Prison ministry doesn’t open the iron bars to the world, but it can open a window to grace.
When I was growing up, The Million Dollar Movie was a staple of WOR TV. That local channel was home to the N.Y. Mets but little else, and it constantly promoted old black-and-white features, including the James Cagney prison picture, Each Dawn I Die. Through frequent repetition, that melodramatic title stuck in my ten-year-old head. An innocent man, framed and caged, was doomed to awaken day after miserable day in bleak captivity. His fate was even worse than that of Lon Chaney, Jr., who only turned into a werewolf once a month.
I sympathized with the innocent captive. As for guilty prisoners, didn’t they deserve to be locked up? Weren’t they to be punished? Thus, my early charitable inclinations bent towards institutionalized children. I volunteered at the N.Y. Children's Foundling Hospital with kids who’d been taken from unfit parents. I organized outings for the kids—the Bronx Zoo, the Big Apple Circus, the Coney Island Aquarium—who reveled in precious moments of freedom.
By my mid-thirties, in the late 1990s, I was living in San Francisco. An acquaintance asked if I’d like to attend Mass at San Quentin prison. Of course! San Quentin was legendary. Humphrey Bogart had escaped from “Q” in Dark Passage. Q was home to celebrity inmates Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan. Q was also the site of California’s death row; its infamous gas chamber had been replaced with gurneys for lethal injection. In fact, an execution was scheduled for the week after our visit.
Entering Q was surreal. We surrendered all personal items and passed through several fortified doors with electronic locks. The chapel was somewhat Gothic: a small, brick-walled chamber, dimly lit, with a few stained-glass windows admitting rosy light. We sat in the wooden pews on the left side and tried not to gawk as dozens of inmates quietly took their seats.
The Mass was not crowded. But the inmates seemed deeply earnest in their prayers. I felt a heightened reverence, almost a catacombs vibe, a sense of ritual as salve for existential peril. My acquaintance said the attendees were mostly “lifers.” After Mass, I spoke to one. He’d been imprisoned without possibility of parole at age eighteen. He claimed he’d gone off with a friend one evening, not knowing the friend intended to shoot down rival gang members. For being in the wrong place at the wrong time, he’d already served twenty-four years. Now forty-two, he’d gotten an education and found religion, but had no reasonable hope of ever leaving prison. “How can this be fair?” he asked.
Another lifer entered after Mass and held court among the visitors. “They’re gonna murder somebody next week,” he told us. The government was no different from the men in the cells, he explained, except they got away with premeditated murder. My acquaintance explained later that this loquacious fellow was something of a “jailhouse lawyer.” He could twist any set of facts to prove his point.
I left Q feeling I’d seen its yin and yang: the fully reformed and the incorrigible. Neither man was going anywhere, at least not in this life. The experience stayed with me, though for reasons never fully explained, we were unable to return for Mass.
Many years later, I enrolled through the Catholic Archdiocese of Newark in a program at North State Prison in New Jersey. Our team of multi-denominational Christian volunteers met the first Wednesday of each month for about ninety minutes of fellowship with inmates. We’d sing hymns, read scripture, listen to prepared reflections, and break into small groups for discussions. Then we’d come together for a closing prayer. We even held a three-day retreat in the spring.
We formed friendships. Forged genuine bonds of fraternal, Christian love. We laughed. We hugged. Occasionally, we got misty eyed, listening to stories of intense struggles overcome through faith or bidding bon chance to a brother who’d been paroled. I got to know several inmates, ranging from sweet-natured knuckleheads to high-strung, addictive personalities to people-pleasing conmen. Most were sympathetic, bearing up under weighty circumstances stacked against them. I was inspired by their faith journeys and the strength they drew from their personal experience of Christ. Yet, there were chilling instances when I spoke not to a person, but to the intractable symptoms of a personality disorder. I looked into the eyes of a killer and knew that circling up the chairs and sharing our favorite Bible verses would never make us buddies. And we would never share a beer on the outside.
Bottom line: men get imprisoned for doing very bad things. Sometimes in a drug-induced frenzy, sometimes with willful disregard for the rights of others, sometimes out of sheer desperation. These crimes—sins—create a pervasive state of painful isolation from the world and from God. They harden the heart in deep resentment. Prison ministry invites the inmate out of that isolation to experience friendship founded upon God’s unwavering love. In an atmosphere of love, bitterness and resentment can yield true contrition, which allows grace to restore the soul.
The Church calls visiting the imprisoned a corporal work of mercy, but we visitors don’t really address bodily needs. Yes, incarcerated persons suffer physical hardship. Confinement is violence. Each dawn, the inmate dies. Getting them out of their cells to the chapel is physically liberating, and there is joy in that moment. But we’re there to offer a more transcendent comfort.
Simon the Cyrenian performed a corporal work of mercy when he took Our Lord’s cross, lightening his burden on the way to Calvary. But prison ministry isn’t just to make light the time served. We’re not removing crosses; we’re helping the inmates bear them. Prison ministry doesn’t open the iron bars to the world. But it can open a window to grace. It can provide an oasis of comfort, some of which prisoners take back to their cells and hold onto. So, maybe, on some dawns, they don’t die.
Most Catholics rarely consider prison ministry, but the need is urgent. Prisons are notorious hotbeds for radicalization. Catholics cannot let distaste for the task keep them from visiting the prisons while Islamists eagerly enter. Moreover, ninety-five percent of inmates will someday be released into our communities. We must do all in our power to ensure that parolees are no longer a threat to society. But the ultimate good is to encourage soulful penitence that leads to sanctification, because one hundred percent of inmates will someday be released from their mortal coils. That’s when our labors, by the awesome grace of God, might bear eternal fruit.