Colorado Prison Departments Offer Offenders Grace and Second Chance | Faith and values

In 1990, Howie Close was an angry and violent 17-year-old Denver punk looking for brawls. One night, he beat up a group of Japanese exchange students. New hate crimes legislation has imposed 75 years in Colorado jails.

He started fighting with other prisoners, sent him to solitary confinement, where he found an old torn Bible stuffed under the toilet. As he repeatedly read the book “from no cover to no cover”, he would experience a powerful spiritual transformation.

“There was no crack in the sky,” he said, “no time to get down on my knees and confess my sin. But I believed what this book told me. Before that, I liked to hurt people. Even though I lost fights, I loved the dopamine surge. It was my drug of choice. But after four months of me and this Bible, I was a different human being. I didn’t want to hurt people anymore.

Gary Skinner illegally transferred funds between companies he ran in Dayton, Ohio, in the 1980s, scamming a friend and business partner for nearly $ 400,000. Convicted of aggravated theft and sentenced to four to 15 years in prison, he lost everything: career, family, house, cars, self-esteem and freedom.

Alone in his cell, he alternated between grief for his sins and blaming his incarceration on his lawyer, the judge in his case and the parole board who refused to reduce his sentence.

So God spoke to him. It was a familiar voice he first heard when he was 10 years old when he was called to the ministry – a call he ignored. But this time, he listened to the voice telling him to “get over it”, to acknowledge his crimes, to take full responsibility for his actions and to seek healing, reparation and reconciliation.

“Crazy as it sounds, I now view my incarceration as a gift,” Skinner says. “I saw life on the wrong side. I had my priorities messed up. I don’t believe God sent me to jail, but I needed to change my way of thinking.

For both men, repentance and rebirth led to rehabilitation and early “miraculous” releases. Now, decades later, the two are among dozens of Springs-based leaders and hundreds of local volunteers who work with those who are or have been behind bars through local Protestant churches, the Catholic Diocese. and the National Prison Fellowship Department.

Those caring for the prisoners see themselves as living the words of Jesus, who in Matthew 25 described a day of judgment when mankind will be divided into two groups – the blessed sheep and the cursed goats – based on their actions. towards those who are “the least” in society:

“Because I was hungry and you gave me to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you dressed me, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.

Such a ministry is not “sexy” or lucrative, and can be downright heartbreaking when people come out of jail to reoffend and come back, as many ultimately do.

But leaders say prison labor is an urgent necessity in the United States, a country that imprisons people at higher numbers and at higher rates than any other. Today in Colorado, approximately 35,000 people are in state, local and federal prisons, and more than 80,000 are on probation or parole.

“The Gospel with the skin on”

Howie Close is a pastor of Woodmen Valley Chapel, a congregation of nearly 7,500 with four campuses around town: his original location off I-25, in Rockrimmon, at Monument, and near Falcon.

The church recently opened its fifth campus inside the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility near Ordway, pioneering a model that has since been adopted by three other churches in the state. It also offers a “7 Habits for Highly Effective Parolees” course based on the best-selling business book and a “Start Over Inside” program in prisons and prisons statewide. (See related story on page 14.)

Close says such efforts reveal the DNA of a congregation that seeks “to be the gospel with the skin on.” Woodmen Valley Chapel also supports COSILoveYou, a Christian nonprofit organization that connects nearly 100 local churches to fight suffering and promote growth in Colorado Springs.

“Christians are people of the cross,” he says. “Jesus hanged on a cross for the criminals, with criminals, and like a criminal. And if we love Jesus, we have to do Jesus’ job the way he did, and to the people to whom he did it.

Close says the United States has the best criminal justice system in the world, but it’s not perfect, and laments the fact that “we have become a nation of inmates” because “there are so many of money in people’s storage ”.

Some people say that compassion for criminals is misplaced and that we should lock them up and throw away the key. Close says Christians should take a different approach to these lost souls. “They are valuable, and they are valuable, especially in the sight of God,” he said. “We give them the love they deserve as people created in the image of God.

Road to transformation

“It’s a lot easier to go to jail than most people think,” says Gary Skinner, a former pastor of the New Life Church who heads Shiloh Chapel, a small independent congregation.

Since 2006, he has been running Lessons for Life Ministries, which provides inmates with correspondence courses, life coaching and mentoring designed to help them prepare for life on the outside.

He and a handful of volunteers work with those in prison, but their goal is to help those on parole or probation make the difficult transition, especially during their first 90 days of “when they need it most. support”.

Skinner tells his story in his book “Plain Vanilla Wrapper”, which he gave to over 25,000 prisoners. He has learned from his experience that while some prisoners are “violent and terrible people”, many others are simply “crazy people” like him who have made bad decisions, often because of anger, alcohol or abuse. Drugs. Either way, the transformation must begin in the heart.

“We have to do whatever we can,” he says, “including being available to talk to them, coach them and connect them with nonprofits. But if they don’t want to change, I don’t. can do nothing for them.

He says those who want to change may need patience and a second, third, or even fourth chance.

The journey to the prison ministry came slowly for Skinner, who operated a window cleaning business before he was invited to serve at New Life in 1999. As he began to process members’ requests for help with loved ones in prison, he has found his calling.

“When I’m in prison, I feel like I’m at home,” he says. “We connect, we laugh, and I am able to share the gospel and what God has done for me. I like what I do.”

A sanctuary for sinners

Tyler Hill is on staff at Sanctuary Church, a west side congregation dedicated to broken people in need of healing, as his website makes clear:

… if you are a saint, sinner, loser, winner, abused, abuser, whore, gambler, lost, fearful, ADHD, liar, hypocrite, bastard, lover, cutter, tweaker Whether you are an alcoholic, adopted or abandoned, you are abandoned, divorced, LGBT, alone, old, young, pushed, a cheater, successful, infected, rejected, pierced or tattooed, or just a misfit, YOU ARE WELCOME HERE .

Hill, whose father is a former pastor in Salida who ministered to “the folks on the sidelines,” worked in the hospitality industry, starting cocktail bar The Principal’s Office and Loyal Coffee, before earning a certificate in spiritual direction and joining Sanctuary.

The church hosts “shameless” and “radically welcoming” recovery services on Sunday nights that attract ex-offenders, and its building houses the offices of Springs Recovery Connection, which helps those struggling with drug addiction.

Hill spends part of most weeks visiting prisoners, writing to those he cannot visit, and helping ex-offenders who flock to the church.

At the heart of his work is a theology of human dignity – a concept he says is alien to the American “prison industrial complex”.

“It’s about seeing the love of people,” he said, “and recognizing that the people right in front of you were created in the image of God. “

He says that “some people lack the dignity of marginalized people”, a mistake he no longer makes. As he tells people, “The image of God in me sees and honors the image of God in you.

While some people may not feel called to visit prisoners, Hill says anyone can write them letters, as they do on a regular basis. One of his correspondents locked up for decades will soon come out and go directly to the Church of the Sanctuary.

Church member Ben Pierce is the Colorado and Wyoming field director for Prison Fellowship, a ministry founded in 1976 by Charles Colson, who went to jail for his role in the crimes and the Watergate cover-up of President Richard Nixon.

Prison Fellowship runs programs throughout the region, including at women’s facilities which were started by Daughters of Destiny, a local ministry that was part of Prison Fellowship in 2014. It runs an academy that teaches life skills to women at La Vista Correctional Facility in Pueblo and a men’s academy at the Rifle Correctional Center.

And dignity is a theme of the Catholic Prison and Corrections Ministry run by the Diocese of Colorado Springs, which provides fellowship or liturgy of the Word services in county jails and public facilities.

“The prison population in our diocese exceeds 6,000 men and women,” says its website.