Strongman and ex-con Mike Benson, who experienced his own jailhouse conversion, takes the stage and proceeds to tear a deck of cards in half, twist a horseshoe into an “S,” roll a frying pan into a burrito shape and snap a wooden baseball bat.
After breaking the bat, he briefly holds the two pieces before him to form a cross.
“Before I knew Jesus, this was malicious destruction of property,” jokes Benson. “Now, it’s ministry.”
Prison Fellowship Ministries, launched in 1976 by convicted Watergate conspirator Chuck Colson, claims more than 22,000 volunteers at 1,800 institutions with two intertwined roles: win souls and address crime through “restorative change” in offenders.
Mark Earley, a former Virginia attorney general and Republican candidate for governor in 2001, took the job leading the largest prison ministry shortly after his gubernatorial defeat.
“For almost 15 years, I thought the answer to public safety was to put as many people in prison as we can,” says Earley as he watches this presentation, called Operation Starting Line. “I was wrong. Crime is not a wedge issue anymore. Everybody realizes there’s not a lot more to do to get tough on crime. The sweet spot is helping them be different when they come out.”
Prison Fellowship offers several programs, mostly intermittent volunteer efforts like Bible study and seminars. But the organization swung for the fences with its InnerChange Freedom Initiative, an intensive Bible-based program that starts within a prison but then extends beyond the walls when an inmate gets paroled.
Early analysis of the program — a public-private partnership — showed some promise in reducing recidivism.
Jonathan Willis, now serving a life sentence, awakens each morning in the high-security Limon Correctional Facility in eastern Colorado, where he attends weekly worship and daily Bible studies as he integrates into the prison population.
He also continues to work toward reconciliation with his victim’s family — a priority he couldn’t accomplish, he says, if he’d let his case go to trial.
“There’s no way I could say I’m sorry to this family,” he says, “and then try to escape the consequences.”
As Willis thinks about spending the rest of his life in prison, he notes that his spiritual rebirth gave him something he never had on the outside — a purpose. He wants to transform other prisoners who one day will see life on the outside.
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