Prisons need chaplains to do vital work

In times of shrinking state budgets, it’s easy to understand why government officials — such as those in Georgia — would consider reducing the number of state prison chaplains. After all, the citizens most affected — prisoners — aren’t likely to voice their displeasure at the ballot box. And even in good times, prison programming and rehabilitation efforts are usually seen as mere luxuries. So when times are tight, they are usually the first things to be cut out of the budget and the last to be restored.

But rehabilitation efforts are not luxuries. They are essential to public safety. More than 90 percent of the men and women who enter our prison systems will finish their sentences and return to the streets. They will, for good or ill, be shaped by their prison experience — either to return to a life of crime or to successfully reintegrate into the community as productive citizens.

Chaplains are indispensable because they provide vital services that no other corrections personnel are trained or have time to provide: from dealing with the spiritual and emotional needs of prisoners, to providing a listening ear in a frightening environment, to helping prisoners stay connected to their families, to — perhaps most importantly — helping inmates develop a moral compass.

Furthermore, chaplains have a huge multiplier effect inside prisons because they serve as a vital connection between the prison system and the compassionate army of volunteers who go behind bars to help prisoners prepare for release.

As the head of the world’s largest outreach to prisoners and their families, I know how difficult it is to get volunteers into prison, where security is the top priority. Volunteers are not allowed to come and go freely. In many prisons, it is the chaplains who manage the process that allows officers at the gate to know who is approved for entry.

In many facilities without chaplains, we have found that volunteer paperwork is often lost and approved volunteers are often denied entry to a prison. This is very discouraging and makes it difficult to retain volunteers.

Yet it is these volunteers who help prisoners with things such as anger management, literacy training, job and family skills, and on and on — skills that prisoners will need once they hit the streets if they are to withstand the pressures from acquaintances, find jobs and be successfully reunited with their families. Reducing the chaplaincy program will make it immensely more difficult to get these volunteers into the prison system, where they provide enormous benefit to the prisoners and to the state, at very little cost.

A better — and safer — approach to cutting costs would be to re-examine just who needs to be confined in a state prison. According to the Georgia Department of Corrections, it costs more than $14,000 a year to keep just one prisoner inside a medium— or minimum—security prison in Georgia. We should reserve scarce and expensive prison space for inmates who pose a real danger to our communities.

Every low-risk offender who can safely be punished in the community under intensive probation supervision or in such programs as the state’s day reporting centers would save the state many thousands of dollars per year. To be sure, there are costs involved in expanding such programs, but they are a fraction of the costs of keeping these low-risk offenders in prison.

As a former attorney general of the state of Virginia, I know how difficult and painful budget cuts can be. So I understand why some would opt for the “easy” cuts — such as reducing the number of prison chaplains. But the easy cut is not always the best cut when it comes to public policy and public safety.

• Mark L. Earley, a former Republican attorney general of Virginia, is the president and CEO of Prison Fellowship.