There is a sound that haunts a man long after he leaves prison. It is not the clang of the steel door or the bark of the guard. It is the weeping of a man who has lost everything—his freedom, his family, his hope, his reason to live—and who is now seriously considering whether tomorrow is worth enduring.

I heard that sound many times in the Valparaíso Penitentiary. I heard it through thin cell walls, across the patio in the early hours of the morning, and in the voices of men who sat across from me and said, in so many words, “I cannot do this anymore.” Counseling these men was the most difficult and the most important ministry I performed behind bars, and it is the ministry for which I was least prepared by anything in my prior experience.

No seminary class, no pastoral counseling textbook, no workshop on crisis intervention can fully prepare you for the moment when a man looks you in the eye and says he wants to die. You are not in an office with a panic button and a referral list. You are in a prison cell with a man who has access to sharpened steel, electrical cords, and bedsheets strong enough to hang from. The professional resources that exist in the free world—psychiatrists, medications, crisis hotlines, emergency rooms—are either absent or practically inaccessible in the prison environment, where a doctor shows up from time to time, and getting to the nurse or psychologist may require a bribe or a very long wait. Suicides are not unheard of, but they are not common either. Yet, the depressed soul often crosses paths with Christians while looking for answers or support.

The Reality of Suicide in Prison

Men die in Chilean prisons with appalling regularity. The steel rods banging against doors at night often signal someone bleeding out from a crude spear fashioned from a sharpened bed frame attached to a broom handle. But not all deaths are homicides. Some are suicides—quiet, unreported, wrapped in institutional silence, yet quickly reported by fellow inmates, where word spreads fast across the different cell blocks or collectives.

The suicidal inmate is not always the man you expect. He is not always the lifer staring down decades of confinement. Sometimes he is the pretrial detainee who received bad news from his lawyer or who didn’t get the parole he was expecting. Sometimes he is the new arrival in his first week, overwhelmed by the shock described in Chapter 1. Sometimes he is the long-term inmate who received a letter from his wife saying she will not visit anymore, or whose appeal was denied for the second time, or who simply woke up one morning and could not find a single reason to get out of bed.

During my imprisonment, there were moments when the despair was so total that even I—a man with decades of theological training, a deep understanding of God’s sovereignty, and a library of Scripture committed to memory—felt the gravitational pull of hopelessness. I consoled myself at one point with the grim thought that if I were forcibly vaccinated and died or was seriously injured, “at least that will be better than dying by my own hand, falling prey to suicide in desperate circumstances in a Chilean jail, and I will thus be in the arms of Jesus.” That is not the testimony of a man who has conquered despair. That is the testimony of a man who is fighting it with everything he has and recognizing how close the enemy comes. Quite often, death looks more attractive to a prisoner than life.

The Bible takes suicide seriously. It records suicides without glorifying them—Saul falling on his sword (1 Samuel 31:4), Judas hanging himself (Matthew 27:5), Ahithophel (2 Samuel 17:23), Zimri (1 Kings 16:18). It presents them as tragic culminations of lives that turned away from God, not as noble exits. The sixth commandment—“Thou shalt not kill” (Exodus 20:13)—applies to oneself as well as to others. The believer’s body is not his own; it was bought with a price (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). Even in the deepest darkness, the Christian is called to endure, not to escape by self-destruction, or by indirectly destroying oneself by intentionally offending a violent criminal in the hope of being killed by him.

But telling a suicidal man “thou shalt not kill” is not counseling. It is theology, and theology alone does not save a drowning man—though it provides the only foundation on which genuine rescue can be built. The man in crisis needs three things simultaneously: a human presence that cares, a truthful word that anchors, and a practical intervention that addresses the immediate danger.

How to Counsel Men Who Have Lost Everything

The men I counseled in prison had, in most cases, lost everything that the world says gives life meaning. Their freedom was gone. Their families were disintegrating. Their reputations were destroyed. Their financial resources were exhausted. Their futures were uncertain at best and terrifying at worst. The standard tools of worldly counseling—“focus on what you can control,” “set goals,” “visualize a positive outcome”—are nearly useless for a man who controls nothing, whose goals have been obliterated, and whose positive outcomes are blocked by an indifferent judiciary and a corrupt legal system, particularly when he is the pawn or stooge of some overbearing guard.

What works—and I say this not from theory but from experience—is the relentless application of two truths: God is sovereign, and this is not the end of the story. God is sovereign. Whatever has happened to you, it has not happened outside the decree of the Almighty. Your unjust conviction, your estranged children, your bankrupt finances—all of it is under the hand of a God who works all things according to the counsel of His own will (Ephesians 1:11). This does not make it pleasant. It does not make it painless. But it makes it purposeful. And purpose is the antidote to despair.

This is not the end of the story. Whether a man spends five years or fifty years in prison, his life does not end within these walls. If he is a believer, he has an eternity of glory awaiting him that makes the years of suffering look like a brief footnote. “For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18). If he is an unbeliever, his suffering is a merciful warning—a foretaste of the eternal consequences of rejecting Christ, and simultaneously a providential opportunity to repent before it is too late.

This is the astonishing truth that most people overlook: God sometimes uses prison as the means of salvation. The man who would never have entered a church, never have opened a Bible, never have considered the claims of Christ, is now locked in a room with no escape and no distraction. His pride has been broken by the humiliation of arrest. His self-sufficiency has been exposed by the helplessness of confinement. His pleasures have been stripped away. And into that vacuum, God sends His Word—through a cellmate, a chaplain, a radio broadcast, an internet podcast or service, a letter from a stranger, or a Bible left on a shelf by a previous inmate.

How many men have been saved because God, in His inscrutable wisdom, permitted them to be arrested? How many men who would have spent their entire lives running from God were stopped in their tracks by a pair of handcuffs? We will not know the full answer until eternity. But I saw enough in six years behind bars and on parole to know that the number is not small.

Addiction in Prison

Drugs flow as freely inside prison as they do on the streets—in some cases, more so. Marijuana was smoked openly in doorways while guards turned a blind eye. Cell phones, which were used to coordinate drug transactions, entered through corrupt guards, compliant lawyers, or visitors who concealed them in body cavities. The financial infrastructure of the drug trade—extortion, blackmail, stolen goods—was integrated into every aspect of prison life.

The addicted inmate is a man in double bondage: chained by the state and chained by his substance. Helping him requires addressing both realities. The first chain you cannot remove. The second, only God can break—but He often uses human instruments.

My approach to counseling addicted inmates was rooted in the biblical understanding that addiction is, at its core, idolatry. The substance has become the god that the man worships—the thing he turns to for comfort, for escape, for pleasure, for identity. Replacing that idol requires not merely the removal of the substance (which is nearly impossible in a prison environment where drugs are ubiquitous) but the introduction of a superior affection. As Thomas Chalmers argued in “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection,” the only way to dislodge an idol is to replace it with something greater. That something is Christ.

I confronted addiction directly but without self-righteousness. When my cellmate asked me to lend him money to buy a joint, I refused: “You can do what you want, but please do not ask me to participate in your getting high or other sins.” I was firm, but I did not lecture. I had made my position clear. Beyond that, the Spirit would have to do His work.

For the outside minister working with addicted inmates, the key is patience and realism. Men will relapse. Many will relapse repeatedly. The question is not whether they will fall but whether they will get up. Your job is to be there when they do—not with condemnation, but with the Gospel. “A just man falleth seven times, and riseth up again” (Proverbs 24:16).

Self-Harm and the Limits of Ministry

Not all desperation takes the form of suicidal ideation. Some men express their anguish through acts of deliberate self-harm that are simultaneously cries for help and manifestations of a darkness too deep for words.

In Rancagua prison, I encountered a violently unstable man named Monicate. In the evening, after an altercation in which he threatened me for retrieving my own watch—to which I responded by quoting Philippians 1:21, “to live is Christ and to die is gain,” indicating that his threats did not frighten me—he took a thick, slightly hooked leather-sewing needle and stabbed himself in the gut. He nearly required a colostomy bag. I stood there, stunned as I learned the report about a man I had just confronted puncturing his own abdomen, and I wondered how many times guardian angels had intervened on his behalf throughout his wretched life. I then also heard that the scene I caused with the guards was so unpleasant for the men living with Monicate that they stabbed him to teach him a lesson. I did not know for sure which story held more weight.