Karri Backer’s path to the priesthood has not been direct or traditional. She was a high-school dropout who disliked and distrusted organized religion. She now has college degrees from UCLA and Antioch University and is working on a third, a master’s in divinity from Claremont School of Theology’s joint program with Bloy House, the Episcopal Theological School at Claremont.

A social worker who found her way back to the church, she enrolled in Claremont after her home church, St. Mark’s, Upland, Calif., encouraged her to become a priest when she was considering the diaconate.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that her internship at Claremont School of Theology is also non-traditional.

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A Virginia inmate claims in a lawsuit that prison officials violated his right to exercise his religious beliefs when they refused to let him order a sermon on compact disc.

The Rutherford Institute filed the lawsuit Wednesday on behalf of Kyle Mabe, who is challenging a Virginia Department of Corrections directive allowing inmates to receive music CDs but not spoken-word CDs. No hearing has been scheduled yet in U.S. District Court in Norfolk.

Larry Traylor, a spokesman for the prison system, said he was not aware of the lawsuit and that he cannot comment on pending litigation. He was also unable to immediately explain the rationale for the department’s CD policy.

According to the lawsuit, Mabe tried to order a CD with a Christian sermon titled “Life Without a Cross” from Still Waters Ministries of Kentucky while he was an inmate at St. Brides Correctional Center in Chesapeake last September. He says the sermon was not available in written form.

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Each year, about 16,000 people are processed through the DuPage County Jail in Wheaton, and about 85 percent of them have lived lives twisted and broken by drug abuse.For many, their stay in the county jail becomes an impromptu trip to detox and an opportunity to craft a new kind of life. That is where Annie Rose comes in.

When Rose, 29, the executive director of JUST (Justice, Understanding, Service and Teaching) of DuPage, first meets her clients, many have gone through rehab at the jail and are “thinking clearly for the first time in a very long time,” she said.

“It seems like every week I hear at least one inmate say they are grateful that they ended up in jail because they wouldn’t have walked into rehab on their own. They are glad to get this chance to get on track,” said Rose, an Ohio native who settled in the Chicago area after graduating from Wheaton College. She has been director of JUST since February.

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Behind barbed wire and heavily secured gates, the women housed at the Mark H. Luttrell Correctional Center fixate on the days left until they’re up for parole.

But for many, the real hurdles lie beyond prison fences.

“The biggest problem is they don’t have the support system out there,” said Patrisha Bridges, pre-release coordinator for the East Memphis prison.

Too often, that means returning to drugs and prostitution and eventually back in jail.

But a faith-based program out of Nashville, which helps women with a history of prostitution and addiction turn their lives around, visited Memphis inmates on Monday to show there’s another way.

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With a sputtering economy and widespread budget crises, many states have decided that reducing their prison populations is a good way to save money.

Illinois is one of the latest examples. Under its new early release program, as many as 1,000 nonviolent offenders will be able to finish their sentences at home or at other locations approved by prison officials.

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[Dick] Witherow is a tall, spare man, 76 years old, a former private detective.

Shortly after he entered the ministry some 30 years ago, he began working in prisons, holding prayer services and doing addiction counseling.

Then, about a decade ago, he began focusing on sex offenders. After some horrific sex crimes involving children, Florida became one of the first states to pass laws restricting where sex offenders could live after they’re released from prison ”” effectively banning them from some communities.

Take the time to listen to it all (a little over 7 1/2 minutes). I sometimes ask myself if Jesus were to come to earth now as opposed to when he did, where would we find him. My answer–doing something like this–KSH.

A New Jersey inmate who was ordained a Pentecostal minister in prison nine years ago but was banned from preaching behind bars won back that right in a negotiated settlement stemming from his lawsuit.

Howard N. Thompson Jr., convicted of murder in 1985 and sentenced to 30 years to life in prison, had preached at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton regularly for years until corrections officers prohibited preaching by inmates in 2007.

The settlement was negotiated between the state attorney general and the American Civil Liberties Union, working on Thompson’s behalf.

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Weak from a respiratory infection and solitary confinement, Luis Barrios was waiting in line to see the doctor at a federal prison in Lower Manhattan one day last spring when a reminder of his outside life appeared. It was a group of graduate students in criminal justice, taking a tour of the Metropolitan Correctional Facility.

Priest, professor and provocateur, the Rev. Dr. Luis Barrios had landed inside the jail with a two-month sentence for trespassing onto a military base in Georgia in a protest against a training facility there for soldiers from Central and South America. From the barricades to the bastille, Professor Barrios was traveling territory familiar from what he estimates are about 65 arrests for various forms of civil disobedience.

The graduate students hailed from Professor Barrios’s academic home, John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Professor Barrios recognized one who had been part of his study-abroad program in the Dominican Republic. Later in his sentence, he met a correctional officer who had taken one of his courses.

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And at no other time of year in the Jewish calendar does the role of a Jewish prison chaplain seem more essential. The period from Rosh Hashana through Yom Kippur is known as the Ten Days of Repentance.

Tradition and theology call on all Jews, of course, to engage in the soul-searching called heshbon ha-nefesh in Hebrew, and to make amends with repentance (or teshuva), prayer and charity. Yet this particular season of reflection and penitence comes after a banner year of proven or alleged misdeeds by Jews, from Bernard Madoff’s pyramid scheme to the violations of labor laws at the Agriprocessors kosher slaughterhouse in Iowa to the arrest of several New Jersey rabbis in a scandal involving political bribery and trafficking in human organs.

If Rabbi Gerard’s experience at Graterford sheds any light on how the convicted and incarcerated encounter the High Holy Days, it is light that strikes in some unexpected ways. (Officials at Graterford would not permit interviews with individual prisoners or the release of their names.)

Most of the Jewish inmates have come to feel remorse about their crimes, Rabbi Gerard said. One or two continue to profess their innocence. All wrestle with a mixture of remorse and defensiveness.

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A slug from a .357-caliber Magnum ended Ken Cooper’s 13-year career as a bank robber and started him on the path toward redemption and a network of five prison ministries.

Carter describes the moment when he encountered a sheriff’s deputy as he walked out of his last score in 1982.

“As if in slow motion, fire flashed from the shooter’s pistol. The plate glass exploded into fragments, coming at me like glistening darts. A slug slammed into my chest, knocking me backward. Shards of glass pierced and sliced my skin. Fire burned in my chest. Someone screamed, the sound bouncing around my mind like an echo. Everything faded to black,” Cooper wrote in his book, Held Hostage: A Serial Bank Robber’s Road to Redemption.

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Some felons who have earned early release from prison are getting a few months of subsidized rent from Washington taxpayers, a new cost-cutting move expected to save the state $1.5 million by reducing the prison population.

The voucher program was approved earlier this year by the state Legislature, which needed to fix a roughly $9 billion state budget deficit. Before the program was in place, some inmates who had earned early release still couldn’t be let out of prison because they had no place to live.

By paying rent directly to an early-release felon’s landlord, the state avoids the higher costs of keeping those convicts behind bars. Inmates released under the voucher program are eligible for rent subsidies of up to $500 a month for three months – thousands of dollars less than the state would spend caring for them behind bars.

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Eddie Morris, the assistant chaplain at Lieber, clearly recalls the bitter young man [Ron] Burris used to be. During their first session, Burris railed against perceived injustices by police, the prison system and society. But when Burris lifted up his shirt to show off his bullet wounds, Morris burst out in laughter, perplexing the young convict.

“I’m looking at this guy and the first five holes would be enough to take a man out,” Morris recalled. “I said, ‘You need to be thanking God you are even here to talk about it.’ ”

As they prayed together, hugged and wept, Burris began to rediscover his faith, Morris said. He kept coming to the weekly prayer meetings, and change took root.

“I’ve seen him go from an angry young man to a humble servant,” Morris said. “It is awesome. He’s become a better husband, a father to his children and a friend to these men. He lets them know, ‘If it can happen to me, it can happen to you.’ ”

Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s local paper.

The exact cause of the 11-hour riot that broke out Aug. 8 at the California Institution for Men in Chino, Calif., won’t be known until an official investigation by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) is completed. However, to some criminal-justice experts the violence that erupted at the facility, located about 40 miles east of Los Angeles, was an inevitable consequence of a state prison system long hobbled by massive overcrowding, program cuts and understaffed facilities. And given the state’s ongoing budget woes ”” with $1.2 billion in cuts mandated to the prison budget ”” the situation is likely to only get worse.

“The overcrowding is the first issue,” says Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency in Oakland, Calif. “You’re talking about hundreds of men moved into triple bunks in what used to be gyms and cafeterias. They’re not even cells. They’re just empty places where we’re shoving people.” According to the most recent statistics from the CDCR, California’s 33 state prisons house 154,649 prisoners in facilities designed to hold just 84,271 prisoners. The Chino prison is among the worst, with 5,877 prisoners in a facility designed to hold 2,976.

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Because of this high failure rate, DOC’s budget has crept up to $2 billion as Florida’s prison population has approached 100,000. Ironically, though, we now know ”” and can quantify ”” key factors that reduce recidivism. Among them:

ӢA belief in something outside of themselves, such as God. Prisoners, like other humans, tend to behave differently in the face of the transcendent.

ӢSubstance-abuse treatment. For many offenders, substance abuse has been a major problem. Treatment substantially reduces recidivism.

ӢEducation. DOC data show a 4 percent reduction in recidivism for each grade-level increase in reading skills. Literacy should be required for release.

”¢Age. It’s statistically odd but true that turning 28 makes a difference. Marriage also helps.

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The graduates patted each other’s backs, and nervously chatted with their families. Some sat quietly, meditating about their future while others wept.

It could have been a scene from any of the thousands of commencement ceremonies this year. But these graduates were convicted killers, rapists and drug dealers at Mississippi’s only maximum security prison.

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As an undergraduate student 25 years ago, I found myself behind bars””not as an inmate but as a correctional officer. One of the youngest members of a large metropolitan sheriff’s department on the west coast of Florida, I worked full-time at the maximum-security jail in order to pay for college. Those four years working in the slammer schooled me, and they raised a number of questions for me as a Christian, especially about the death penalty and the use of force. I am continuing to unlearn certain attitudes and assumptions I held then, including some about punishment itself.

By vividly putting into words much of what I have personally pondered about prisons and punishment, these two books should help American readers””Christian or not, possessing firsthand experience with incarceration or not””to step back and take an honest look at what is happening in our current practice of large-scale imprisonment. Each book also asks why we insist on continuing down this punitive path.

Why is it, for example, that the U.S., which has 6 percent of the world’s population, incarcerates 25 percent of the world’s prisoners? We currently have some 2.3 million persons in federal, state and local jails and prisons””an estimated half-million more than are locked up in China, whose population is more than triple that of the U.S. We spend more money building and maintaining prisons than public schools””to the tune of $50 billion a year. Some 644,000 persons are incarcerated per year and about 625,000 are released, but then 50 to 75 percent of those who are released end up returning to prison within a few years. No other democratic nation today imprisons people on such a scale or for as long as the U.S. Yet what are we accomplishing?

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In many ways, it was like hundreds of pep talks and locker room speeches he’d given in nearly three decades as an NFL coach. Tony Dungy’s message was one of responsibility, of motivation, of not letting down others ”” or yourself. As always, he was pointed and analytical yet smooth and laid-back.

This time, however, Dungy’s audience wasn’t a highly paid collection of elite athletes.

On this day, Dungy ”” a little more than two years removed from becoming the first African-American coach to win a Super Bowl and less than three months after retiring as the leader of the Indianapolis Colts ”” was in a prison yard, a Bible tucked under his left arm.

This is Tony Dungy’s new world, the one he has embraced since walking away from cheering crowds, a salary that exceeded $5 million a year and a team that was equipped for another Super Bowl run.

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Mark Earley was indifferent to the lives of convicts before he started working with Prison Fellowship.

“I was a very unlikely person to work with prisoners,” Earley said. “My general thought was the longer prisoners are locked up the better.”

However, the former state senator and attorney general of Virginia experienced a change of heart while reading the Bible. Earley recognized parallels between the lives of certain biblical figures and the experiences of prisoners. So, in 2002, Earley retired from politics to become president of Prison Fellowship.

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A panel of three federal judges, saying overcrowding in state prisons has deprived inmates of their right to adequate healthcare, tentatively ruled Monday that the state must reduce the population in those lockups by as many as 57,000 people.

The judges issued the decisionafter a trial in two long-running cases brought by inmates to protest the state of medical and mental healthcare in the prisons.

Although their order is not final, U.S. District Court Judges Thelton Henderson and Lawrence Karlton and 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Reinhardt effectively told the state that it had lost the trial and would have to make dramatic changes in its prisons unless it could reach a settlement with inmates’ lawyers.

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[TIM] O’BRIEN: Young is being held at a maximum security prison in central Florida. Under Florida law, juveniles charged with serious crimes are tried as adults, and serious crimes ”” like armed robbery ”” can bring life in prison. And in the courtroom of Judge J. Rogers Padgett, being a child didn’t seem to help. It can even hurt the child who behaves like one, as Kenneth Young did.

Judge J. ROGERS PADGETT (Hillsborough County, Florida Circuit Court): So what we see is what we get in the way of a defendant. We get a person who shows no remorse. We get a person who is smiling in court, thinks it’s funny. We have a person who, while he is under consideration for a life sentence, is flipping signals to people in the gallery.

O’BRIEN: He’s only 15, barely.

Judge PADGETT: We have a person who gives no appearance of deserving any slack whatsoever and sentence him. So we give him a life sentence.

O’BRIEN: Enter law professor Paolo Annino, who runs the Children in Prison Project at Florida State University. Annino has been trying for years to get the Florida legislature to allow parole consideration for all juvenile offenders in the state to give them a second chance, his arguments as much moral as they are legal.

(to Prof. Paolo Annino): Is it your position that no juvenile should be sentenced to life without parole?

Professor PAOLO ANNINO (Florida State University): Oh, absolutely, and I think we’re immoral, ultimately, as a nation. This is no different from slavery or other major moral issues. Placing children in adult prisons for life is a death sentence for children….

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The men who live at Taste-N-See Outreach Ministry in Bridgeport have been praising God in song and scripture for a good hour when Pastor James Jennings urges them to their feet shortly after 7:30 a.m.

There are about a dozen ex-cons here, their histories muddy with violence and drugs and shame, but they stand and embrace each other with awkward grins and thumping backslaps, one after the other, as Jennings looks on.

“Sometimes we think love is what we say, but love is what we do,” Jennings says.

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“Jesus for President!” So proclaims a progressive Christian movement aiming to tweak the national conscience. Recent trend lines in the country suggest an even more provocative tagline for our consideration: “Jesus for Parole.”

That’s right. Jesus is imprisoned ”” at least in the view of an increasingly vocal set of Christians spurred into action by some deeply troubling truths about America and our bursting-at-the-seams prison system.

The concern seems as well placed as it is challenging. The United States has crossed, for the first time, a dismal threshold: One out of every 100 American adults is in prison, according to the Pew Center on the States. Five states have reached the point where they are spending as much or more on corrections than they do on higher education systems. To place it all in perspective, consider that America has approximately 5% of the world population but about 25% of the world’s prison population.

The fact that violent crime, according to the Justice Department, has dropped over the same three decades of surging prison-population growth poses a complex tangle: Is less crime the product of get-tough enforcement and sentencing, or are we just incarcerating more low-level offenders who don’t need to be in prison? Probably some of both. But whatever the case, the situation is enough to chew on the conscience of any follower of a religion that emphasizes compassion and redemption. Multitudes of Americans are languishing in prison ”” and it’s all suggestive of something deeper afflicting the soul of the nation.

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(RNS) Gov. Bob Riley on Tuesday (May 20) asked Alabama churches to shoulder the burden of caring for newly released inmates, saying the state lacks the flexibility and funds to help them successfully re-enter society.

Leaders from churches and charitable groups were asked to provide a wide range of services to former inmates, including employment assistance, housing, clothing, health care and cash.

Riley said the state’s churches can rise to the challenge just as they do in response to natural disasters such as hurricanes.

“If we can motivate the faith-based community in the state the way we do during an emergency, then we can make a difference,” Riley said to a group of about 500 people, mostly religious leaders.

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“He’s the best warden we’ve ever had,” says Jerry Williams, 51, one of hundreds of convicts selling food and handicrafts outside the stadium while an inmate band serenades the visiting public. Williams has served 31 years for murder.

“God always uses a vessel, and God has used Warden Cain,” says Carlwyn Turner, 47, a convicted rapist who is a disc jockey for the only federally licensed radio station in a US prison – the “Incarceration Station”. “Warden Cain has given a lot of guys purpose. That’s what keeps them going,” says Lane Nelson, 53, another convicted killer and “Death Row” correspondent of The Angolite, the prison’s award-winning newspaper.

It is hard to argue with such accolades. Cain, 65, a fervent Christian with a deep Southern drawl and the build of a refrigerator, believes he was sent to Angola to do God’s work, and what he has achieved there in 13 years is little short of a miracle.

He has transformed the most violent maximum security prison in America into its safest. He has turned Angola into a place where families with young children happily consort with convicted killers at the spring and autumn rodeos. He has brought hope where there was only despair.

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