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Jails For Jesus: An Update

Today the NYT has a long piece on the status of taxpayer funded, faith-based programs aimed at captive audiences, like prisoners and rehab patients.

That's a story that Mother Jones reported back in 2003, in Samantha Shapiro's piece: "Jails for Jesus." In it she chronicles how Prison Fellowship Ministries—a group founded by Watergate's Chuck Colson—got backing from then-Gov and now President Bush to preach to inmates via its InnerChange program. As Samantha writes:

InnerChange represents the cutting edge of President Bush's faith-based initiatives, which seek to have religious groups take over social services once provided by state and federal agencies and, in so doing, fulfill two goals dear to many conservatives: bringing more people to Christ and shrinking government.

Prison Fellowship Ministries is a $56 million dollar a year operation, and given its treatment record of those who do not see the light, in June a federal judge ruled in that PFM's InnerChange program amounted to an unconstitutional use of taxpayer money for religious indoctrination. That case is now on appeal, which is what the NYT details. What the paper declined to get into is the really juicy stuff that Samantha reported, namely:

* InnerChange's programs, which include perks like pizza parties and music lessons to the inmates who sign up, are largely paid for the canteen and exhorbitant phone rates that the general prison population pays for out of the wages they earn from stamping plates or answering customer service calls.

*InnerChange promises to "cure" homosexuality via exposure to Christ—not perhaps surprising, since Colson hawks a brochure he wrote called "Rick Santorum Is Right"—through a form of therapy its officials told Samantha was "a little like AA for homosexuals." The encounter group, she was told, would be led by a man who "had a reputation across the state for being a flaming homosexual," while the other two members were "former cross-dressers." Samantha was then ushered into a room, unattended by any staff or guards, where it became evident that the inmates undergoing therapy

"were not simply 'cross-dressers' but serious sex offenders; Hoffman said he'd attempted to sodomize a blind man, and Gavin had sodomized his four-year-old daughter. Hoffman attended InnerChange because he'd been thrown out of the state-run sex-offender program, which Gavin had completed."

As Samantha notes:

"Letting Christ-based programs 'cure' sex offenders—exempting them from state programs that employ aversion therapy and normative counseling, and releasing them into society armed primarily with polemics about sin—seems risky, to say the least, but [InnerChange official Larry] Furnish is confident the state will go for it. 'We already offer GED, substance-abuse, and pre-release programs. If we get sex-offender treatment, we'll have the whole ball of wax for the state at a bargain-basement price,' he said."

That's your tax dollars at work, folks.

Comments

The first thing that pops into my mind is that extraordinary book and film, A Clockwork Orange. I hope that I not being too sarky but can I see them, our criminal droogs prancing out of the Korova Milk Bar after soaking up a bit of Ludwig Van’s the 9th, higher than kite on drencom, synthemesc and vellocet, but instead of waltzing out into the twilight zone of the ultra violets and having some filly fun with a drunk, they go with their heads bowed in praise to church, not because of Jesus, though the actual crucifying of sweet Jesus is delightful but because they find themselves more aroused by the old testament—the gory good stuff of the Old book, and so are all the little girls and the priest’s wife’s legs—amen. Instead of bastardizing Ludwig Van through Ludovico therapy (there is a connection between these names) we are supposed to believe and place our faith in that “Old Time Religion” a la Judovico therapy. I mean the Old Testament does have its rather bizarre ethical standards, especially in terms of sex, their sense of God given victory, beloved eye for an eye as well as being the chosen people and the direct descendents of Adam and Eve. The president himself reminds me a bit of Burgess’s anti-hero Alex, they both are definitely grahzny bratchny and both of whom get their jollies from seeing lots of gullywuts, though the President does seem to lack the wild desire to do the ins and outs with a lovable dovotchka while the tune I’m Singing in the Rain heightens his violent virility, bang, bang.

Posted by: jeff on 12/10/06 at 6:27 PM

Woggy bit that. Knackers!

Posted by: Vanna on 12/16/06 at 5:56 AM

Our tax dollars should never go to capitalize any religious endeavor until the tax dollars are increased by taxing the income of religions. The tithing should take care of any expenses the religions have, that's why the encourage their members to tithe.

Posted by: catt napp on 12/16/06 at 3:11 PM