When volunteer prison chaplain Tom Cummins knocks on the door of a prison cell, the inmate’s voice is nearly always welcoming, sometimes delighted.
“I deal almost exclusively with those in isolation,” he said. “The guys know what society thinks of them. They are part of the throwaway society like papers tossed aside, abandoned, out-of-mind, in prisons that are hidden in the country, off a side road. When anyone treats them like a child of God, they flourish.”
Cummins serves at the 2,700 bed Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center at Bonne Terre and the 800-bed Missouri Department of Correction Center near Potosi.
About 1,574,000 men and women were in state and federal prisons at the end of 2013, according to federal statistics. The legal system has the detailed records of these men and women’s criminal wrong doings. Chaplains are among the few who have the time for in-depth conversations about what they think now.
Cummins listens and asks simple questions to encourage inmates to think through their current decisions. When inmates say they have stopped taking their medicine, stopped stress-relieving exercise in their cell, he simply asks why. If they say they have stopped writing their families because the families don’t write back, he suggests that they not let others limit their kindness.
He has witnessed many transformations, including men awaiting execution, after a prisoner begins to live a more structured life, away from addictions and peer pressure.
Inmates call the isolation sections that Cummins visits “The Hole.” Corrections officials call the units administrative segregation. In these halls inmates are not released for general outdoor exercise, classes, lectures, visiting theater troupes and chapel services.
One at a time, each may visit a concrete block walled “yard” about three times larger than a cell with overhead netting that allowed a view of the sky.
They can yell conversations with other inmates but can’t see men they talk to, the chaplain said. These men may not have a radio, coffeepot, crockpot or watch. They may have about six paperbacks from the prison library, no hardbacks. He encourages them to find something that interests them and read about it.
Most men he has worked with develop strict daily routines: setting aside the same time each day for exercise in their cells, reading, and writing letters. Some have as many as 100 pen pals, mostly strangers who participate in a friendship program.
“Letter writing is a rich part of their lives,” he said.
Cummins is one of the few human faces that inmates see in the highly automated isolation sections at Potosi and Bonne Terre prisons. The retired engineer and Monsanto executive spent four post-retirement years getting a master’s degree in pastoral ministry at Aquinas Institute of Theology before beginning his volunteer chaplaincy. The Catholic layman volunteers under the auspices of the Criminal Justice Ministry of the St. Louis Archdiocese.
Inmates who are not in isolation have jobs and can attend classes toward getting a GED. Missouri declines to offer courses, even basic literacy classes, for lifers. However, the St. Louis Archdiocesan Prison Ministry has volunteers who tutor some willing lifers, according to Sister Carleen Reck, a School Sister of Notre Dame who directs the archdiocesan ministry.
Often the men and women talk to prison chaplains about their determination to go straight; find a job and stay clean but they worry about falling into old habits when surrounded by society’s negative ideas.
“The family is often part of their baggage,” said The Rev. Jeff Nehrt, pastor of the 85-member, Our Redeemer Lutheran Church in Greenville who has spent one day a week for the past 20 years volunteering as a chaplain for the men and women at the Greenville Federal Corrections Institution. The women’s portion is called a camp, which is prison without razor wire fence.
“If they could have the assurance of community support, not just their family, when they walk out of prison to face all the challenges, obstacles, slaps in the face, hurdles of starting a good life it would be helpful,” Nehrt said.
In addition to one-on-one conversations, he has 12 women in a Christian Bible-study class and four men in a separate, similar class. While he focuses on Christians, he cooperates with two rabbis and an imam who also volunteer with people of their faiths at Greenville.
“The trust builds over the years,” Nehrt said. Many find solace and hope of forgiveness when he quotes Paul’s epistles proclaiming that Jesus died for their sins. Nehrt, who has a doctorate in ministry from Concordia Seminary in Clayton, said he never asks what a man or woman did to be incarcerated but many tell him. “Many are straightforward.”
Nehrt and Cummins are both volunteers. Chaplains who are salaried by the state often say they regret that they are swamped with administration duties and paperwork.
“We don’t need more who preach at them, but pastoral people who listen to them, talk to them. be a human face for them,” Reck said. “Everything is pretty automated in prison now;, they don’t see a lot of faces.”
Edited for length and reprinted with permission from news.stlpublicradio.org.
