Beyond the God Pod

By Silja J.A. Talvi, Santa Fe Reporter. Posted March 10, 2005.

"Don't forget that Jesus Christ himself was a prisoner" – New Mexico Department of Corrections Secretary Joe Williams, at the American Correctional Conference in Phoenix, Ariz., January 2005.

"Strongly guarded ... is the separation between religion and government in the Constitution of the United States" – James Madison, author of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Betty Ramirez is a career correctional officer who actually loves her job. She believes in the power of rehabilitation and redemption for the women she is responsible for guarding and protecting. More than anything, Ramirez believes they deserve a second chance.

Or a third, a fourth or a fifth, as the case may be. New Mexico's recidivism rate is the nation's third-highest and, by some estimates, up to 85 percent of women who are incarcerated and released within this state will end up back in prison.

Ramirez, nonetheless, believes in the potential for rehabilitation of even the most hardened inmates. "Most of these women are sorry for what they have done," she says, "But have run into bad luck and bad situations."

A petite woman with a powerful presence, Ramirez is one of the few Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) employees who have been at the New Mexico Women's Correctional Facility (NMWCF) in Grants, N.M. from the very beginning when the facility became the first privately run women's prison in the nation in 1989. The move signaled what later became a full-blown trend toward the privatization of incarceration statewide – and nationwide.

In the ensuing 16 years, Ramirez watched the population in this facility increase dramatically as increasing numbers of non-violent and addicted offenders were sentenced to longer and longer sentences under more punitive drug war laws. From 149 state prisoners in 1989 to nearly 600 women today, the majority of these women have had one or more children by the time they get locked up. Most come from backgrounds filled with abuse, neglect, poverty, drug and alcohol addiction, domestic violence and limited educational and vocational opportunities.

Ramirez greets fellow correctional officers and inmates alike as she walks in and out of classes, workshops and prison pods. An early stop includes a visit to two segregation pods where a few dozen women are locked down 23 hours a day in small, dark solitary confinement cells. Ramirez, who used to work in the segregation pods, acknowledges that segregation "can be very stressful" for the inmates who do not have contact with the outside world – let alone other inmates – for months or even years on end.

But there is one area of the prison that stands in particularly sharp contrast to the bleak desperation of the segregation pods: the God pod.

Officially this is the Life Principles Community/Crossings Program. It's a program officials consider the real "success story" within the confines of NMWCF. As a housing pod, Crossings has been around for four years with the enthusiastic support of the prison administration and Chaplain Shirley Compton. More recently, CCA picked Crossings as one of eight sites nationwide to pioneer a new partnership with a fundamentalist Christian ministry named the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP).

Although it is not the only religious activity at the prison it is, by far, the most institutionalized and structured. In many ways, it also is the most problematic from a First Amendment point of view. It is in this unit that the blurring of the line between church and state is most evident, harkening a new turn in corrections toward Christian-based programming that has begun to truly influence (or, depending on one's perspective, to infiltrate) the nation's prisons.

Religious programming for prisoners has been around for years. At NMWCF, volunteers from churches of various denominations come in to lead Catholic mass, baptisms, Bible studies and other activities, and an Albuquerque-based ministry named Wings has gained particular preference to conduct its large-scale, Christian-based family reunification program/pizza party events inside Grants (and, soon, many other prisons across the state). The Kairos Prison Ministry, the mission of which is to "bring Christ's love and forgiveness to all incarcerated individuals" also has a presence.

But an increased emphasis on religion from the federal government has impacted the scope – and amount of money – available for such programs.

In fact, two adult prisons in the Florida corrections system are now entirely faith-based, while Florida's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention has launched the nation's first Faith and Community Based Delinquency Treatment Initiative. (Funding from the federal government has placed such an emphasis on the faith element of juvenile programming that many previously secular treatment and residential facilities for youth have made the decision in the past year to center their programs on "faith" in order to keep receiving money.)

Since its inception in 1998, President Bush's emphasis on his administration's National Faith-Based Initiative has risen to $1.33 billion, or nearly 10 percent of available funding from five federal agencies (Education, Labor, Justice, Health and Human Services and Housing), with marked increases every year. (Fully 25 percent of HUD's funding in fiscal year 2003, for instance, went to faith-based organizations.)

Silja J.A. Talvi writes for In These Times, the Christian Science Monitor, The Nation and other publications. Her work appears in the anthology, Prison Nation (Routledge, 2003).

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »