Litigation over Christian programming in prisons heats up.
"Did God ordain all human authority? YES."
"Are rulers to execute his wrath? YES."
"Are we obligated to obey an authority who has an offensive disposition? YES."
-From the basic seminar workbook "How to Get Under God's Protection," mandated study material as a part of the Crossings/Life Skills residential religious program at the Grants women's prison.
A lawsuit filed one year ago against an evangelical Christian residential program in the Grants women's prison has reached another turning point, with both sides arguing for partial or full summary judgment from New Mexico Federal District Court.
The local battle has mirrored a national tug-of-war between the increasing trend of overtly faith-based prison programs and the constitutional imperative for the separation of church and state.
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Last November, six taxpaying residents of New Mexico and the Madison-based watchdog group Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) filed the lawsuit [Outtakes, Nov. 16, 2005: "
"] against the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), New Mexico Corrections Department (NMCD) Secretary Joe Williams, et al., after finding out about
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the existence of the state-funded religious immersion prison program from an investigative SFR cover story [March 9, 2005: "
"].
"We are indebted to the publication and to your in-depth reporting," FFRF co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor says. "That's how we all found out about what was going on."
For the story, SFR exposed the existence of an authoritative, patriarchal indoctrination program at the New Mexico Women's Correctional Facility (NMWCF), which is run by CCA, the nation's largest private prison company-the sixth largest prison system in the US. NMWCF became the nation's first privately run women's prison in 1989 and has run the prison with NMCD funding since that time.
In the latest legal development last month, CCA introduced a motion for summary judgment in an attempt to prevent the lawsuit from going to trial. CCA argued that the state of New Mexico was not directly funding the "God Pod" and, moreover, that funding of religious indoctrination programming, specifically in a prison setting, is completely constitutional as long as other programs are made available.
In response, attorneys representing the plaintiffs called the overt state sponsorship of a prison-based, single-faith residential religious program "unprecedented and…unconstitutional." The plaintiffs then introduced their own motion for partial summary judgment to
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stop New Mexico tax dollars from flowing, directly or indirectly, to the program and to the salaried prison chaplain who reviews inmates' applications and leads prayer walks and meetings for God Pod residents.
Women in the program are not allowed to intermingle with other prisoners and are given a cleaner, more secure and quieter living space-as well as the potential of substantial reductions on their prison sentences. Although the program claims to be voluntary, nondenominational and welcoming of all faiths, FFRF alleges that all female prisoners have been made to watch videos related to the program at least four times.
"We are not trying to deny reasonable accommodations for prisoners' religious beliefs," Gaylor clarifies. "We have a problem with the state involved in adopting far-right, fundamentalist Christian doctrine and imposing it on prisoners as a form of rehabilitation."
A primary condition of program participation forbids participants access to regular television and prohibits them from reading or watching anything but carefully selected Christian programming. Prisoners in the God Pod are not allowed to listen to popular music-even Christian rock or gospel music not approved by the program. Furthermore, women are taught through the workbooks how to turn themselves into obedient wives, daughters and citizens and to never question authority. In one of the workbooks, participants are told that "under extreme circumstances a wife may need to depart from her husband, but not to divorce him."
Gaylor adds: "Telling these women to blindly submit to authority is the worst kind of message to be sending to
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them."
The vast majority of the God Pod materials, SFR discovered, are purchased directly from a fringe Christian reconstructionist Illinois-based group named the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP), run by Bill Gothard. Gothard's group, which has spread across the nation and through many parts of the developing world, has a so-called secular counterpart organization based in Oklahoma City, the Character Training Institute.
IBLP is not the only evangelical group involved in prisons, but it is the only one CCA has turned to for help with setting up the residential religious immersion programs. In an interview last year with SFR, John Lanz, CCA's national director of Industry and Special Programs, admitted that the relationship between the two organizations has cemented "a franchiselike approach."
The faith-based residential prison approach has suffered a few setbacks of late, including FFRF's significant victory last month in stopping the Department of Justice's attempts to create five "single faith-based" federal prisons. In July, Charles Colson's Prison Fellowship Ministries/InnerChange Freedom Initiative was effectively eliminated in Iowa when a US District Court judge ruled that Colson's operation in an Iowa state prison was unconstitutional-and ordered the organization to reimburse the state more than $1.5 million.
Still, Gaylor says, the prevalence of religious immersion programs in prisons is on the increase. Three entirely faith-based prisons now exist in the state of Florida, and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has recently announced a faith-based re-entry program in one of its largest women's prisons.
The reason for the increased appeal of these programs isn't a mystery: Federal grants to faith-based organizations exceeded $2.15 billion in fiscal year 2005, a figure that now represents 11 percent of all available competitive funding from federal agencies. Of particular note is the fact that President Bush's Prisoner Re-entry Initiative is now awarding nearly one third of its funds to faith-based organizations.
"It's absolutely pervasive," Gaylor says. "We could be suing a prison program every day if we had the resources to do so."
