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.
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 Eid 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 a half times fewer infractions than inmates who did not attend the programs. In another study, inmates who attended 10 ore 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.
Perhaps nowhere else is the impact of inmate religious activity felt more directly than at CMF, where 50 inmate-volunteers participate in the Pastoral Care program, the spiritual arm of CMF’s program to provide hospice care to inmates dying of AIDS, cancer and other terminal conditions.
Selected, trained and supervised by Chaplain Keith Knauf, Pastoral Care volunteers give emotional and spiritual support to dying inmates. Their duties regularly include maintaining around-the-clock vigils at the bedside of patients during their final days or hours. The volunteers even carry special identification that enables them to be escorted through the institution at any hour.
Knauf is a former Presbyterian minister, but his ministry at CMF – unusual among CDC chaplains because it’s not tied to a denomination or a chapel – involves hospital and hospice patients of all faiths.
Among his many duties, Knauf performs a spiritual assessment of each new hospice patient and matches him with a volunteer of the same faith. When Knauf and his volunteers can’t fulfill a patient’s spiritual request, Knauf may turn to community volunteers. One time, he located a Hare Krishna guru in Berkeley to minister to a dying Krishna inmate.
“We take our cue from the patients,” Knauf says. “It’s the end of their life.”
To become a Pastoral Care volunteer, an inmate must go through a stringent screening process that includes a review of his commitment offense, behavior in prison and other factors, references from custody staff, and an appearance before the classification committee. Those inmates who are chosen as volunteers receive training in the physiological and emotional aspects of death and dying from the same instructors and experts who train hospice staff.
Knauf believes the program benefits inmate-volunteers as much as it benefits patients. “Lots of men here don’t have the tools to deal with death and dying and other crises. They always run away from their responsibilities. We teach them to run to a crisis, to be of help.”
The result is noticeable, says Knauf. “When inmates are actively engaged in a spiritual pursuit, they tend to gravitate towards compassion, a sense of their own humanity, the value of life. I don’t see this with other inmates [not involved in the program]. When my guys are with someone in his last days and last minutes, they undergo a transformation.” ¨