“It’s sweeping the country,” said Denny Autrey, director of operations for the Prison Seminaries Foundation. “More wardens and directors of prisons are looking for ways to change the tide of crime inside and help these guys when they do get out so they don’t come back in. It’s an educational program that impacts the heart and mind.”
Few of these educational programs address problems associated with the carceral state, such as racial disparities or the ways the justice system disproportionately punishes people who are poor, mentally ill and addicted. The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world.
North Park University’s School of Restorative Arts welcomes a new cohort of students to its masters degree program at Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois in Oct. 2019. Photo by Karl Clifton-Soderstrom, courtesy North Park University
One program that does is North Park Theological Seminary’s School of Restorative Arts, which offers a master’s degree in restorative justice ministry. The program, run at two Illinois prisons (one for men and another for women), includes classes on conflict deescalation, race relations, trauma, healing and restorative justice. Its faculty also advocates for students’ release and prison abolition more generally.
“A lot of programs are training people to be missionaries on the inside, but they’re not advocating for their freedom,” said Michelle Clifton-Soderstrom, director of the program and the dean of faculty at North Park’s seminary. “We are not of that mindset. We recognize there are better ways to address violence and mass incarceration.”
At the graduation ceremony in North Carolina, which was followed by a catered lunch for graduates and their families, Southeastern leaders made it clear they wanted graduates to be “ambassadors for Christ,” in the words of Joe Gibbs and Danny Akin at the graduation ceremony.
Akin reiterated that Southeastern is a seminary whose core purpose is to spread the faith.
Speaking to the graduates, Akin said: “You get to take the life-changing light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to those who have value, men for whom Christ died,” Akin said.
Loren Hammonds, a 43-year-old inmate serving a sentence of life without parole, said that’s exactly what he hopes to do. Hammonds, who held his mother’s hand as he sat with his parents, shortly after the graduation, said he will be sent to a hospice-care ward at a prison 40 miles from Charlotte where he will offer comfort and companionship to terminally ill men who will spend their final days in a cell bloc.
“I want to give them hope,” he said, “and introduce them to the Gospel.”
This article originally appeared here.
