ADOC chaplains coordinate ‘reasonable opportunities’ for inmates to practice faith
Ever wondered what a typical day in the life of an Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) prison chaplain might look like? It’s certainly more extensive than merely organizing Bible studies and leading prayer times. Most often it looks like this:
- Tactfully arbitrate scheduling conflicts among 15 different religious groups ranging from Protestants to Pagans
- Fairly distribute limited supplies of donated items like shampoo and books
- Schedule ceremonial time for an inmate observing Native American Spirituality
- Vet, train and oversee dozens of faith-based and community volunteers working in the facility
- Search a worship site for contraband without violating religious principles or constitutional rights
- Provide a chapel service for death-row inmates
- Arrange for an inmate to go to a funeral home to privately view the body of a deceased family member
They don’t teach this stuff in seminary.
Tom Woodfin, pastoral programs supervisor for the ADOC, served as a state prison chaplain at the Elmore County Correctional Facility for 18 years prior to assuming responsibility for the state chaplain program. Now he travels from one end of the state to the other to supervise the work of 14 state-employed chaplains with the daunting task of meeting the spiritual and human needs of some 22,000 inmates and about 4,000 correctional officers and support staff.
Large workload
A typical ADOC chaplain must service an inmate population of 1,650 inmates, Woodfin said, more than 2.5 times the caseload recommended by the American Correctional Association (ACA). One Alabama chaplain handles 2,100 inmates, more than triple the ACA standard.
Written into the law books shortly after the Civil War the state prisons’ Chaplain Services Corps has been working ever since to navigate the complicated landscape of constitutional rights, spiritual needs and prison regulations. To qualify as a state prison chaplain one must hold at least a four-year bachelor’s degree and be ordained or have an equivalent letter of endorsement from a religion.
ADOC chaplains plan, direct and coordinate all aspects of religious and faith- or character-based programs in the prisons. They approve and train all lay, community and cleric volunteers and, according to Alabama Administrative Regulation 462, “provide inmates of all ADOC recognized faith groups with reasonable opportunities to pursue their religious beliefs and practices consistent with institutional security, safety, health and orderliness.”
To accomplish that chaplains must have a thorough understanding of the following state-recognized religions and reconcile their practices and prohibitions with prison rules:
- Catholicism
- Orthodox Islam
- Protestantism
- Hinduism
- Jehovah’s Witness
- Judaism
- Buddhism
- Kemeticism
- Nation of Islam
- Odinism/Asatru
- Nation of Gods and Earths
- Native American Spirituality
- Moorish Science Temple of America
- Rastafarianism
- Wiccan
That means approving activities on sacred days, special foods, creating and maintaining outdoor worship sites for “earth-based” (pagan) services and providing sweat lodges for Native American rituals. It also means determining religion-based exceptions for inmate facial hair rules and monitoring the possession or storage of approved religious items ranging from St. Christopher medals and crosses to gongs, incense and feathers. That’s just to name a few.
Chaplains schedule 150–200 religious services per month in each institution — with some groups meeting daily — and mediate conflicts among different religions competing for the same space.
They are also in charge of the “Faith Dorms,” or as they are officially named the “Faith/Character-Based Residential Housing Unit.” In those quarters chaplains oversee interpersonal relationships and ensure that inmates living in them are progressing in their spiritual and/or personal goals.
Variety of duties
Regardless of an inmate’s religious belief system, or lack thereof, he is likely to come into contact with the prison chaplain in a number of different ways on any given day.
Chaplains are the ones tasked with notifying inmates if a family member dies, providing grief counseling and, if the inmate is willing to pay the cost of transportation, arranging the trip to and from the funeral home so the inmate can have a one-hour private visit with a deceased loved one. Likewise the chaplain notifies next-of-kin when an inmate dies. Woodfin said he averaged 10 notifications every month when he served at Elmore County Correctional Facility.
They visit inmates in the prison infirmary and if needed assist with funeral arrangements.
A chaplain is one of the last people to visit an inmate scheduled for execution and also provides chapel services for inmates living on death row.
“I didn’t know how to minister on death row,” recalled Woodfin. “But I did know how to disciple for Christ.”
Chaplains provide inmates with family counseling, spiritual counseling and even pre-marital counseling, as well as classes in biblical instruction. And since 93 percent of inmates are male and about that same percentage of inmates will eventually be released from prison, chaplains also offer re-entry counseling and classes on topics such as fatherhood and biblical manhood, Woodfin said.
Then there’s attending to spiritual needs of staff: performing a wedding ceremony or a funeral, visiting them in the hospital, fielding their scriptural questions, providing one-on-one counseling and offering prayers before staff meetings and events.
“We practice the ministry of presence by just being there,” Woodfin said. “People come in and blow off steam because it’s a safe place.”
Each prison is different, and chaplains adapt to the circumstances. Some give lonely inmates cards for birthdays, Christmas and holidays. Others give out books and toiletries donated by local faith-based and charitable organizations.
With all the different administrative hats that a state prison chaplain wears every day, it’s not possible for him or her to also provide all the worship services, counseling and instruction needed at each prison.
That’s where volunteers come in, Woodfin noted, citing a Buddhist volunteer who drives from Atlanta to serve one Alabama prison. The faith-based We Care Program is especially “invaluable,” he said, providing dozens of full-time and part-time chaplains to the prisons all over the state at no cost to taxpayers.
Woodfin said most prisons maintain a full schedule of worship services — especially in the mainstream religions — but there are still plenty of opportunities for people of faith to become involved in helping the incarcerated. There’s a need for mentors, discipleship studies, small group studies and Sunday School classes, for instance.
Local prison needs
To find out what your local prison needs, Woodfin said, call the switchboard and ask to speak to the chaplain. In all likelihood the chaplain can guide volunteers to just the right place to offer their services.
“There’s a place for everybody in the faith community to contribute in this process,” he said.
Helping prisoners doesn’t mean you have to do so behind clanging steel doors and razor wire.
“Behind-the-fence ministry isn’t for everybody,” Woodfin said. “The first and most obvious place is through prayer support. There’s always a need for monetary or other donations. And you can provide logistical support for existing prison ministries like grading papers or providing financial or other support.
“You can just dovetail with someone already doing prison ministry to improve what they’re doing, rather than reinventing the wheel.”
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‘Nothing more powerful’ than the gospel to stop the revolving door of recidivism
He prayed with every step as he approached the prison, much as he had the first time he saw it many years before. But this time, Eddie Miller Jr. was a free man.
Miller, now a part-time chaplain for the We Care Program of prison ministries, arrived at Fountain Correctional Facility to deliver on his earlier promise to return and share the word of God that had unchained him spiritually long before his release.
“You didn’t forget us!” said an inmate with whom Miller had served time, wrapping him in a bear hug.
“How could I forget you?” Miller responded. “God hasn’t forgotten you.”
Miller described a triumphant air to his return visit to Fountain. “They saw the walk I had been on.”
Miller was raised in a good neighborhood in Mobile with loving, hardworking parents who served as his role models.
“I was raised up according to the Bible, to be respectful, to say, ‘Yes, ma’am’ and ‘No, sir.’” He was an altar boy in the Lutheran church and attended a Lutheran school through the 5th grade. He lived a sheltered life.
Exposed to drugs
He entered public school in the sixth grade and took up sports. When he was 14 he found other kids in his neighborhood who had been exposed to things he hadn’t encountered before — like marijuana.
The neighborhood kids convinced the boy that he should try it, and he stole $5 from his mother’s purse — “something I’d never done before in my life” — to purchase some.
Long story short: He came home high and his mother figured it out and called his daddy home from work. “We got down on our knees and prayed,” Miller said. “I was sort of scared straight for a while.”
Miller walked the straight and narrow until he was a senior in high school, when he resumed smoking pot and started drinking. He continued for years but was always a good worker, ambitious and self-reliant. He got a truck-driving job, married and had children.
In 1985, Miller landed the coveted job of driving a truck hauling chemicals. This position, however, required passing drug tests.
Miller quit smoking pot, and on one long trip in 1987 he listened to a spiritual tape that his grandmother had given him. It launched him on an even longer journey to redemption. “I repented and turned myself over to God,” he said of that moment. “I had a vision of me preaching one day. I had a black Bible.”
Eventually though his resolve dissolved. He tried cocaine and then crack cocaine. By around 1990, Miller said, “I started going down. Eventually I hit rock bottom.”
Miller got arrested for theft of property. Because he had no prior record he was allowed to go through drug court, which defers court action while a defendant complies with various probationary and drug-testing requirements.
He didn’t finish the program, so he was re-arrested on the theft charge, convicted and sentenced to five years behind bars.
“I got out and did good for a while. Then I got arrested again.”
This time, the charge was manslaughter.
There had been an argument. Miller had been angry. Miller finally awakened to the consequences of his behavior.
Convicted
“I got arrested in my mother’s home,” Miller said. “I looked into my mother’s eyes. She was crying. This was not the child my mother and father had raised,” Miller said. “I began to pray.”
While in Mobile Metro Jail awaiting his trial Miller experienced a conviction of another kind: spiritual.
He prayed every day — and soon his prayers were answered. “I heard God say one day, ‘Son, I’m here.’”
He began to share God’s word and pray with others at the jail. Sentenced to 20 years, Miller packed up his faith and brought it with him to Fountain, a sprawling medium security prison facility situated on 8,200 acres in Atmore.
“When I got to prison the We Care prison ministry was there,” he said.
Miller was assigned to Fountain’s Faith Dorm. “The Faith Dorm is for men who want to better themselves,” Miller said. “They have spiritual programs to help you re-enter productive society.”
Miller became a dorm leader and a spiritual leader for fellow inmates and would often open services for the We Care chaplains.
“God was preparing me,” he said.
One Sunday, Miller preached a service conducted by In and Out Ministry. Afterward Miller heard God again.
“God said, ‘You remember that vision I sent you? That vision came to pass.’ That blew me away,” Miller said. “When I had seen that vision of me preaching, I had no idea that it would be in prison,” he said. “But God did.”
The years rolled on. Miller’s faith and spiritual leadership grew behind bars.
“One day I was in the North Yard at Fountain. I saw another vision. This time I was coming back to prison preaching the word of God.”
Throughout the years Miller took Bible courses and other faith-based classes, teaching some of them himself, and worked for a prison chaplain. He also took workforce training classes and underwent an intensive six-month drug rehabilitation program.
Miller learned patience in prison. “I prayed, ‘Lord, I don’t want to come back to prison to do time. Until You know I’m ready, don’t open those doors and let me come out. God, I’m not serving You just to get out of prison. I’m serving You because You’re worthy of serving. Lord, cause Your word to take root in my heart.’”
By Miller’s third parole hearing he said, “I felt that this was my time. One day I came back from work, threw down my jacket and felt the spirit of the Lord strong on me. I heard God’s audible voice say, ‘You’re ready.’”
After 15 years in prison, Miller said, “God brought me out.”
Chaplains and other kind souls helped him get his feet back on the ground. He and his wife began a small residential property rental business.
A changed man
By 2017, Miller was sharing his testimony at the prison. In January of this year he became a part-time assistant chaplain for the We Care Program. He spends one-on-one time with Fountain inmates — praying, sharing Scriptures and giving his testimony. He also was recently approved to serve as a chaplain at Mobile Metro Jail, another familiar place. Miller’s wife, Velesia, also is involved in ministries, visiting female inmates at Mobile Metro Jail and working with recovering addicts in a local drug rehab program. With both partners involved in similar ministries, they are more effective, Miller said. “We are one.”
Prison ministries, Miller suggested, are an effective remedy to the revolving door of recidivism.
“There are a lot of programs in prison that are a blessing,” Miller said. “But the greatest need is the gospel. There’s nothing more powerful.
“I tell people that you cannot get out of prison with the same mind you went into prison with. You have to have a renewed mind.” Miller knows — he’s been there.
“I use my testimony to plant hope in people’s lives through Jesus Christ,” Miller said. “I tell them, the same thing He did for me, He will do for you.”
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A way to take action
Ministries such as Eddie Miller’s rely on donated financial support. Miller’s own church, for instance, helps out with his gas money.
We Care President Don Metzler said correspondence for the program or chaplains may be sent to: We Care Program, 3493 Hwy. 21, Atmore, AL 36502.
The faith-based, nonprofit We Care Program relies on gifts from interested individuals, churches and businesses for a majority of its income.
Additional resources are generated through three thrift stores. We Care Program accepts no local, state or federal funds.
For more information on We Care Program, visit www.wecareprogram.org.
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