Prison Fellowship says the U.S. has done a great job of getting criminals off the street. What we haven’t done a good job of, says the ministry, is getting criminals ready to come back onto the street. The president of Prison Fellowship shares with Phil Fleischman about a program that challenges the Church to help former inmates transition back into society.
The following interview was originally aired October 13, 2009 on Moody Radio’s “Prime Time America” show.
Prison Fellowship says the U.S. has done a great job of getting criminals off the street. What we haven’t done a good job of, says the ministry, is getting criminals ready to come back onto the street. The president of Prison Fellowship shares with Phil Fleischman about a program that challenges the Church to help former inmates transition back into society.
The nation’s prisons are home to about 2.3 million people at any given time. Over the course of a year, nearly 700,000 inmates will be released. But within three years, two-thirds of them will be back behind bars, including many who had accepted Christ.
Mark Earley: We found historically that men and women who came to Christ in prison, and were really doing well, when they got out, they came to prison really at the same rate as anybody else, because those early days—those first six months to a year—are really so tough.
Prison Fellowship is working to get faith-based organizations to step in and help those inmates safely navigate their way back into society. One of the ways to do that, says ministry president Mark Earley, is through the use of regional conferences called Out4Life. The events are being held in a total of ten states between now and next June, and each one is co-sponsored by that state’s department of corrections.
Mark Earley: We need their help. They run the prisons. We need their help in getting these men and women ready. And then to that, we invite any and all churches that are interested in this—any and all Christian organizations that are doing it. We have a lot of organizations at the community level that provide job training and clothes and substance abuse counseling for inmates coming out if they need it. Family services if they need that. So we’re bringing together all of the Christian community in all kinds of forms, as well as the departments of corrections to form a network in the large metropolitan areas of these states where most of these inmates are returning so they can make it, and make a transition. And, quite frankly, the most important piece of this is getting them attached to a local church and getting a mentor involved in their life who can continue to disciple them on the outside.
Raeanne Hance: I think one of the most interesting things about the conference is that it opens up with a town hall forum, and there’s a panel of people from all different walks. It could be an employer, an ex-offender, the parole officer, the department of corrections, legislators, and so forth. And the people at the conference have the opportunity to ask this board questions about reentry and about ministry.
Raeanne Hance is the executive director of Prison Fellowship Florida and Georgia. She says in addition to the town hall-style meetings, the upcoming Georgia Out4Life conference will also feature a number of workshops.
Raeanne Hance: . . . things about how inmates can get employed, where they can go to live—great resources for the people of the community.
And it’s the community—especially the Christian community, says Mark Earley—that can play a vital role in helping former inmates make good choices upon their release. He says more and more churches are realizing the importance of this ministry.
Mark Earley: There are a growing number of churches who now have historically gone into prison and done prison ministry who also recognize now that they also need to help these inmates they have been ministering to make the successful transition back to the outside.
In fact, says Mark, research shows that when a church program is in place, recidivism rates fall from as high as 60 percent or more down to only eight percent. But without church or ministry coming alongside them, says Mark, an inmate is more likely to end up in trouble again after leaving prison.
Mark Earley: The analogy I use to help Christians understand this is in the early days of the missionary movement of the Church, we often would send out missionaries solo to a foreign country to do evangelism and plant churches. And we found that a lot of those missionaries got wiped out. They couldn’t survive on their own. The temptation to sin was too great, the culture they were adapted to was too great, and they became a basket case. We realized we had to send men and women out in teams as missionaries to other countries. Well, the same thing is true for these men coming out of prison. Right now, they basically come out alone. They are given $25.00 or $50.00 at the gate and a bus ticket to go back to the community they came from. Often times there is no family to go to, there are no jobs, they don’t have a place to live. If they were drug addicts, they wind right back up on the street corner with their old friends, and guess what happens? So we need these men to be on a team of other believers—and that team is the local church. And they need a mentor and accountability partner to walk with them. And when that happens, we see great success—huge success for these men and women who have accepted Christ in prison when they come out.
An example of one such success story, says Raeanne Hance, is a woman in Florida. Upon her release from prison, a local church offered her the use of a small house it owned while she began trying to establish a new life.
Raeanne Hance: People in the church gave her leads to get a job; they gave her clothing; they bought her toiletries; they helped her with her food. And within three days of leaving she had a job in a donut shop. Through a series of things that happened, she lost that job—no fault of her own, it just happened—and right at that moment the church had a woman that was going out on maternity leave, and they had her fill in until the woman came back.
In that space of time, the former inmate found a job herself in—of all places—a bank.
Raeanne Hance: . . . which is a miracle in itself, because of her crime. But because the Lord had just transformed this woman, the people in the bank—the chairman of the board and others voted and said, “Yes, we will let her come in and be in the bank.” She’s working there to this day, and that’s 19 months later.
While the statistics indicate that stories like hers are the exception, Mark Earley hopes the Out4Life conferences can begin to make such stories more common. Conferences, says Mark, are attempting to answer an American corrections system which he says is broken.
Mark Earley: All it unfortunately is doing primarily is warehousing inmates for the years of their sentence and releasing them back on the streets, and when they are released, they are as savvy—if not more savvy—as criminals as they were when they went in.
In addition to that, prison population has increased tenfold in the last 30 years. We’ve gone from having about 300,000 people in prison to 2.3 million people in prison in the United States—more people than any other country in the world. And we’re simply warehousing these individuals.
Our goal at Prison Fellowship is to see many of these inmates who want to change their lives and can change their lives to be able to do so through Jesus Christ. And we think that with what we can offer on the inside and what we can bring together with churches on the outside to help these men and women when they are released can make a huge impact on the criminal justice system in the United States, as well as a huge impact on transforming the lives of these individual prisoners in Jesus Christ.
For Prime Time America, I’m Phil Fleischman.
