David Gaspar was shot in a domestic violence incident, hospitalized for a prescription drug overdose, taken away from his mother, and placed in foster care – all before his eighth birthday. When he committed a violent crime at age 22, he says it was like the context of his childhood simply disappeared. His humanity was erased, and all anyone saw was a criminal.
Twenty years later, Gaspar is out of prison and thriving as CEO of The Bail Project, an organization that provides bail assistance through philanthropic dollars and advocates for the elimination of the cash bail system. But Gaspar is by far the exception. Most formerly incarcerated people struggle the rest of their lives to find a stable income and re-enter the prison system repeatedly.
The problem
The U.S. makes up 4 percent of the world’s population and 20 percent of the world’s prison population. With more than 2 million people in prison, the U.S. has the highest number of prisoners per capita in the world (664 per 100,000 people). Add to that the nearly 5 million formerly incarcerated people struggling to thrive, and the problem is even harder to ignore.
Once a person is introduced into the prison system, their chances of thriving and contributing to society in a meaningful way post-release decrease dramatically. Approximately 60 percent of formerly incarcerated people struggle with unemployment, compared to 3.7 percent of the general population – a particularly devastating statistic when we know full-time employment reduces the chance of recidivism (rearrest) from approximately 52 percent to just 16 percent.
“If incarceration worked, we’d be the safest country in the world,” says Robin Steinberg, Bail Project’s founder.
The human behind bars
Jesus says that to visit someone in prison is to visit the Lord himself. And since he offers no clarification about which prisoners – except to include even the “least” of them – we can assume he’s talking about every prisoner.
We’re exhorted to love mercy (Micah 6:8), to “remember those in prison as if [we] were together with them” (Hebrews 13:3). Jesus said those who did not care for prisoners would be ordered to depart from him (Matthew 25:34-46).
Why then, when one in two people in the United States has an immediate family member who has been incarcerated, when one in 28 children currently has a parent behind bars, does this very direct call from God so often go unanswered? We know how to clothe the naked. We know how to feed the hungry. But helping those in prison can feel vague – or worse – less urgent.
Heather Rice-Minus, executive vice president of strategic initiatives at Prison Fellowship, says her eyes were opened to caring for prisoners during her time living in developing countries. “Family members really do bring food and supplies if you’re behind bars. It’s not like the way we’ve institutionalized it. Here in America, there’s a feeling of out of sight, out of mind.”
So often in the U.S., the incarcerated are condemned and forgotten. They are sent far from their families, separated from their communities. Jails and prisons become like fortresses to keep those on the outside safe from those on the inside, instead of places that provide rehabilitation for the lost and struggling.
“Prisons are filled with people, by and large, who did bad things, but are not bad people,” says Andrew Glazier, president and CEO of Defy Ventures, an organization that provides personal development programs for people with criminal histories. “When you give them an opportunity to be different, most of them will grab it.”
Prison-related charities are answering the call from Scripture to offer the love, redemption, and hope of Christ every step of the way: Covering bail when awaiting trial might be a matter of life and death, believing in the human behind bars so they can begin to believe in themselves, offering second chances. These things are critical.
The presumed innocent?
One of the pillars of American democracy is the idea that a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty. However, 71 percent of people being held in jail in the U.S. have not been convicted of a crime. They’re there because they’re not able to pay their cash bail. Steinberg says this shows how powerful a driver the cash bail system has been in the march toward mass incarceration.
“Everybody is supposed to be wrapped in the presumption of innocence,” Steinberg says, “regardless of how much money you have, regardless of the color of your skin, regardless of your background, everybody is entitled to that.”
When an individual is arrested, there are only two choices: Fight the charge or plead guilty. But fighting the charge usually requires cash bail in order to be released and await fair trial from home. And when only one in three Americans can afford an unexpected $400 expense, and when imprisonment affects those in poverty disproportionately, paying any amount of bail is rarely a real option.
With bail off the table, the options grow bleaker: Stay in jail until trial (which could be months or years) or accept a plea deal – a guilty plea in exchange for a “time served” sentence – and go home that day.
Awaiting trial
A wide range of factors may culminate in a person being arrested, but once in jail, life both inside and outside the jail cell begins to deteriorate at a dizzying pace.
Inside, it’s dangerous and distressing. “Forty percent of jail deaths, including suicides and homicides, occur within the first seven days of incarceration,” Steinberg says. “It is profoundly dehumanizing. It’s violent. It’s terrifying. That’s the experience of being in jail.”
Their lives outside begin falling apart, too. Child custody can be lost in the first 24 hours. After three days, a person might lose their job, not be able to pay rent, or miss a car payment. Any money they can scrape together to pay bail only deepens the hole and pulls their family further into the hole as well, Steinberg says.
Gaspar explains, “They’re not only dealing with the conditions of jail; they’re dealing with the mental and emotional ramifications of what’s happening to their life as they know it. Everything that they hope to go home to is no longer available to them. And so hope starts to fade. Everything that they are working so hard to just maintain is no longer available for them to maintain.”
“Under those circumstances, and under those conditions, almost everybody, including myself, would plead guilty,” Steinberg says. “We’re not really able to litigate whether somebody is guilty or innocent. People are just pleading guilty in massive numbers because it’s the only way to get home.”
Since their start in 2018, The Bail Project has helped nearly 30,000 people post bail with donations and a revolving bail fund into which bail money is returned at the end of a client’s case. This way, they provide clients the opportunity to fight their cases while staying safe and keeping their lives together, which has a huge impact on the outcome of these cases.
“Anywhere from 20 to 70 percent of cases get dismissed once we intervene and pay cash bail,” Steinberg says, “which tells you a lot about how many people are being dragged into the system who shouldn’t have been there to begin with.”
Over the past five years, the Bail Project has disproved the myth that it is cash that makes people come back to court: Its clients show up to court dates 92 percent of the time, even though they have no financial interest in the charity-funded bail.
“At some point, we have to all take a breath and really ask ourselves: ‘Is this system working?’” Steinberg says. “We’ve tried the experiment of mass incarceration for generations, and it doesn’t work. It harms communities that are most vulnerable.”
The incarcerated
Michelle Payette had a young son at home while she served out her sentence in a women’s facility. At night, she would lay in her bunk and listen to the other mothers crying out for their children. She would sneak stickers out of volunteer-driven activities so she could have a treat to send along with letters to her son.
Payette’s life was changed when she was approached by a chaplain and asked to run Prison Fellowship’s Angel Tree program – a way for the mothers in her facility to send a Christmas gift to their children. She received permission to clean out a storage closet and got to work signing the mothers up for the program.
While working from the storage closet, Payette found Christian resources: sermons on VHS, devotionals, Bibles, and – most exciting to Payette – a concordance. She looked up topic after topic, reading what the Bible said about anxiety, forgiveness, hope.
Soon, she was hosting a regular Bible study for fellow inmates. After being released, she attended church with her family, became the church’s Angel Tree coordinator, and now works with Prison Fellowship as a church partnership manager.
“Had I not gone to prison, I wouldn’t have found that,” Payette says of her faith, purpose, and community.
Prison can be an incredible opportunity to get a life back on track, given the right support. Arguably, that’s what prison should always be. But that’s not what it is for most people.
“The kind of things people go through to survive in prison culture are antithetical to how we would expect people to behave in society,” Rice-Minus says. “In prison, your decisions are made for you. We decide when you wake up, what your job is, how many hours you’re going to spend where.”
Prison culture is contrary to success in the real world. This is probably why the U.S. has some of the highest recidivism rates in the world. Taking initiative, planning your own schedule, making good decisions – these skills are critical for success post-release. That’s why organizations like Prison Fellowship provide programs like The Prison Fellowship Academy – a biblically based program for holistic life transformation.
“In many prisons, if you happen to get rehabilitative services, you are the exception,” Glazier says.
But, when educational, personal-growth, and job-training programs are available to prisoners, inmate conduct improves, recidivism rates drop (from as high as 70 percent to as low as four percent), and post-release employment rates rise.
The rehabilitated
As Christians, we know transformation comes from grace. We know the power of being offered new life. Data points to this being true in prisons as well. Glazier believes he could help close seven prisons a year by lowering arrest rates through community engagement and reducing recidivism through in-prison programs.
“We have a mentality of just warehousing people,” Rice-Minus says “And then we expect them to change post-release.”
But by the time a person is released from prison, the greatest opportunity for rehabilitation has passed. There is a whole new set of obstacles waiting for them outside the prison walls – obstacles which, if unprepared for, would threaten anyone’s resolve for a fresh start.
“I couldn’t get custody of my son until I had an apartment,” Payette says. “I needed a job to get an apartment. In order to get a job, I needed a car. I couldn’t get a car without money. Can’t get money without a job. What do I do?” Even this ignores the obstacle of finding an employer willing to hire someone with a criminal record.
But programs like the Prison Fellowship Academy and Defy Ventures’ CEO of Your New Life educate prisoners on healthy life habits, building strong communities, and employment readiness.
“Fundamentally, what we’re doing is restoration of humanity,” Glazier says. “When you go to prison, you lose your humanity, and you lose your self-worth. So when we bring somebody into our program, what we’re saying to them is, ‘You’re a human. You have unique gifts and talents. What do you want to be?’”
These organizations work with employers, too, bringing leaders into prisons to witness, firsthand, the value these men and women can offer the workforce. “We could be the best reentry preparation program ever in the history of the world,” Glazier says, “but if there is no opportunity waiting for them on the other side, we have failed. Because nothing sends somebody back to prison faster than the inability to earn a living.”
Answering the call
What can you do? Sit in a courthouse. Attend a church service inside a prison. Share your professional skills with inmates preparing for release and reentry. Ask a prison ministry leader what can be done to change the system. Ask your church leaders how your church on the outside can partner with the living, breathing church on the inside to experience radical transformation together.
Rice-Minus has been combing through the writings of their late founder, Chuck Colson, who believed the connection between prison and the local church is powerful. More local churches would benefit from joining the church inside. If we tried this, she says, “we would not only see more revival happening in prisons, but we might actually spark revival in the church outside.”
While prison is a place of devastation for many, believers in prison have some advantages over believers outside. “Prison cultivates intense and unique faith communities,” Rice-Minus says. “Those who have hit rock bottom come to know Christ out of desperation. They understand grace on a level many on the outside cannot begin to understand, and they have time to spend studying, praying, and fasting.”
“We often think that prison ministry means bringing God into prisons. The fact is, he is already there.” Imagine what could happen if even a fourth of Christians heeded Jesus’ call to visit him there.
