Public Money Used to Indoctrinate Prisoners

Posted on Dec 10, 2006

nytimes.com

Iowa federal Judge Robert Pratt

Tax dollars are going toward an unlawful program of religious indoctrination in prisons, according to Iowa federal Judge Robert W. Pratt, who now finds himself fighting a battle against entrenched forces from evangelical ministries, prison corporations and the Bush administration.

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New York Times:

But the only way an inmate could qualify for this kinder mutation of prison life was to enter an intensely religious rehabilitation program and satisfy the evangelical Christians running it that he was making acceptable spiritual progress. The program—which grew from a project started in 1997 at a Texas prison with the support of George W. Bush, who was governor at the time—says on its Web site that it seeks “to ‘cure’ prisoners by identifying sin as the root of their problems” and showing inmates “how God can heal them permanently, if they turn from their sinful past.”

One Roman Catholic inmate, Michael A. Bauer, left the program after a year, mostly because he felt the program staff and volunteers were hostile toward his faith.

“My No. 1 reason for leaving the program was that I personally felt spiritually crushed,” he testified at a court hearing last year. “I just didn’t feel good about where I was and what was going on.”

For Robert W. Pratt, chief judge of the federal courts in the Southern District of Iowa, this all added up to an unconstitutional use of taxpayer money for religious indoctrination, as he ruled in June in a lawsuit challenging the arrangement.

The Iowa prison program is not unique. Since 2000, courts have cited more than a dozen programs for having unconstitutionally used taxpayer money to pay for religious activities or evangelism aimed at prisoners, recovering addicts, job seekers, teenagers and children.

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