Called to Heal the Brokenhearted: Stories from Kairos Prison Ministry International

INTRODUCTION

American Prisons and the Kairos Challenge

Kairos Prison Ministry International has been offering intense three to three-and-a-half-day weekend retreats in medium- and maximum-security prisons since 1976. Forty or so volunteers—from very liberal Christian backgrounds to very conservative Christian backgrounds—build a team over several months to prepare for the long Kairos weekend. When the teams go into prisons, they do their best to carry out the Kairos slogan: listen, listen, love, love. Men visit men’s prisons, women visit women’s prisons. As a group, the inmates, or residents as they often like to be called, have received little, if any, love in prison; few people have really listened to them: to their anger, their guilt, their boredom, their fear, their hopes, even at times their joy. Outside of what is said when they are arrested and tried, few know the residents’ stories. At this writing, Kairos is active in 300 prisons and juvenile detention centers in the United States and in nine foreign countries. Each year over 30,000 volunteers serve over 20,000 inmates. Since its beginnings in 1976, Kairos has served an estimated 250,800 inmates.

I have been involved with Kairos since 1991 and have served on Kairos teams in several states. During the Kairos retreat, November 7–10, 2013, at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, I was once again heartened by what just about always takes place. It was the fifty-sixth Kairos retreat offered at Angola (as the prison is commonly called) since 1993 when Kairos first began there. In the highly structured program, three free people and six residents sit at one of six, seven, or eight tables for most of the time. They listen to many talks (given by volunteers and residents) and take part in various activities, which I describe in some detail in chapter 5. But during most of what Kairos calls Family Table Time, volunteers and residents alike tell something of their stories and listen to others tell their stories. Kairos has now expanded to four other Louisiana prisons; the structure of each is much the same.

The focus of this book is Kairos #53 in November 2011 at Angola. During that long weekend, I sat at my Family Table (Table of St. Mark) and listened closely to the many talks given and to the follow-up conversations at our table. The first thing that struck me was that a Muslim imam (a resident minister) took an active part in this decidedly Christian program. He joined in all the discussions and was not at all put off by the Jesus talk. At our last session when we were saying good-bye to everyone at the table, he said, I am as much a Muslim as ever, but this has been a great experience, and now I have you, my new Christian brothers. The Qur’an says Muslims and Christians should be brothers.

But it wasn’t just the ease with which the imam moved into the family discussions. All nine of us at the table eventually forgot who was white, who was black; who was Christian, who was not; who was conservative, who was liberal; and, amazingly, we forgot who was free, and who was not. Thankfully for me, the group even forgot who was young (we had two nineteen-year-olds in our group serving long sentences) and who was older (I was seventy-two at the time). We were just Tyrone, Jim, Qadar, Alvin, Freddie, William, and so forth. Just people sitting around a table for most of three twelve-hour days telling our stories and listening appreciatively to the stories of others. That forgetting is key to Kairos’s success.

I begin this book by telling about events leading up to Kairos #53, and near the end I write about Kairos #56 in November 2013. When I completed Kairos #56, I was more than ever taken with the words of a longtime Angola inmate, Checo Yancy, who is now a Kairos outside volunteer. He says that Kairos, like his storefront church in Baton Rouge, is anointed to heal the brokenhearted. It may be hard for some Kairos volunteers to think of themselves as anointed, but we do feel called to heal the brokenhearted: the residents, the victims (now often called survivors)—and ourselves.

Programs like Kairos are needed more than ever to serve our huge prison system that, I believe, works neither for the inmates, nor for the communities they come from, nor for the rest of us. One out of every 100 American adults is confined in one of our state or federal prisons or jails—2.3 million altogether—the most per capita of any country in the world. If the trend continues, over the next generation more than 60 million of our citizens will have been incarcerated at some time in their lives. By contrast, on January 8, 2014, the New York Times reported that Germany and the Netherlands incarcerate about one-tenth as many of their people as we do ours.

On February 17, 2012, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that Louisiana leads the world in its incarceration rate: 881 of every 100,000 of our residents (adults and children) are currently behind bars. Mississippi is a distant second. The national average is 502 prisoners per 100,000 people. Many of these men and women will spend much or all of their lives in prison. If you count the number of people in Louisiana who are under correctional control (including parole and probation) and those who have been released but with felony convictions (which prevent them from getting most jobs), the number of those penalized by the Louisiana criminal justice system rises from almost 1 in 100 to 4 or 5 in 100.

In her recent and potentially culture-changing book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander writes that there are more African American males under correctional control—in prison or jail, on probation or parole—than there were male slaves in 1850. At the present time, 7 out of every 100 African American men between the ages of thirty and thirty-four are in prison. Think of how many of them could have been productive citizens in the struggling communities they had to leave. With so many fathers in prison, it is often very difficult for single mothers to keep their children out of a life of crime.

Founded thirty-eight years ago by a lawyer named Tom Johnson at the Union Correctional Institution at Raiford, Florida, Kairos Prison Ministry International now serves those 300 prisons and juvenile detention centers in the United States and abroad. (A new program called Torch works with young people in twenty-four juvenile detention centers.) In its carefully planned long weekends, Kairos offers essentially the same program year after year, place after place. At this writing, nearly 2,400 inmates at Angola have taken part in fifty-seven intensive three-day Kairos programs, forty or so at a time. The largest maximum-security prison in the nation, Angola is presently home to over 6,000 inmates, 4,500 of whom will never leave that place.

I hope the general reader will appreciate as much as I do the mostly untold stories of how a faith-driven program, like Kairos, can be transformative both for the inmates and also for the volunteers who work with them. As you read on, you will see that instead of doing much summarizing or paraphrasing, I let the residents and volunteers from Kairos #53 speak for themselves. I began this project only listening, taking so-called oral histories, but eventually came to realize that Called to Heal the Brokenhearted is my story too, so the oral histories became more like conversations in which I tried not to talk too much. That part was easy since I found what my friends were saying—residents and volunteers alike—fascinating as they took me inside the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. It is a world I now visit often.

I’d like to think that our judges and elected officials who imprison those 2.3 million people will also appreciate the stories told in this book. How many of those inmates could have been kept out of prison in the first place? How many, with proper reentry support, could leave prison now and become productive citizens? And what about those who must stay in prison because they just can’t handle freedom? How might they find a better life for themselves even there? Better for them and better and safer for security and other staff—and less expensive to manage.

Stories abound—especially on television—of the violent lives of the people we incarcerate, but those stories can be deceiving. Offenders, even those guilty of the worst crimes, can and do change when given the right opportunities, or so I believe.

Ike Griffin, executive director of Kairos Prison Ministry International from 1990 to 2001, recently described typical American prison life in the scores of prisons he has known intimately. Then Griffin said what must be done.

Life in prison is fearful, oppressive, lonely and boring. Prisons, being institutions of great autonomy, isolation and mystery, are scary places for anyone entering for the first time, whether they enter as an invited guest or as a sentenced felon. An inmate newcomer is subjected to two orientations: one is a formal presentation delivered by the administration and the other is more informal, presented by a delegation of inmates.

The new boot is rapidly brought to an understanding of the prisoners’ code and the current pecking order in place for that particular institution. The informal presentation is often punctuated with threats of, or real, acts of violence. Violence upon inmates is strictly forbidden by prison policy, but administrators cannot protect every inmate unless that inmate agrees to a special prison within the prison called Administrative Segregation. Even there, inmate-to-inmate violence is not unheard of. Fear walks with each inmate for as long as he or she is incarcerated.

Prison life is oppressive because prison procedures are designed to discourage and disallow individual decisions. Gone are the prisoner’s right to self-expression through personal appearance. Clothes, jewelry, hairstyle and facial hair are all regulated. Gone is any personal wealth an individual may have enjoyed in the free world. Gone is the freedom to communicate by fax or e-mail. Phone conversations are controlled and monitored, and letters are routinely censored. Privacy is a thing of memory. Showering is a public affair and relieving one’s bowels is performed within easy vision of anyone who cares to watch. One eats whatever is served in the mess hall, like it or not, and is allowed only ten minutes to dawdle. Since it is widely accepted that prisoners have come to prison as a result of acting on bad decisions, almost all decisions are removed from a prisoner’s daily experience.

Prisoners are lonely because community is discouraged. Separation and isolation of inmates is reinforced by a negative sub-culture within the prison, where the weak are preyed-on by the strong and sentimentality is viewed as weakness. Love does not happen without vulnerability, and vulnerability is disastrous in a prison environment. The only relationships prevalent in prisons are connections based on domination. In such a relationship, neither the master nor the slave is nurtured. The master is served but not satisfied; the slave is allowed to exist by serving the master.

Prison routine is boring because of the unchanging nature of everyday life. One fear-ridden, oppressive and lonely day leads to another and another until a week of the routine is accumulated and that is followed by another week and another until a month has gone by, and that month joins a procession of like months until a complete calendar has passed. Prisoners who have accumulated five, ten, twenty or more calendars are so bored they do not even recognize the boredom. They eat, sleep and move through each day as in a trance, except they are forever vigilant lest some fearful danger befall them. Depression and paranoia are the illnesses of incarceration. Distrustful eyes dart here and there taking in every possible danger, hidden in an expressionless mask of a face. No one can be trusted.

Over the years Griffin has helped Kairos develop its transforming strategy in places like Angola. He writes:

So what is the future for inmates? Absent programs to help them break free of isolation, fear and boredom, their future is severely limited. If nothing is done to help them make better decisions, they will continue to make bad decisions. If they do not learn about love, they will be incapable of receiving or giving love. If they do not learn something about parenting skills, they will continue to be sperm-donors for children who will more than likely grow up to be prisoners themselves. If prisoners are not taught social skills, they will continue to be antisocial, and will return time and again to prison, there to be a spending opportunity, or rather an obligation, for public tax dollars.

In his profoundly moving book In the Place of Justice, Wilbert Rideau shows just how far society must go to fully rehabilitate the most antisocial inmates in the prisons Griffin describes. In 2005 Rideau was briefly incarcerated in Louisiana’s Calcasieu Parish Prison after serving forty years in prison, mostly at Angola. Himself African American, he was amazed, horrified—and heartbroken—at the level of hopelessness and destructiveness he encountered among his young and black temporary dorm mates, some headed for a lifetime in prison, hurting many along the way. Things were bad enough when he was first incarcerated, but are even worse now.

He writes:

My guess is that most of these youngsters never held a job. They are not part of the American economy and exist at the fringes of society.

They display adult comprehension and abilities in only a few things. For example, one man I met in my dorm was expert at dope pushing and the economics attached to it, but was largely ignorant and inept at everything else. He planned on getting some bitch pregnant when he got out.

I asked why, and he looked at me puzzled. That’s part of being a man. That’s what you supposed to do, so your name lives on after you dead.

Love and a relationship don’t enter the picture, and he had no plans to care for the child.

That’s on her, he said, then laughed. If she don’t want a baby, she shouldn’t open her legs.…

It was painful for me to look at these street-raised weeds, these outcasts and misfits. I know only too well that they do not care about a world that does not value them. This makes them walking time bombs.

The Kairos Prison Ministry strives to meet the challenges that Griffin names and Rideau describes—as the forty or so inmates meet with the forty or so volunteers over those three twelve-hour days and stay in close touch after that. Ike Griffin believes—and I want to believe—that Kairos and programs like it will eventually succeed in transforming the prisons that welcome Kairos and programs like it. Inmates who have thought the worst and done the worst can find ways to live productive lives when released, and find ways to live productive lives even if never released.

Broad-based Christian, Kairos does not evangelize in the usual sense of that word. As I have said, volunteers go into prisons to carry out the Kairos slogan: listen, listen, love, love. Certain other faith-driven programs and secular programs strive to do the same thing. I say secular because, of course, religious programs do not have a monopoly on listening and loving. But maybe Kairos does the listening and loving best.

If there is going to be significant prison reform in this country, which above all means drastically reducing the number of people we incarcerate, Michelle Alexander argues that society must support something akin to the massive civil rights movement in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, or the Third Great Awakening, the transforming religious and social justice movement of the second half of the nineteenth century. Alexander is probably right. I believe four things need to happen.

First, the voting public must take seriously the scholarly research of people like Michelle Alexander and William Stuntz. In his monumental The Collapse of American Criminal Justice (2011), Stuntz argues, along with Alexander, that the criminal justice system, which leads to mass incarceration, is not just. The privatization of prisons may be the most unjust thing of all. In his astounding and influential article in the New Yorker (January 30, 2012), The Caging of America, Adam Gopnik quotes from the annual report of one of the largest for-profit prison enterprises, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). Gopnik calls the report the most chilling document in recent American life. For-profit prison operations, paid for by the states, may not use the same language these days, but the truth emerges in this quotation from the CCA’s 2005 annual report:

Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities…. The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.

The more people incarcerated and the less spent on them, the more the profit for investors. The CCA spends millions of dollars lobbying state policy makers.

Second, the voting public and the politicians who represent us must come to believe that the huge cost of imprisoning so many of our people can be drastically reduced without increasing the threat of violence to us and to our communities. In today’s strapped economy, state and federal governments spend approximately $80 billion annually locking people up, according to the Brookings Institute. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) noted recently that over the last twenty-five years, state corrections spending grew by 674 percent, substantially outpacing the growth of other government spending, and becoming the fourth-largest category of state spending. Moreover, those with felony convictions released into society may never get full-time work as tax-paying members of society.

Much of the money spent on incarceration could be spent on crime prevention programs; on diversionary programs, like drug rehabilitation; and just as important on programs that successfully help inmates reenter society after serving time in the prisons Griffin describes. Too often, former inmates are given $20 and a bus ticket and told to go make a life.

In chapter 10 Keith Nordyke (a defense lawyer) and Jimmy LeBlanc (secretary of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections) emphasize the huge need for effective reentry programs sponsored by government agencies, faith communities, and other organizations. The programs must start by finding food and shelter and then work for those who are released. Nordyke points out that with felony convictions, returning former inmates often move from being locked in to locked out of the society they are reentering. With a felony conviction, it is often impossible to get a decent job. Offenders cannot receive food stamps; often they are ineligible for public housing. And they are often scorned by many family members and old friends. Nordyke believes that one in twenty of all Louisianans is either under correctional control or, though free, effectively locked out because of a felony conviction.

Fiscal conservatives like Jeb Bush (former Florida governor), Newt Gingrich (former Speaker of the House), Rick Perry (former governor of Texas), and Grover Norquist (the antitax hard-liner) are leading a movement called Right on Crime to replace the decades of the failed Tough on Crime or War on Crime, championed by Democrats as well as Republicans. Texas and Arkansas, for example, have saved hundreds of millions of dollars by refraining from increasing the prison population as planned, and at the same time reducing crime through programs such as drug rehabilitation. A similar national movement, Smart on Crime, is becoming more and more influential.

On August 13, 2013, Attorney General Eric Holder, motivated both by his sense of justice and by the huge cost of imprisoning so many of our people, ordered federal prosecutors to slow up on their criminal charges for relatively minor drug offenses and to find ways to release older offenders no longer a threat to anyone. He said of our mass incarceration: Too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law enforcement reason. He pointed out that while the American population has grown by one-third since 1980, the prison population (jails, state prisons, and federal prisons) has grown by 800 percent. The human and moral costs, he said, are impossible to calculate. Five percent of the world’s population lives in the United States; 25 percent of those incarcerated are imprisoned in our nation.

Sounding very much like Eric Holder, Marvin Frankel, a federal judge, wrote in his 1972 influential book Criminal Sentencing: Law Without Order: My basic premises about sentencing include a firm conviction that we in this country send far too many people to prison for terms that are far too long. Frankel blamed the problem largely on incompetent sentencing-judges supported by a voting public that put no pressure on them or on the judicial system to figure out how sentencing could best serve the public interest as well as the victims and the offenders. He was especially disappointed with the lack of interest in sentencing at our law schools. Things seem to have gotten much worse over the last forty-plus years. In Louisiana, for example, both judges and prosecutors will tell you that they learned next to nothing about sentencing while in law school.

Third—and this is especially where Kairos comes in—the voting public must come to believe that offenders, even those guilty of terribly violent crimes, even those weeds Rideau painfully describes, can and do change, often with help from programs like Kairos. That is the thesis of this book—but am I right? I do not focus on the why question—why there is so much evil in the world (especially among offenders and those responsible for our demonic mass incarceration)—the Job question. But I do speak to the how: how can evil be transformed into something good? What you meant for evil, Joseph says to his brothers who had sold him into slavery many years earlier, God used for good (Genesis 50:20).

The stories of those we imprison need to be told—by them and by outside volunteers who work closely with them. Their stories contradict what so many Americans believe about those we incarcerate—not only are they unredeemable in the popular mind, but they are not even worth thinking about. Just lock ’em up and throw away the key. I have greatly appreciated the recent work of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, but things were different in the past. Many correction officers contributed to the lock ’em up and throw away the key widespread mentality. In preparation for a Kairos event in 2004 at what was then the Washington Correctional Institute (near Bogalusa, Louisiana), the correction officer training us said, If you want to know what convicts are like, imagine a horse turd. Now, you might see something that looks like whipped cream on the top, but remember that’s shit too.

I have chosen to focus on the inmates convicted of mostly violent crimes for two reasons: first, that is the group with whom Kairos generally works; and second, as national prison reform moves forward, the focus will naturally be on victimless, low-level drug and property crimes. But those guilty of more serious crimes, including violent crimes, need their stories told as well. And whether prison reform takes hold or not, many who were the most violent will eventually be released into society. Who are they, and how can they change?

I hope that the stories inmates and volunteers tell in this book will convince readers that the so-called worst of the worst of the worst are redeemable. And if they are redeemable, then everyone—with the right kind of love, the right kind of healing—is redeemable. If inmates can’t handle freedom and thus cannot be released from prison, they can still be treated as fellow human beings. Warden Burl Cain (at Angola since 1995) seems to be showing the way—both to prepare inmates for the outside world and to make imprisonment more humane for those who will never leave. For one thing, in Cain’s system, the older, more seasoned inmates help the younger inmates as pastoral mentors and teachers in the eight vocational training programs that Angola offers. When it eventually comes time for the lifers to die, Angola inmates, working as volunteers in the Angola hospice program, help them make that transition.

When people ask me how I know that an inmate is or becomes redeemable, I say, I know when I realize that he or she would be welcome to visit in our home in New Orleans.

Fourth and finally, the victims/survivors of crime must have a place at the table as prison reform is envisioned. While the survivors are not the focus of this book, I join with all who support them. I realized early on that I needed to understand what the victims of crime go through, especially the loved ones of those murdered. As one mother who lost her son said, There is no suffering any greater. No one wants to talk with us. It’s just too painful.

In chapter 4—What About the Victims?—I ask them to speak for themselves. How might they best find healing? Many victims are themselves incarcerated. No surprise here, as violence begets violence. Recently, the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections appointed me to serve as a mediator in structured conversations between the survivors of violent crime and their offenders. Both survivors and their offenders must agree to the mediations, which we prepare for over several sessions with both sides before the mediations themselves. So I continue to learn about the needs of the survivors and how faith communities and other volunteer organizations can support them.

As I have mentioned, Called to Heal the Brokenhearted focuses on the fifty-third Kairos weekend at Angola, November 10–13, 2011 (three twelve-hour days). In Part I, I tell of experiences leading up to Kairos #53, including the chapter What About the Victims? In Part II, I write about Kairos #53 itself: what happened overall, how five inmates or former inmates experienced it, how five volunteers experienced it. Often it is easier for the volunteers to tell the stories of the inmates than it is for the inmates to do so themselves. For obvious reasons, the inmates have to be most cautious in what they say about themselves. When necessary, the volunteers disguise the identities of the inmates they talk about.

In Part III, I tell of how Kairos #53 led to other prison ministries, including ministries on Death Row, both at Angola and at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women at St. Gabriel. I describe how Kairos works in other states, making the point that Kairos is pretty much the same everywhere. And I ask a non-Kairos defense lawyer (a leading Louisiana advocate for prison reform), a reform-minded judge (who has led the Louisiana Sentencing Commission), and the secretary of Louisiana’s Department of Public Safety and Corrections to give their views on our mass incarceration, on what needs to change, and on Kairos itself. In chapter 11 I tell what happened at Kairos #56 at Angola (November 7–10, 2013). In chapter 12 I speak of the challenges ahead for Kairos, especially in Louisiana, but I am mindful of how similar Louisiana Kairos is to Kairos everywhere. In chapter 13 I tell of my day in court, when I was invited to give my views on incarceration in Louisiana and throughout the nation before the Louisiana Sentencing Commission. And I conclude with one last Kairos story.

In the afterword Jed Horne, the former city editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, responds to Kairos from the point of view of a secular journalist. He speaks to a most important question: what can religious programs like Kairos (or other programs devoted to listening and loving) contribute to the growing secular movement to reform the criminal justice system? If programs like Kairos do expand in prisons, how can they meet the ACLU test of freedom of religion? Jed Horne is the author of Desire Street: A True Story of Death and Deliverance in New Orleans, the story of a man tried five times for the same murder by an incompetent legal system, and Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City, the spellbinding epic of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, one of the worst disasters of our time.

In Appendix A I include the resolution from the national Kairos Prison Ministry Executive Committee (June 16, 2009) that ensures that Kairos volunteers respect and appreciate the contributions of all Christian denominations. In Appendix B I include a working paper on sentencing reform prepared for the Louisiana Sentencing Commission. I serve on two committees of the commission.

Called to Heal the Brokenhearted is also my story: how I, as a young Episcopal clergyman, became involved in prison ministry in the first place over forty years ago, what I have learned about prisons and the people who live in them; how I have seen up close Kairos making a significant difference in prisons, drawing on the best of the Christian faith. Like former prosecutor John Musser—the man most responsible for bringing Kairos to Louisiana—I was completely flabbergasted when (in 1991), during a Kairos event in Texas, I saw just how Kairos helps change lives in the opaque institutions we call corrections facilities and penitentiaries.

And finally I tell of how Kairos changed my life. For one thing, working with inmates and volunteers alike, I came to realize that maybe we Episcopalians, not so lovingly called God’s Frozen People, might learn something from those Jesus-talking members of the Christian faith that we too easily describe as overly demonstrative in their conversations about religion. I admit to being a bit squeamish when I hear talk about who’s saved, implying that everyone else isn’t. I applaud my sisters and brothers of Kairos for being broad-based Christian (see Appendix A), but I regret that during Kairos gatherings we don’t hear more about Christ’s love given and received by those not likely to ever call themselves Christian. Despite my reservations, what drives me to fully support Kairos is that it works, and few, if any other prison programs, work as well. I also found healing for my heart.

As secular prison reformers do their part in convincing the voting public of the drastic changes needed in the criminal justice system, I hope that more and more they will call on people of faith, residents and volunteers alike, who can also convince the public—maybe not through statements or statistics but through the stories they tell. The great theologian Paul Tillich (1886–1965) is often quoted as saying: Love without justice is sentimentality, justice without love is legalism. Secular reformers speak, of course, of justice; those driven by faith—at their best, our best—speak of love.

Evaluating Kairos in Louisiana and Nationally

In January 2014 the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections secretary, Jimmy LeBlanc, asked the chaplains to evaluate Kairos at the five state prisons where it has been active. Since few academic studies have been done to measure the effectiveness of Kairos in other places—none in Louisiana—one must rely largely on what prison wardens, chaplains, and other staff say about the program, along with the volunteers and the inmates themselves. I hope this book will encourage academic researchers to measure the success of the program in Louisiana and nationally with control group studies. It would be important to learn how prison residents who have participated in Kairos compare to those with similar backgrounds and convictions who have not participated. Light could be shed on questions like these: What is the recidivism rate of those in each group who have been released from prison? How many write-ups (infractions of prison rules) were received by those in each group? Here is how chaplains from the five state prisons responded to Secretary LeBlanc’s request (arguably similar to prison chaplains’ evaluations everywhere):

Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola

For at least 20 years Kairos has had a very active program. We have had growth recently in Kairos. They did a Kairos retreat for the offenders who live in a dorm setting at Camp J recently, and it was a huge success. [Camp J is a lockdown camp. Kairos worked with the trustees who serve those who are locked down.] When I met with a group of offenders, they said that hands down Kairos was the most effective ministry coming into Angola. We always have a waiting list for offenders waiting to participate…. We have 50 regular Kairos volunteers that may not come every month but are engaged in their ministry.

We have so many offenders wanting to participate that we have a backlog list with hundreds of names awaiting their turn. The Kairos volunteers here at Angola also serve in dual roles as individuals who work with offenders after they are released from prison. I have a lot of memories of men who have been so moved by these retreats that their lives were never the same any more. The unique goal of this ministry is to look for those who are not engaged in church and let them participate in this weekend, and it is phenomenal. The hardest of hearts cannot remain hard through such a weekend because of the immeasurable love that is given to each participant.

—Chaplain Robert Toney

Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women (LCIW) at St. Gabriel

Kairos has been at our prison for nineteen years. Each Wednesday Kairos Prayer & Share grouping is sponsored by Kairos volunteers. This allows the women to grow in their spiritual journey. Kairos has grown over the years with at least 65 inmates participating each Wednesday and returning to serve at our prison on new Kairos weekends as volunteer servants after they are released.

Kairos began with 42 residents in attendance. Kairos has now served over 1,265 offenders, with 417 still in residence at LCIW. Recidivism rates for those attending Kairos are 21% [about half of the ordinary recidivism rate after five years]. Kairos was the first such program at LCIW, and we feel made a major impact on the prison.

In excess of 1,000 volunteers have been used by Kairos at LCIW in the nineteen years on the compound. On a yearly basis we have an average of 85 volunteers involved…. The first Kairos program at LCIW targeted negative leaders at the prison. After the 3 1/2–day program, it was over a year before any of the attendees had a disciplinary report.

—Chaplains Debi Sharkley and Kristi Miller

David Wade Correctional Center (DWCC) at Homer

Since 1995 we have had about a dozen regular volunteers who provide once-per-month ministry meetings with the general population and also with the protective unit. There is never a shortage of applicants for the March and September four-day program. The weekly Kairos meeting groups have very good participation.

The Kairos program has introduced a moral compass into the lives of many offenders over the years. Currently here at DWCC there are over one thousand offenders on record as attending a Kairos program since September 1995. Many have been discharged, moved to other facilities, and many remain at DWCC and continue to assist in the ongoing Kairos program. As a chaplain, I cannot speak highly enough of the overall success of the