Prison program puts religion behind bars

ROSHARON — Kenny Calliham sat alone in the dark of aprison cubicle when it finally hit him: He couldn’t live like that anymore. He needed something different, something better.

Years of drugging and fighting had gotten the Greenspoint man where he was, in the middle of a 45-year prison sentence for aggravated robbery. He’d squandered a shot at probation, destroyed relationships with those around him, and gotten into “all the worst that prison had to offer.”

“I just looked at myself and saw that everything I’d started on my own had crumbled,” he said.

But on Monday, he started the process of rebuilding.

The 36-year-old was one of 35 prisoners who graduated from the four-year seminary at the Darrington Unit, a milestone marked by a jailhouse commencement attended by inmates’ families, high-ranking prison officials and state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston.

“Each and every one of us today is witnessing a miracle,” Whitmire told the new graduates, black graduation robes hiding their prison whites.

With the addition of the 2018 class, there are now 180 seminary graduates who’ve been sent out to do God’s work as field ministers at 26 prisons across the state.

By 2024, there will be field ministers on hand in all 104 Texas Department of Criminal Justice prisons.

Darrington was once known as a bad unit, plagued by violence and unrest. It was a place you didn’t want to be sent.

Now, men are vying to get into the maximum-security Brazoria County prison, competing for a few dozen coveted slots in the program funded by the nonprofit Heart of Texas Foundation and run by the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, based in Fort Worth.

To qualify, would-be students need to have high school diplomas or a GED, no disciplinary problems for the past year, and at least 10 years left until their earliest release date.

That last caveat is one that makes the seminary program stand out from many other prison offerings. While vocational programs and education are typically targeted at helping inmates lead productive lives after their release, the seminary program is aimed at those who have long stretches of time left — and an interest in doing good works behind bars.

For four years, they study rhetoric, Western civilization, health science and the Bible. They hole up in the library and take full-time classes instead of holding prison jobs, and they learn together in the groupings they’ll stay in when they’re eventually sent out to prisons across the state as graduates of the nondenominational program.

“There is a sense of community that develops among the students,” said Ben Phillips, the seminary professor who serves as Darrington’s program director. “For a great many of them, they really want to seize this opportunity and wring every ounce of value out of it.”

The class of 2018 will fan out to units across the state in the coming weeks, walking in as the first field ministers newly dispatched to seven prisons from Huntsville to Rosharon to outside San Antonio. Prison officials say it’s been transformative, and become a model for other states sending in their high-ranking corrections officials to look in on the Lone Star State’s success.

“We’re doing it, and we’re doing it in ways that no other country or state in the world has done it,” said Grove Norwood, founder and CEO of the Heart of Texas Foundation, a nonprofit that works to provide Christian teachings to long-term inmates.

It was over dinner that seminary president Paige Patterson’s brother-in-law told him about Angola.

The notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary had been a hotbed of violence, but officials there were crediting a forward-thinking program with changing the culture behind bars. And Patterson’s in-law, Charles Kelley, had a hand in that. As head of the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, Kelley had overseen the four-year program there — and watched it work.

“He said I didn’t deserve to go to heaven if I didn’t do the same thing in Texas,” Patterson said with a smile. The high-stakes urging was all in jest, but Patterson took it to heart.

What happened next may have been coincidence or divine intervention, but as Patterson was mulling over his next steps he bumped into Norwood at a convention. They’d never met before, but once they started talking they realized they had a common interest in bringing God behind bars.

So Norwood introduced Patterson to Whitmire, and soon they’d organized a three-day trip to Louisiana to see the program in person. Everyone came away impressed.

“I knew what kind of prison Angola had been, and it was like moving from the center of a storm to a peaceful haven,” Patterson said. “You knew something miraculous had happened.”

After holding hands and praying about it, Whitmire recalled, they made a decision: “Let’s go to Texas.”

Initially, the seminary didn’t even have a four-year program; its academic offerings focused on master’s and doctoral programs.

“They made one just for this,” Norwood said. With legislators, prison officials and the seminary all on board, it didn’t take long to cut through the red tape.

By 2011, the first class of future ministers started their studies. And on Monday, Darrington saw its fourth graduating class walk across the stage. They sang, tossed their caps and flipped their tassels. It had all the elements of a traditional graduation, mixed in with a little rapping and a very Texas sermon involving a mishap with a bear along the border.

“Graduations happen throughout our state,” said TDCJ Deputy Executive Director Oscar Mendoza. “But graduations like this only happen at the Darrington Unit.” keri.blakinger@chron.com twitter.com/keribla