. The Supreme Court ruled in Holt’s favor, citing the protection of the act, but even in her concurring agreement, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg stated that the protection extended to Holt because it was not harming anyone else. Just months before, in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, the legal team for Hobby Lobby used RLUIPA to argue that Hobby Lobby had the right to refuse health insurance coverage for employees based on its Christian religious principles. Justice Ginsburg, who wrote the primary dissent in the Hobby Lobby ruling, stated that the Hobby Lobby decision could present harm to employees for whom it refused to cover birth-control coverage, and thus the outcome was against the right to religious freedom. The RLUIPA gathers disparate political actors (Prison Fellowship and Americans United both supported the Holt decisions), while having the potential to promote forms of conservative evangelical Christianity. The various cases argued under RLUIPA exemplify the differing legal premises of what exactly constitutes “religion” and the freedom to embrace certain practices within prison.54
While the absolute certainty of Baptists and evangelicals often forecloses curiosity about other religions, for those men like Rodney, marginalized for his race, religion, and foreignness to the prison, his outsider status seems to provide him with the ability to think more critically about religion and the prison in general. He discusses how meeting different people did not close him off, but enabled him to constantly grow and change: “It blessed me with the opportunity to step outside of my own lenses to look at it through your lenses, you see. And from this I have a better understanding of who people are.” Later he admitted, “I thought you were a law officer or some Christian lady from a magazine when I first met you. . . . So, it is always good to give a person the benefit of the doubt. I am not saying be crazy or be foolish, but, you know, give the same measure that you would like to receive, you know what I mean.”
Rodney tells me he is frustrated by the fact that people in prison cling to their own religious certainty and lack curiosity about others. He would prefer a more open educational space where the premise is to question and learn.
If a person will talk to me open-minded, an open-end conversation, I will try to get a feel for where he is and vice versa. But a lot of times, you do not have that, because people are so close-minded. One thing that helped me to accept this was that, just because I was taught something, does not necessarily mean that it is true. So I can kind of identify with the Buddhist by questioning all things. If it cannot stand some scrutiny, maybe it should not [be] taken to be something that [you] placed your entire foundation upon.
Rodney’s implication was that the prison seminary discourages diversity of opinion and viewpoint, thus constricting the men’s view of the world. As Rodney and others noted, despite the history and current cases of legislation around religious freedom and practice in the prison, within most American prisons Christianity is dominant. The idea of the chapel, chaplain, and the concept of “faith” reinforces the assumption that Christianity is the norm. The warden at Lawtey once asked me if men should lose their recreation time so they’d be forced to attend services in the chapel.
Yet, even in a religiously diverse prison in which all groups were represented, with adequate space and time to meet, the deeper question returns to the first penitentiaries in the 1800s, and the role of religious groups within a deeply unjust system. Individual faith is meaningless when there is a lack of access to non-contaminated food or the ability to remain safe and free from violence inside. Record numbers of people are dying in Florida prisons for lack of decent health care. Florida contracted health care to private companies, and now the US Department of Justice may indict the state for violating the constitutional rights of prisoners. Allison DeFoor, director of the Project on Accountable Justice, says of Florida, exemplar of faith-based reform, “If the prison system were a person, it would be screaming for help.”55