Prisons, Profits, and Prophets

By Bill Berkowitz, WorkingForChange.com. Posted September 2, 2004.

In an era where the Bush administration touts faith-based organizations as engines of individual and social transformation, and is actively recruiting and funding religious organizations to deliver a bevy of social services, it isn't surprising that a high-powered politically-savvy corporation wants in on the action. The Corrections Corporation of America, the nation's largest owner and operator of private prisons, is trucking out a new product line with a little help from its fundamentalist friends: Prison Conversions to Christ.

Over the past few years, high-profile prison conversions to Christ – like Carla Faye Tucker and David Berkowitz (no relation), also known as the "Son of Sam" – captured the attention of fundamentalist Christian leaders and the mainstream media.*

While high-profile prison conversions may play well in the media, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) is casting its lot with your everyday prisoner, entering into partnerships with several Christian fundamentalist evangelical organizations that are increasingly active inside America's prisons.

According to company records, the Nashville, Tenn.-based company is the sixth largest corrections system in the nation, behind only the Federal government and four states. CCA operates 65 facilities, including 38 company-owned facilities, with a total design capacity of approximately 66,000 beds in 20 states and the District of Columbia.

In late March, CCA announced it was collaborating with the Chicago-based Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP), a Christian-based outfit founded and headed by the controversial and charismatic Bill Gothard. IBLP is described by Focus on the Family's Family News in Focus as an organization "provid[ing] a voluntary program for inmates who feel that God can change their lives."

Gothard, who is at the forefront of the character education movement called Character First!, "teaches that Jesus Christ is at the top of a 'chain of command' in which authority figures, teachers, employers, elected officials, and, of course, preachers – are ordained as leaders by Christ and should be obeyed without question," Bob Norman reported in Florida's New Times in September 2002.

The goal of the CCA/IBLP partnership is to enroll up to 1,000 inmates – incarcerated in CCA-operated prisons in the Southeastern and Western United States that house more than 60,000 inmates – in a faith-centered rehabilitation program, Family News in Focus reported.

This isn't the CCA's only marriage to faith-based organizations. Since 1991, CCA has been working with the Dallas, Texas-based Bill Glass Champions for Life (CFL). In April of last year it entered into a full-scale partnership with CFL, which according to the Nashville City Paper, allows CFL to develop "religious-oriented prison programs" inside the walls of "all... of CCA's prisons in the United States over the next three years." According to the new arrangement, CFL will work with the more than 60,000 inmates housed in CCA's 64 facilities in the U.S.

"Everyone one of our jails and prisons, on any given day, has groups that do outreach or volunteer work with inmates," Louise Green, CCA's vice president of marketing and communications, told the Nashville newspaper. The CFL contract "is the first time we've had one organization uniformly come into all our facilities," she pointed out.

Champions for Life (CFL), founded in 1972, operates prison ministries in 42 US states as well as Mexico, Bermuda, the Dominican Republic, South Africa and Russia, according to a report published by the Public Services International Research Unit (PSIRU) of the University of Greenwich, London, England.

Bill Berkowitz is a freelance writer covering right-wing groups and movements.

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