Why This Book Exists

I did not write this book from a seminary library or a church office. I wrote it from the inside of a Chilean prison cell, where I spent five years and five months of my life after being wrongfully convicted of two counts of attempted murder (initially) and unjustified firing of a weapon in public. Upon appeal, the former charges were reduced to serious bodily injury to a man’s thigh and property damage to a radiator and gearbox. In reality, I was condemned for a self-defense shooting during Chile’s 2019 social protests spurned by radical, violent leftists and the Communist Party. The forensic evidence overwhelmingly demonstrated my innocence—the prosecution’s theory violated basic physics by 750 percent, posited an impossible ricochet trajectory, could not account for a missing exit wound that day or the absence of an exit hole in the “victim’s” pants, and relied on ammunition traces that did not match my firearm. None of that mattered. The Chilean judiciary convicted me anyway, and I was sentenced to serve years in three different prisons, two of them among the most corrupt and dangerous in the Western Hemisphere.

I am not telling you this so that you will feel sorry for me. I am telling you this so that you will understand the vantage point from which I write. Most books on prison ministry are composed by well-meaning outsiders—pastors who visit for an hour on Thursday afternoons or Sunday mornings, chaplains who go home every evening to their families, or seminary professors who have studied incarceration in the abstract. Their contributions are not worthless, but they are incomplete. They describe the zoo from the visitor’s side of the glass.

This book is written by the animal in the cage.

During my nearly five years, five months behind bars or five months on parole, I became a de facto pastor to dozens of men. I initially started Bible studies with no books, no hymnals, no quiet space, and a hostile environment saturated with drugs, violence, sexual extortion, and corruption. I taught theology to men who could barely read. I counseled suicidal inmates, confronted false religion, witnessed genuine conversions, and watched jailhouse converts fall away within weeks. I “buried” a sickly man who was indirectly murdered by the guards for lack of medical attention. I lost most of my own family—most of my seven children estranged from me and all but one initially considering me guilty, my finances obliterated, my reputation destroyed by a mendacious press and a vindictive leftist prosecutor. I suffered from macular degeneration, hypertension, diverticulitis, renal cancer (successfully operated on only after being paroled), Covid-19 (serious), life-threatening pneumonia (twice), and a constellation of other ailments while being denied adequate medical care. I showered with cold water at times, later using a bucket and a kettle, like many others, to pour warm water over myself.

And through all of it, God sustained me. Not in the sentimental way that Christian greeting cards suggest—not with warm feelings and emotional reassurances—but in the hard, sovereign, providential way that the Scriptures actually describe. He sustained me the way He sustained Joseph in Potiphar’s prison, Jeremiah in the cistern, Daniel in the lions’ den, and Paul in chains. He sustained me by being God, not by making my circumstances generally comfortable.

This book draws from two forthcoming, prior works that I have written. The first is Suffering Unjustly: Imprisonment, Wrecked Families, and Property or Wealth Destruction Affecting Christians in Modern Democratic Societies, which provides the theological and analytical framework for understanding why Christians suffer under modern legal systems. The second is Bearing the Cross: A Gringo Political Prisoner Exposes the Injustices, Indignities, and Vexations of the Chilean Criminal Justice and Prison System, a five-book, eleven-volume, 1.17-million-word prison journal and memoir documenting my daily experiences across six years of incarceration and parole. Suffering Unjustly gives you the doctrine. Bearing the Cross gives you the dirt under the fingernails. This book synthesizes both into a practical guide—a field manual—for anyone who touches the world of prison ministry.

Who This Book Is For

I have written this guide for three audiences, each of whom needs something different from it. First, this book is for church leaders and volunteers who are planning or conducting prison ministry programs. You will find here the unvarnished reality of what prison is actually like, what inmates actually need, what mistakes outside Christians routinely make, and how to build a sustainable ministry that does not collapse after the initial enthusiasm wears off. Most of what you think you know about prison is wrong. This book will correct your assumptions.

Second, this book is for Christians who find themselves incarcerated—whether wrongfully or otherwise—who need spiritual guidance for surviving and thriving behind bars. I am not interested in offering you platitudes. I am interested in telling you what will actually sustain your faith when the cell door locks, the lights go out, and you are sharing a room with a drug addict and a murderer while your wife stops answering your calls and visiting. The Scripture references, the practical survival strategies, and the spiritual disciplines described in this book are not theoretical. I lived them.

Third, this book is for family members and friends of incarcerated Christians. You are the forgotten casualties of the criminal justice system. Your spouse, parent, or child is behind bars, and you are left to manage the financial ruin, the social stigma, the emotional devastation, and the slow erosion of every relationship you have—often with no support whatsoever from the church. This book will help you understand what your loved one is experiencing, how to support them, and how to survive this ordeal yourself.