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Practicing Faith Benefits Everyone
Reprinted by permission from the November/December 2001 issue of Correctional News, the official newsletter of the California Department of Corrections
Ramadan, Hanukkah, the winter solstice, Christmas - these and other observances mark the fall and winter months as a time of special spiritual significance for people throughout the world.
This is no less true for inmates doing time in California Department of Corrections institutions, where the practice of spiritual faith presents challenges as well as benefits, not only for the individual inmate, but for the institution and the community.
Observance
The religious affiliations of CDC inmates more or less match those of the general population. A study published in 1991 showed that 75 percent of all CDC inmates identified themselves as either Protestant or Catholic; 2 to 3 percent were Muslim; and Judaism and Native American spiritual traditions each represented about half of one percent of inmates. One in five inmates practiced
another religion besides those five faiths or had no religious affiliation at all. A recent count at California State Prison, Solano, for example, showed that inmates there are actively affiliated with 12 different faiths.
To meet the spiritual needs of inmates, each institution maintains chapels and other facilities for holding religious and spiritual observances. All institutions also have at least one Native American sweat lodge.
The department also employs more than 100 Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, Jewish and Native American chaplains to minister to inmates, conduct services and lead observances, and serve as religious experts at CDC's 33 institutions.
At Deuel Vocational Institution, Protestant Chaplain Roland Ruffin conducts six weekly non-denominational services for some 400 Protestant inmates in three locations. A much bigger focus of his efforts are the 38 weekly Christian-themed activities and classes he offers to inmates. These include classes in conflict resolution, parenting and anger management, and groups
devoted to prayer, music and drama.
"These activities address the spiritual component of personhood as a way to promote change in behavior," explains Ruffin. "What you believe is what you behave."
Like other chaplains, Ruffin relies on community volunteers, including ordained pastors and ministers, to lead denominational church services for inmates in seven faiths.
The use of community volunteers is one significant way that CDC institutions accommodate inmates' religious needs. Some three-quarters of the 12,000 community volunteers who help at CDC institutions each year take part in religious activities.
At California medical Facility, Mark Renke, an accounting clerk at CDC headquarters in Sacramento, ministers to hearing-impaired Christian inmates. Renke, who is hearing impaired, established the Deaf Prison Ministry five years ago when the pastor of his church put him in touch with a Protestant CMF chaplain who sought help in meeting the religious needs of deaf inmates.
Three Sundays a month, Renke leads Bible study and prayer for a dozen CMF inmates from a variety of Christian faiths.
"I know that being deaf can be a very lonely and isolating handicap," Renke explains. "When I became aware that there are deaf men so isolated, not only because they were in prison but because there is no one who can communicate with them, my heart was touched."
Renke's is strictly a volunteer effort. With some support from his family, Renke pays his own travel costs and also buys inmates special Bibles written for hearing-impaired readers.
Next door at CSP-Solano, a handful of Buddhist inmates are taught by two community volunteers who each lead a monthly half-day Buddhist meditation retreat.
For several years, the prison's Buddhist inmates were self-directed, reading and practicing meditation individually and as a group. When the inmate who led the group was transferred several years ago, the group contacted the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, a national organization whose activities include supporting Buddhist practice inside jails and prisons, for assistance in finding a teacher. The organization contacted Mary Mocine, a Zen Buddhist priest from Vallejo with experience leading Buddhist teachings and meditation in correctional settings.
The bimonthly retreats, led alternately by Mocine and Jim hare, a lay Zen teacher from Sacramento, include alternating periods of sitting and walking meditation, chanting, and discussions of Buddhist teachings.
"These guys are very serious," observes Mocine. She says their practice helps them become more grounded. "It supports them in what they're doing to turn the finger that's blaming others to looking at themselves."
Accommodation
For the department, accommodating religious practice is strictly a legal duty. Under state and federal law, and the terms of several important court decisions, the department must provide inmates with reasonable opportunities to exercise their religious freedoms.
"Our concern is not to place a value on any religion," explains Barry Smith, who coordinates inmate religious programs for the department. "We're only concerned with whether a religious practice can be accommodated within the correctional setting."
Inmates' expressions of faith come in all forms. They include attendance at weekly chapel services, practices such as daily prayers and fasting during Lent and Ramadan, and the observance of sacred days such as Easter, Rosh Hashana and End al-Fitr, as well as full moons, equinoxes and solstices.
Followers of Native American traditions participate in the sweat lodge ceremony, a purification ritual that takes place outdoors in a specially built hut heated by a small, open fire.
Inmates are allowed to possess such sacred objects as the Bible and the Quran, crucifixes and rosaries, yarmulkes and prayer shawls used in Jewish prayer, and Native American medicine pouches containing sacred herbs, stones and animal parts.
When an inmate has a spiritual request that has not already been accommodated at the institution or is not reflected in department policy, the institution's community resource manager, who supervises religious programs, typically turns to a local authority from that faith to determine whether the subject of the request is essential to the practice of that faith.
Yet prison security remains the primary consideration. "It's a constant balancing act," says Smith. He notes that the decision to refuse to accommodate an inmate's spiritual request is not a judgment of the religion itself. "When we deny an inmate's request concerning a religious practice, it's not the religion we're denying, it's what the religion requires.
Benefits
"We should have no activities that do not contribute to making California safer," declares Tom Carey, warden at CSP-Solano. "Religious and spiritual programs teach peace, brotherhood and charity, and that makes everyone safer, both in prison and in the community."
Mike Valdez, CSP-Solano's community resource manager, notices a difference between the behavior of those who actively practice a faith and those who do not. "If an inmate is actively involved in something that gives him a sense of self-worth, a sense of humanity, then he causes
fewer problems," says Valdez. "If a guy's in church, he's not making a shank."
CDC has no figures to measure how participation in religious programs affects inmate behavior. However, such research has been conducted in other states by Prison Fellowship Ministries, a Christian organization that provides programs to prison inmates throughout the U.S.
One study showed that inmates who attended Prison Fellowship programs committed two and half times fewer infractions than inmates who did not attend the programs. In another study, inmates who attended 10 or more Prison Fellowship Bible studies in a year were nearly three times less likely to be rearrested during 12 months after release than a group of similar inmates who did not attend the organization's programs. Similarly, only 14 percent of those who
attended at least 10 Prison Fellowship Bible studies in a year were rearrested, compared with 41 percent of the non-Prison Fellowship group and about the same percentage of those who attended the organization's programs less frequently.
Posted by editor on June 7, 2004 02:35 PM