The banging of a steel rod against a sealed steel door was the first sound that educated me about my new reality. It came from another cell block, perhaps two hundred meters away, yet it drowned out everything except the blood-curdling screams of the victims: “Don’t do it! Please stop!” There was nothing anyone could do from inside his cell but listen. Usually, the steel rod is employed to get the night guard’s attention when someone trips a circuit breaker by running a high-amperage heating device. But about one in ten times, the banging means that someone is sick or wounded and dying. The guards never hurry. First, because most calls are false alarms; second, because one gendarme covers three módulos (cell blocks), each containing fifty to three hundred fifty prisoners. By the time he arrives and hustles the victim to the paramedics, the poor man has usually bled out or is at least in sad shape.

That was my introduction to the Valparaíso Penitentiary.

I was fifty-six years old, held five earned college degrees, had visited seventy countries, had written numerous books and scholarly articles, had pastored a Baptist church, and had taught at the university level. None of that mattered now. I was a reo—a prisoner—and the elaborate architecture of my former life was irrelevant to the concrete and steel cage that surrounded me.

The Arrest

No one is truly prepared for the moment of arrest, regardless of how many police dramas he has watched or how clearly he knows his own innocence. The Chilean state took me into custody in the chaos following the fiery, violent October 2019 social protests, when leftist mobs burned and looted across the country. I had fired my legally owned weapon in self-defense when a crowd attacked, bent on killing me, and Sebastián Valdés Muñoz opened my pickup’s driver-side door to lynch me. The forensic evidence—the physics of the bullet trajectory, the absence of an exit wound at the hospital or an exit hole in the pants, the wrong ammunition traces—all pointed overwhelmingly to the impossibility of the prosecution’s theory. But this was a political case. I was a well-known libertarian and rightist commentator, having published 1,507 letters to the editor beyond my academic work and Chilean media appearances, and the leftist establishment needed a scapegoat. The prosecutor was loud-mouthed, arrogant, insolent, mendacious, and cruel. The judiciary was arbitrary and biased. Truth was subordinate to politics.

When the handcuffs close around your wrists, something changes inside you that no theology textbook adequately describes. Your body floods with adrenaline—your heart races, your vision narrows, your mind scrambles to comprehend what is happening. Even if you are a man of faith, even if you have preached sermons about Paul’s imprisonment and sung hymns about perseverance, the physical reality of being seized, processed, and confined produces a visceral terror that cannot be intellectualized away. I do not say this to excuse weakness. I say it so that when it happens to you, or to someone you minister to, you will not be surprised. The body and the soul are connected, and the shock of incarceration assaults both simultaneously.

The First Night

My first night in módulo 118 of the Valparaíso Penitentiary was an education in helplessness. The cell was small—barely enough room for bunks, a place to sit, and a shared toilet area. The air was sometimes thick with cigarette smoke and the residual fumes of marijuana. The noise never stopped: televisions blaring, men arguing, the unpredictable percussion of steel on steel from distant blocks where someone was often sick or sometimes being stabbed, beaten, or dying. I lay on a thin mattress that smelled of the dozen men who had used it before me, and in some cases, I stared at a ceiling I could touch.

The things they do not tell you about prison are the small humiliations that accumulate like sand in your shoes. No running hot water. You learn to bathe by mixing cold water from a paint bucket with water from an electric kettle, then pouring the lukewarm mixture over yourself—hardly a replacement for a real shower, but the only option for months and years on end. The food is barely edible. Medical care is primitive, and even a visit to the nurse may require a bribe. The bathroom is shared, exposed, and never truly clean. These are not abstract deprivations for a middle-class man accustomed to running water, a private bedroom, and meals prepared in a kitchen. They are daily, grinding erasures of everything that once made you feel human.

And yet the physical hardships are not the worst of it. The worst is the psychological assault. You lie in that cell on the first night, and the full weight of your situation descends upon you like a millstone. You are separated from your wife, your children, your church, and your friends. You do not know when—or if—you will see them again. You do not know what is happening in the outside world, except fragments gleaned from a television you cannot control and slang-ridden conversations you cannot trust. You are surrounded by strangers, some of whom have committed terrible crimes, and you must navigate their world according to rules you do not yet understand.

Disorientation. Fear. Shame. Anger. Frustration. Disbelief. These emotions and reactions cycle through you in waves during those first hours, and they are not mutually exclusive. You can be terrified and furious at the same time. You can feel deep shame—as though the arrest itself has dirtied you, even when you know your own innocence—and simultaneously feel disoriented, unable to locate yourself in time or space. “Where am I? How did I get here? This cannot be real.” But it is real, and the sooner you accept that reality, the sooner you can begin to survive it.

What Your Family Experiences

While the newly incarcerated man is processing his shock, his family is experiencing its own earthquake. My wife had to absorb the news that her husband was behind bars, then navigate a bewildering legal system in a foreign language, manage our household finances with no income, and begin the exhausting process of visiting me in a penitentiary that often treated family members with contempt. Visitors are subject to strip searches. In some cases, they must arrive precisely on time or be turned away. They can carry limited items and limited cash. The indignities imposed on prisoners’ families are deliberate, and they are effective at discouraging people from coming.

For my children, the shock was compounded by the social stigma. Their father was accused of attempted murder. That headline travels faster and lingers longer than any subsequent exoneration. Three of my seven children drew closer after six years; most became distant, angry, hateful, ashamed. The family destruction wrought by incarceration—which I will address at length in later chapters—begins in these very first hours, when the family receives the news and must decide how to respond to a catastrophe for which nothing in life has prepared them.

If you are a pastor, an elder, a deacon, or a church volunteer, understand this: the family needs ministry from the moment of arrest, not after the trial, not after sentencing, not after things “settle down.” There is no settling down. The crisis is immediate and total. The family needs someone to show up at their door within hours, not weeks. They need practical help—financial, logistical, emotional, spiritual—and they need it now. This is not a suggestion. It is a biblical imperative. “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world” (James 1:27).

Practical Survival for the First Days

Allow me to offer some counsel that I wish someone had given me.

Do not trust anyone immediately. Prison is a world of deception. Men will approach you with apparent kindness—offering food, information, protection—and many of them are doing so to exploit you. I was scammed multiple times in my first thirty months because I was too trusting, a product of the civil society I had come from. In prison, trust is earned over months, not given in hours. Be polite, be respectful, but guard yourself.