Chaplains now struggle to re-build and re-create effective prison ministry amid legal obligations
and legal limitations placed on
traditional religious liberties.
Being a farm boy from the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country every summer I make a daring effort to create an inviting landscape around my home. However, several years ago I planted a Veronica type plant, knowing little about the plant, other than it was free and provided ground cover. As the seasons have come and gone, this plant has taken over every area of the garden with a hostile vengeance. The only means of removing the plant is to completely remove every particle of soil from its roots so that it has no chance of survival and spreading.
Current legal issues in correctional chaplaincy have followed a similar pattern. Once a new law or policy concerning religion in corrections is adopted it spreads viciously, invading all aspects of correctional chaplaincy. Chaplains have been overwhelmed with legal obligations and legal limitations while trying to uphold legal liberties. In many cases a supervising chaplain simply becomes a broker of religious programs that ensure that legal obligations are fulfilled.
Religious liberties were important to the immigrant diversity of America. Evidence of this idealistic freedom to worship was seen in legislation such as the Toleration Act of 1649.[i] Enforced toleration created an atmosphere of euphoric freedom for religious groups forming in America. However, the traditional understanding of Christianity as America’s religion was being challenged. All seemed harmonious until each faith group sought their own religious preeminence inside the prison. The freedom so preciously protected by the courts has become today’s albatross for the Protestant chaplain.
Correctional chaplains could no longer champion their own faith group. Their biased views became a legal liability to government agencies with millions of dollars at stake. Paralegal inmates with an abundance of time on their hands have become a “thorn in the flesh” to corrections. Only a chaplain with litigation savvy can provide appropriate responses to all faiths that will avoid litigation. Like the tendrils of a spreading Veronica plant, legal obligations strangle and intimidate every chaplain’s effort across the nation.
Let’s now consider one particular recent social change that has increased legal limitations and legal obligations for virtually all staff members providing correctional programming and treatment for inmates. These social changes overburdened the correctional system logistically, financially and legally. We are referring to the deinstitutionalizing of state psychiatric patients that took place in the nineteen seventies. Unfortunately, many of these patients wound up in local jails on charges of vagrancy and petty theft.[ii] This brought a change in public perceptions of the type of person who gets incarcerated. Prison populations no longer were seen as convicts kept off the streets to protect the common citizen. Psychiatric treatment and religious rights increased in accordance with new legislation regarding the treatment and rehabilitation of inmates. An empathetic ear was given to those behind bars. This transition from punishment to treatment caused the creation of many new religious and secular programs in prisons. This growing segment of the prison population began to receive legally mandated medical treatment both prior to and after their release.[iii]
One particular movie illustrated the cynical view of psychiatric institutions in, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. In the final scene "Chief" Bromden (Will Sampson), a silent six-foot-seven-inch Native American, rips a sink from a tiled floor and throws it through a window to escape from an asylum. As the movie ends his large, lumbering body slowly disappears into the mist of the early morning. He did this so that the other patients of the asylum would think Murphy (Jack Nicholson) had escaped. The Chief wanted the other patients to believe Murphy had escaped because Murphy had challenged the other patients to attempt to escape by this “technique”. What had seemed impossible became possible not because of what Murphy was able to do, but by what the Chief did. Just before his escape the Chief had smothered Murphy to death because the doctors had lobotomized him. The lobotomy left Murphy in a catatonic state. In order to keep hope alive in the other patients the Chief escaped, knowing that they would believe it was Murphy who had escaped.
Murphy became the hero of the movie by challenging the other patients to reach beyond the limitations of their mental illness to achieve true freedom. The institution and Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) became the antagonists by enslaving the mentally ill with the limitations of their illnesses. And it was the Chief who played the protagonist by showing the audience that the mentally ill can escape from their tragic lives, often by seemingly impossible means. This classic movie was a commentary critical of asylums and their mistreatment of their patients.[iv]
[i] Toleration Act, Part One, Article I, Section V, State Constitution of New Hampshire, p. 469, Virginia Bill of Rights, p. 627, the Biographical Review of London, reported an “absolute toleration” for the new colonies, p. 502.
[ii] History of the Wernersville State Hospital,
http://www.dpw.state.pa.us/PartnersProviders/MentalHealthSubstanceAbuse/StateHospitals/003670162.htm, accessed October 4, 2009.
This most recent movie depicted the struggle in prisons of the need for reform placing control of the inmate’s destiny in their ability to find value in self. The Chicago Sun-Times film reviewer Roger Ebert suggested that The Shawshank Redemption is an allegory for maintaining one's feeling of self-worth when placed in a hopeless position. Andy Dufresne's integrity is an important theme in the story line, especially in prison, where integrity is lacking. Isaac M. Morehouse suggests that the film provides a great illustration of how characters can be free, even in prison, or unfree, even in freedom, based on one's outlook on life.
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