The prison does not merely confine the man inside it. It detonates a bomb in the center of his family and walks away. The state that prosecutes, convicts, and incarcerates a man takes no responsibility for the devastation it inflicts on the people who love him. His wife, his children, his parents, his siblings, his church, his friends—they receive no support, no counseling, no financial assistance, and precious little sympathy from a society that assumes they must have done something to deserve their association with a criminal.

I have seven children. By the end of my imprisonment, most of them grew more estranged from me than they already were. I had a wife who stood by me through unimaginable pressure—bringing food bags to the prison, navigating a hostile legal system in a language not her own, managing finances that had been obliterated by legal fees and the loss of my income. She endured strip searches to visit me. She waited in line for hours. And there were periods when even she, under the accumulated weight of it all, began to crack—at several points basically denying the faith, falling apart under a worldly self-centered (rather than God-centered) perspective, the financial devastation, social isolation, and relentless cruelty of the system.

This is not an exceptional story. It is the typical story, and perhaps better than the typical one. The family of the incarcerated man is destroyed not by a single event but by a sustained assault that attacks every dimension of their lives simultaneously—emotional, financial, social, spiritual. If the church does not understand this reality, it cannot minister effectively to prisoners or their families.

The Wife Who Bears the Cross She Did Not Choose

Before I speak of marriage in the abstract, let me speak of Pamela in the particular—because her suffering was not theoretical but grinding, relentless, and largely invisible. Her lack of faith and obedience only made it worse. Her future change of heart would make that ever clearer.

Week in and week out, she dreaded waiting in line at the pharmacy and supermarket, suffered taking public transportation, and dealt with the long line of people—mainly women—waiting to have their bags inspected by the moody and sometimes quite disagreeable gendarmes. She filled two plastic sacks with food per week. She divided cooked meat and potatoes into six sealed plastic containers while I was in Valparaíso—one kept in the cell for the weekend, the others stored in the communal freezer wrapped in a bag with my cellmate’s name, since items bearing an aggressive cellmate’s name were less likely to be stolen. The mayonnaise, the BBQ sauce—which had to be poured into a bag to prove it contained no drugs—the chips, the cereal bars, the lunch meats and cheese, the garlic powder, the homemade salad dressing disguised in artificial sweetener bottles—all of this was the product of hours of labor by a woman who had not signed up for this life. “This is hardly the fairy-princess life I signed up for,” she once remarked, and the understatement was devastating.

She could not understand why the prison would have such a nasty toilet for women waiting to bring things to their prisoners, why the guards let the pigeon droppings cake up on the walkway thick as paint in some places, in sight of many bags of human excrement that had been tossed out from the upper floors, why they tolerated so many mangy dogs scratching fleas off their fur next to people bringing bags of food. Every visit was an ordeal that began hours before she arrived and did not end until hours after she left—emotionally drained, financially depleted, and spiritually battered.

And there were periods when, under the accumulated weight of it all, even Pamela, great-granddaughter of Pastor Wenceslao Valdivia, the first Chilean Baptist baptized by Baptist missionaries in 1896, began to deny her Baptist faith. She basically fell apart under the financial devastation, prayerlessness, wrongheaded theology, angry rebellion, social isolation, and relentless cruelty of the system. Watching the person closest to you lose her grip on the faith you share is a particular kind of agony that compounds your own doubts even as you fight to maintain your own footing. I could not hold her. I could not reason with her face-to-face. I could only pray, and there were nights when even prayer felt like shouting into a void. Yet, God was gracious over time. Like Job’s wife, Pamela learned more from her husband’s trial than he did.

The Devastating Impact on Marriages

Marriage, even under the best of circumstances, requires presence. It requires daily conversation, shared meals, physical touch, the thousand small interactions that weave two lives together. Prison severs all of this with surgical precision.

I had not felt the soft female touch from my wife or any other woman for so long—not even a handshake—that when the first visitation was finally permitted after nearly nine months, feeling Pamela’s soft skin was almost startling. She sat on a white stool at a round plastic table, wearing new sparkling silver shoes and just the right amount of makeup. She was a sight for sore eyes. The rules said no kissing, hugging, or touching. Every couple in the room broke those rules. Our first kiss was with masks on—the absurdity of the Covid-era prison. The second through fifth—the last one occurring while standing and hugging, just as we were leaving the visitation—were with bare lips and showed happy, embodied affection. It did the marriage good to have such an encounter. The gendarmes walked away to give privacy. One-legged Jorge and his girlfriend were caught making out in a camera-free staircase. The humanity of the moment—the desperate, ragged humanity of men and women who had been torn apart by the state and who clung to each other for a few stolen hours—was both beautiful and heartbreaking.

The conjugal visit system in Chilean prisons allowed one three-hour visit per month in most prisons (Casablanca offered two) for those with qualifying relationships, after completing extensive paperwork and bureaucratic requirements. The wife had to arrive precisely on time or be denied entry. She could bring nothing with her—sheets, pillows, shampoo, and other necessities had to be brought in separately through special written permission. The man had to arrive early and make the bed, douse the shower and toilet with chlorine, and set a nice ambiance. The visit took place in a cramped cell, two meters by three meters, under time pressure and institutional surveillance. Romantic? Hardly. Dignifying? Not remotely. But it was the only physical contact with one’s spouse that the system permitted, and many men considered it the single most important event of their month. The women of inmates had a different perspective, annoyed as they were seen by others who knew what their task was about. Like the bride at the altar, who knows what everyone is thinking, Pamela and many women hardly enjoyed being the center of attention, even when they are being obedient to God (1 Corinthians 7:1-4).

For the spouse on the outside, the strain is compounding and relentless. She must function as a single parent, a sole breadwinner, a legal coordinator, a prison visitor, and the emotional anchor for children who are confused, frightened, and angry—all while managing her own grief, loneliness, and the social stigma of being married to a convict. Many marriages do not survive. Those who do are scarred in ways that the couple may never fully heal. By God’s grace, Christian couples can make it through, and you and others can help them do so.

The imprisoned Christian man carries a particular burden: he knows what his incarceration is doing to his wife, and he is powerless to stop it. He can pray. He can write letters. He can offer words of encouragement during visits and phone calls. But he cannot hold her when she cries. He cannot discipline his children. He cannot fix the leaking roof, pay the overdue bills, or drive his daughter to school. He is reduced to a spectator of his own family’s disintegration, watching from behind glass and concrete while the people he loves most pay the price for his circumstances. Matters are even worse if he has to spend part of the visitation time confronting his wife for sinful behavior and thinking. Christian wives of prisoners must learn to shore up their faith and Christian practice like never before.

Children Who Grow Distant

Of all the casualties of incarceration, the children are the most innocent and the most damaged. My son Daniel, during an earlier family crisis, had betrayed me by convincing his sisters (whom I had full custody of) not to come live with me in Chile. The estrangement that followed was deep and lasting. Other adult children responded to my imprisonment with anger, shame, confusion, and withdrawal. Two stopped communicating entirely. Most presumed I was guilty despite my attempts to show them I was not. That hurt. For other men, the younger children may not understand why their father is gone; the older ones might understand. In my case, they understood only too well and blamed me, especially my two sons Joshua and Matthew, who denied the faith as adults and became atheists or agnostics. They grew to detest my faith. Others’ older children might blame God, or the system, or the country—for a situation they could not control and did not choose.

Children of incarcerated parents face a constellation of problems that social science has documented extensively: higher rates of anxiety, depression, behavioral problems, academic failure, substance abuse, and eventual incarceration themselves. The cycle is vicious and self-perpetuating. A child who watches his father taken away in handcuffs carries that image for the rest of his life, and it shapes his understanding of authority, of justice, of God, and of his own identity in ways that no amount of counseling can fully remediate. Others learn that the way to make a living is to steal from others rather than work. I met a man in prison who said he, at times, shares a cell with his brothers and once even had his father living with him.

For the Christian father in prison, the anguish is compounded by the knowledge that he has been called by God to train up his children “in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4)—and that his incarceration has made this duty virtually impossible to fulfill. He can write letters. He can send messages through his wife. He can pray ceaselessly. But the daily, hands-on, presence-based parenting that children need is simply not available from inside a cell. It is no surprise, therefore, that prisons were used by the ungodly in the Bible. They were not ordained under God’s law.

The church must step into this gap. If the incarcerated father cannot be present, the church must provide surrogate presence—men who will mentor his sons, women who will support his daughters, families who will include his children in their activities, and elders who will watch over them with the care that their absent father would provide if he could. This is not charity. It is the body of Christ functioning as it was designed to function: “If one member suffer, all the members suffer with it” (1 Corinthians 12:26).

Financial Destruction