God has calmed the waters at Angola

By Peter Finney Jr.
Clarion Herald

Byron Johnson, director of the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University and the author of “More God, Less Crime,” distinctly remembers the call he received in 2012 from Burl Cain.

The warden of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola – the maximum-security prison built on a former slave plantation in a bend of the Mississippi River where inmates were sent to die – was eager to let Johnson know of the faith-based initiatives he had implemented at Angola that he claimed were transforming its entrenched reputation as the most violent prison in the United States.

Cain told Johnson of partnering in 1995 with the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary to establish a seminary in which inmates – many of them who had no chance of ever leaving Angola – would become pastoral leaders for their fellow inmates.

As an academic – Johnson also is a distinguished visiting professor of Religious Studies and the Common Good at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy – Johnson was intrigued by Cain’s claims, but he told the folksy warden that he needed more than a few anecdotal stories to believe it.

“Burl told me, ‘We’ve had this major effect of changing a culture of violence and corruption into one that’s a model,’” Johnson recalled. “I told him I had heard stories but I hadn’t seen any data on what he was doing. Testimonials are great, but we wanted something that was rigorous that we could publish in academic journals. That meant a major longitudinal study – over time – and that would be a major commitment to a big research team.”

Johnson received funding for the study, and beginning in 2012, he and his fellow researchers had unfettered access over the next five years to interview and survey hundreds of Angola inmates to “document changes in their lives over time.”

“It’s labor-intensive, and we would go and stay on the grounds for a week at a time and do interviews with inmates that lasted up to two hours,” Johnson said. “This kind of study is just not done. People don’t have the time, so they try to get data that they can order, which is called secondary data sets – and the researchers never leave the office. To go out and interview hundreds of inmates for an hour or two, repeatedly, is incredibly rare. I can’t emphasize enough how unusual that kind of work is.”

Over five years, Johnson’s team asked questions that measured the strength of inmates’ faith commitments – their time devoted to prayer, what they prayed about, the types of activities they were involved in and how they spent their time.

“We were looking for things that would show some kind of a change,” Johnson said. “So, if they were not involved in prosocial activities but over time they became active in these prosocial activities, then there was evidence that the needle was moving on change.”

Asking open-ended questions, the researcher encouraged inmates to describe their own living situation.

“We found that as they go to church or as they go to Bible college, they’re much more likely to forgive themselves and to forgive others,” Johnson said. “There is evidence that spiritual transformation is linked to their ability to receive forgiveness but also to forgive others in their past, as well as to seek forgiveness from victims. Forgiveness is pivotal to transformation and rehabilitation. A lot of them have such a horrible history.”

At Angola, there are pastoral services for about 30 denominations, including Catholic, Johnson said. Some inmates attend multiple religious services.

Johnson lauded Cain’s decision to let inmates receive theological training and then become pastors themselves rather than simply relying on outside groups to come into the prison to provide services.

“What they did that was so genius was to train these guys, help them to become ministers and to start churches, and then they began to start ministries,” Johnson said. “Over time, that really did change the culture of the whole prison.”

Bringing it to Mississippi

Cain, now the commissioner of corrections in Mississippi, is trying to replicate that success, Johnson said, which is the subject of another of his research studies.

One aspect of the faith-based initiative that struck Johnson was seeing inmates’ family members attend inmate-run worship services.

“Burl Cain was innovative in allowing inmates’ families to visit those congregations, so there was a lot of healing and reconciliation among family members,” Johnson said. “The most surprising thing is that for people who are serving a life sentence, they can find contentment, peace and joy.”

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