Faith-based initiatives refer broadly to a wide range of interventions and services offered to offenders, victims, and families by volunteers and organizations motivated by religious convictions. Although the term faith-based initiative has been associated with the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (now the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships) since its establishment in 2001, the concept of faith-based initiatives far predates and transcends this federal program. This article outlines the origin of faith-based initiatives within the criminal justice system, introduces contemporary faith-based programs, and surveys challenges confronting these services.
Origins of Faith-Based Correctional Programs
Faith-based initiatives in the U.S. criminal justice system date to the late 18th century. Religious leaders concerned by the brutality of corporal punishments advocated correctional reforms that gave rise to the penitentiary movement. This movement drew upon the principles and practices of religious monasticism, including silence, solitude, labor, and instruction to reenvision prisons and jails, formerly reserved for pretrial detention and debtors’ incarceration, as places of penitence, reform, and rehabilitation for criminal offenders. The first U.S. penitentiaries included Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Jail and New York prisons Newgate, Auburn, and Sing Sing. From its inception, the penitentiary movement was fraught with conflict between religious reformers and security over access and program implementation. Religiously motivated emphasis on rehabilitation waned while incarceration endured as the default criminal punishment in the United States. The penitentiary label is a vestige of its religious roots.
Contemporary Faith-Based Services
Since the 1970s, faith-based initiatives addressing crime have returned to prominence. Programs include prevention efforts, custodial programs, and post-release services. Community-organizing endeavors like Boston, Massachusetts’s Ten-Point Coalition and Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s Violence-Free Zone Initiative cultivate partnerships between congregations and other community assets, including schools and law enforcement, to curtail gang activity and substance abuse, particularly among youth. Mentorship programs pair at-risk youth, especially children of incarcerated parents, with positive role models to disrupt intergenerational criminal cycles.
Other initiatives mobilize faith-motivated staff and volunteers to serve incarcerated offenders. These interventions range from worship services and scripture studies led by volunteers from local congregations to formal curricula, accredited degree programs, and faith-based dorms and entire prison units operated by contract with state and federal agencies. The largest organizational service providers include Prison Fellowship, Kairos Prison Ministry, and the Salvation Army, all of which operate internationally. These groups provide visitation, mentorship, life skills courses, substance abuse counseling, and parenting seminars. More extensive academic programs offer bachelor’s degrees at no cost to prisoners through partner seminaries. Still other programs offer direct services to inmates’ families, including counseling, assistance with visitation processes, and material aid.
Prison Fellowship’s most intensive program, the InnerChange Freedom Initiative, bridges in-prison rehabilitation and post-release aftercare. The InnerChange Freedom Initiative delivers a biblical curriculum within an environment dedicated to its program. It then continues to support participants for up to a year after parole, significantly reducing recidivism. Another innovative initiative bridging prison and parole is the Prison Entrepreneurship Program. The Prison Entrepreneurship Program combines character assessment and development with a business plan competition that challenges participants to cultivate business skills needed upon release. The program also offers transitional housing and continuing education to support reentry.
Still other initiatives focus exclusively on reentry. Religiously operated halfway houses offer safe, stable, and supervised residences to parolees. These residences often offer on-site job skills and technology training, employment and transportation assistance, and ongoing substance abuse counseling. Faith-motivated individuals and organizations help parolees navigate the most vulnerable months of their transition and reintegrate as prosocial community members.
Challenges to Faith-Based Initiatives
Assessing the efficacy of faith-based programs has proven difficult, although the most extensive literature review to date identified positive correlations between religion and crime reduction in 90% of studies. The first hurdle for assessing faith-based initiatives is their sheer diversity. Crime prevention initiatives, victim services, and interventions with offenders both during and after custody defy easy categorization. The diverse settings for such services virtually ensure some degree of inconsistency in implementation. Different initiatives also claim different outcome measures as appropriate to their respective programs. Recidivism reduction, desistance, institutional conduct, and subjective coping might all be plausible outcome measures for a given initiative, but differing stakeholders may well disagree about which ones are most appropriate. Finally, faith-based initiatives inherently introduce a measure of selection bias since they must be voluntary to protect participants’ religious freedom. Careful evaluation design can mitigate this assessment challenge but likely never dispel it entirely.
Mention of religious freedom leads to the second major challenge to faith-based initiatives: questions of constitutionality. Some object to the direction of public funds to faith-based services, even when carefully earmarked for secular aims. Others object to the provision of faith-based services at all, regardless of funding. They contend that religious programs within correctional contexts inescapably privilege one faith over another (or none) and thereby unconstitutionally incentivize religious participation. Concerns to resist government establishment of religion come into tension with protection of offenders’ free exercise rights and controversies that have beset faith-based initiatives since the penitentiary’s origins reemerge.
References:
- Dodson, K. L., Cabage, L. N., & Klenowski, P. M. (2011). An evidence-based assessment of faith-based programs: Do faith-based programs “work” to reduce recidivism? Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, 50(6), 367–383. doi:10.1080/10509674.2011.582932
- Duwe, G., & King, M. (2013). Can faith-based correctional programs work? An outcome evaluation of the InnerChange Freedom Initiative in Minnesota. Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 57(7), 813–841. doi:10.1177/0306624X12439397
- Johnson, B. R. (2004). Religious programs and recidivism among former inmates in Prison Fellowship programs: A long-term follow-up study. Justice Quarterly, 21(4), 329–354.
- Johnson, B. R. (2012). Can a faith-based prison reduce recidivism? Corrections Today, 73(6), 60–62.
- Sullivan, W. F. (2009). Prison religion: Faith-based reform and the Constitution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.