Prison Fellowship Partners With Churches, County
By Candace Rondeaux
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 27, 2006
For most inmates at the Loudoun County jail, life behind bars is hard. But volunteers with Loudoun Aftercare, a faith-based mentoring program for inmates and ex-offenders, say life is sometimes harder on the outside.
The program, started with the support of Lansdowne-based Prison Fellowship ministries, aims to help smooth the transition back into the community for former offenders from Loudoun and other Virginia facilities.
"They face all the challenges that everyone would in everyday life. They face the challenge of finding employment, and it's very difficult if you have a felony record," said Mark Earley, president and chief executive of Prison Fellowship and a former Virginia attorney general. "With many of these men and women, we're starting from the ground up."
Introduced with the help of volunteers from several Loudoun churches, the Aftercare program, which involves faith-based one-on-one mentoring, is just one of several ways Prison Fellowship is joining local churches and the county government to reach inmates and ex-offenders in Loudoun.
The nonprofit organization, which moved its headquarters from Fairfax to a modern compound on a 12-acre campus in Lansdowne nearly two years ago, is also working with the county's Community Corrections Program for nonviolent offenders. More than 30 ex-offenders have performed their court-ordered community service, including such tasks as groundskeeping and clerical work, at the organization's offices, said Diane Harrington, senior probation officer with the Community Corrections Program.
"For us it's a win-win, because a lot of our clients who come through the criminal justice system have other needs," Harrington said. "So they're able to give back to the community by providing their skills and also make connections at the fellowship, where they can get help with other things they need to keep them from coming back."
With 110 employees in its Lansdowne office and hundreds more worldwide, Prison Fellowship is among the largest nonprofit organizations in the county. Founded in 1976 by former Nixon administration special counsel Charles W. Colson after he served time for Watergate-related crimes, Prison Fellowship has grown from a small charity to an operation with regular radio broadcasts, newsletters and programs at prisons and jails in all the states and in 100 countries.
Colson is still very active in the organization. Fellowship officials say he sometimes stays in an apartment in a lavish guest house on the Lansdowne campus when traveling to the Washington area on business. In 2002 he tapped Earley, a onetime Republican gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, to be his successor.
Prison Fellowship has regularly been cited by the Bush administration as one of the leading groups of the faith-based social services movement. But a federal judge in Iowa ruled in June that a Prison Fellowship program offered to state prison inmates was unconstitutional, setting off speculation about the future of the administration's faith-based initiative.
The two-year-old lawsuit was brought by the Washington-based Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, which contended that state funding for Prison Fellowship's InnerChange Freedom Initiative was unconstitutional. U.S. District Judge Robert W. Pratt agreed, saying the program at Iowa's Newton Correctional Facility, which immerses participants in daily Bible study and evangelical Christian principles, violated the ban on government establishment of religion because it was state-funded and aimed at religious conversion.
The judge ordered the program shut down and ruled that Prison Fellowship must pay back about $1.5 million it has received from the Iowa Department of Corrections since the program began in 1999. But he also stayed both rulings pending the outcome of an expected appeal.
Earley says he stands by the program, adding that he is hopeful the appeal will be successful.
"We really think the IFI program is constitutional, and we also think that model of working with prisoners before they get released is really the way to go," Earley said.
In the meantime, Earley said, Prison Fellowship will continue to focus on grass-roots partnerships with community churches as a means of reaching inmates and reducing the number of repeat offenders.
Prison Fellowship does not directly fund the Loudoun Aftercare program, but the organization does provide volunteers with office space, a computer and access to meeting rooms at its Lansdowne campus.
Inmates are usually referred to the program by the jail's chaplain or through one of several Bible study sessions at the jail in Leesburg, said Loudoun Aftercare director Debora Lavin. They are screened through interviews and an application process to make sure they are a good fit and have an interest in joining a local church.
"I think for these people they hit rock bottom. They realize they need something more, so they turn to God and say, 'I just can't do this on my own,' " Lavin said.
Three to six months before their release, inmates are matched with volunteer mentors who help them with such tasks as finding a job and a place to live. But the mentors' biggest role is to reintroduce them to the community by attending church with them.
To date, five volunteers from St. John the Apostle Catholic Church in Leesburg and six others from Restoration World Outreach Ministries International in Sterling have agreed to mentor inmates and ex-offenders.
View all comments that have been posted about this article.