Introduction: Why the Man of Faith Should Care About Data

The serious Christian has always been a man of evidence. The Apostle Paul, standing before King Agrippa, declared that the things concerning Christ “were not done in a corner” (Acts 26:26). The resurrection was a public event, witnessed by more than five hundred people at once (1 Corinthians 15:6). The faith once delivered to the saints is not a private mysticism but a historical, verifiable, evidentiary claim about the nature of reality. Indeed, the entire structure of Reformed theology—with its systematic categories, its careful exegesis, its insistence on propositional truth—presupposes that evidence matters, that truth can be investigated, and that careful inquiry is not the enemy of faith but its natural companion.

It is therefore surprising—and regrettable—that so many practitioners of prison ministry operate in near-total ignorance of the substantial body of academic research that bears directly upon their work. The typical prison ministry volunteer has read neither a peer-reviewed study on faith-based programming nor a systematic analysis of chaplaincy effectiveness. He knows what he has seen with his own eyes, and that experiential knowledge is worth more than nothing. But it is incomplete. The plural of anecdote is not data, and the man who would build a ministry that endures beyond his own tenure would do well to understand what decades of criminological research have revealed about the intersection of religious practice and criminal behavior.

This chapter surveys the major findings. I write it not as a criminologist—I am not one—but as an academic and a practitioner who has lived the reality that these researchers study from a distance. My purpose is twofold: first, to equip the church with evidence that can be marshaled in defense of prison ministry when skeptics demand justification; and second, to subject our own assumptions to the discipline of honest inquiry. If our methods are sound, the data will confirm them. If they are not, we ought to know it.

A word of caution at the outset. Academic research on prison ministry is fraught with methodological difficulties that even the best researchers acknowledge. Selection bias—the possibility that inmates who volunteer for religious programs are already more motivated toward change than those who do not—haunts nearly every study in the field.¹ We shall confront this limitation directly. Nonetheless, the cumulative weight of the evidence, drawn from multiple studies across different populations, time periods, and methodological approaches, points in a direction that the church should find both encouraging and instructive.

Recidivism and Faith-Based Programs: What the Numbers Reveal

The question that every politician, warden, and taxpayer wants answered, even if disingenuously, since their livelihoods depend on a high level of criminality, is simple: Does religious programming reduce recidivism? The question that the Christian ought to ask is different—we minister because Christ commands it, not because it satisfies a cost-benefit analysis—but the pragmatic question is nonetheless legitimate, and the answer is worth knowing.

The United States Department of Justice has documented that approximately 68% of released prisoners are rearrested within three years of their release.² This figure is staggering. It means that roughly seven out of every ten men who walk out of a prison gate will be back in handcuffs before thirty-six months have passed. The American correctional system, by any honest accounting, is a catastrophic failure at its stated purpose of rehabilitation. It warehouses human beings, subjects them to conditions that intensify criminal tendencies, and then releases them into communities with fewer resources, fewer relationships, and fewer prospects than they had before their incarceration. The recidivism numbers are not a mystery. They are the predictable consequence of a system that has abandoned any serious commitment to transforming human character, preferences, choices, and behavior. Of course, this analysis does not apply as much to those unjustly imprisoned, since they will have greater sympathy and opportunities upon release. They probably had better educational preparation and job experience to begin with. Most career criminals have rarely held a real job, and most do not have a high school diploma.

Against this backdrop, the research on faith-based programming is remarkable. The most significant body of work has been produced by Byron R. Johnson, Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor University and director of the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion. Johnson’s comprehensive analysis, published as More God, Less Crime in 2011, synthesized decades of research and arrived at a conclusion that ought to be proclaimed from every pulpit in America: religious practice—not mere religious affiliation, not a one-time conversion experience, but sustained, regular, intentional religious engagement—is associated with significant reductions in criminal behavior.³ The distinction Johnson draws is critical. A man who “accepts Christ” in a prison chapel service and never opens a Bible again has not, in any meaningful sense, engaged in the kind of religious practice that the research associates with behavioral change. The data are clear: it is the regularity and depth of religious participation that matters, not the emotional intensity of a single moment.

This finding aligns precisely with what Reformed theology has always taught. We do not believe in decisionism—the notion that a single prayer, sincerely uttered, constitutes the sum total of the Christian life. We believe in perseverance, in the means of grace, in the daily discipline of Scripture reading, prayer, corporate worship, participation in the means of grace, evangelism, social transformation via the Dominion Mandate of Genesis 1:26, and accountability within the body of Christ. Johnson’s research, conducted with the tools of social science rather than systematic theology, arrives at the same conclusion by a different route: transformation requires sustained practice within a supportive community.

The most extensively studied faith-based prison program in America is the InnerChange Freedom Initiative (IFI), originally launched in 1997 at the Carol Vance Unit in Sugar Land, Texas, in partnership with Prison Fellowship Ministries. The initial evaluation, conducted by Johnson and David B. Larson in 2003, found that IFI graduates had a re-incarceration rate of just 8.0% compared to 20.3% for the matched comparison group, while their re-arrest rate was 17.3% compared to 35.0%—both representing reductions of more than 50% over the matched comparison.⁴ This is a striking result. In a system where just over two-thirds of released prisoners are rearrested within three years, a program that reduces rearrest to single digits demands serious attention.

Critics immediately noted the selection issue: the 8% figure included only program graduates, not all participants. Those who enrolled but did not complete the program had recidivism rates comparable to or worse than the general population. This is a fair methodological point, and Johnson himself has acknowledged it.⁵ Nevertheless, the finding raises a question that the critics rarely pursue: What is it about the program that those who complete it receive? If the answer is sustained religious community, intensive mentoring, and post-release support—which it is—then the policy implication is not that the program is fraudulent but that it must be structured to maximize completion rates.

It’s a wonder that states haven’t allocated more tax dollars to fund church activities in prison and for those on parole, until we reckon with the stark reality that state actors do not necessarily want to reduce or eliminate crime and recidivism. They want to control it, but not eliminate it entirely. The state thrives on crises, and when the public is uneasy, it creates a perceived need for public policy intervention. Otherwise, citizens will begin to wonder why they are paying for such an expensive state apparatus when there is no crisis or grave problem. Contrary to the desires of the public at large, those who gain their livelihoods from the criminal justice industry prefer to keep their jobs and revenues, informal or otherwise, rather than drastically reduce crime and recidivism. This logic is incontrovertible.

The Minnesota replication of the InnerChange model, rigorously evaluated by Grant Duwe and Michelle King in 2013, addressed many of the methodological limitations of the Texas study. Using a quasi-experimental design with propensity score matching—a statistical technique that creates comparison groups similar on observable characteristics—Duwe and King found that IFI participation reduced re-arrest by 26%, re-conviction by 35%, and re-incarceration by 40%.⁶ These are not trivial effects. In the language of criminal justice research, effect sizes of this magnitude are rare. Most correctional interventions produce modest improvements at best. A program that cuts re-imprisonment by 40% is, by the standards of the field, extraordinary.

Moreover, the Minnesota study included all participants, not merely graduates, thereby addressing the selection bias criticism that had plagued the Texas evaluation. The results held even after controlling for observable differences between participants and non-participants.⁶ This method and result do not eliminate selection bias entirely—unobservable motivation remains a potential confound—but it substantially strengthens the causal inference.

The Prison Chaplain’s Role: An Undervalued Workforce

The prison chaplain occupies one of the most peculiar positions in American institutional life. In jurisdictions where he is paid, he is employed by the state to perform a function that the state cannot define, funded by taxpayers who may not share his beliefs, and tasked with serving a population that the public largely prefers to forget. He is simultaneously a government employee and a minister of the Gospel—a tension that would have amused the Apostle Paul, who understood the irony of Roman citizenship rather well. In Chile and most other countries, the chaplaincy is a concession granted to volunteers of evangelical churches, although, in Chile, the Roman Catholic Church always has a separate inroad to enter prisons whenever it wishes, which is not often. I think I met five or six Catholic laymen who visited to minister during my confinement. A few of them came on multiple occasions; the rest came only once. Part of that lack of enthusiasm might have been propelled by the Covid-19 lockdown, which the Evangelicals endured much better.

Despite chaplains’ centrality to the religious life of correctional institutions, research on their role and effectiveness has been surprisingly sparse. The most significant study remains the survey conducted by Jody L. Sundt, Harry R. Dammer, and Francis T. Cullen, published in 2002. They surveyed a national random sample of 500 prison chaplains, of whom 232 returned completed responses (a 46.4% response rate), and found that the overwhelming majority were highly supportive of rehabilitation as a correctional goal.⁷ This finding may seem unremarkable until one considers the context: in the 1990s and early 2000s, the dominant paradigm in American corrections was “nothing works”—the nihilistic conclusion drawn from Robert Martinson’s influential 1974 review, which argued that rehabilitative programs had no measurable effect on recidivism. While mainstream corrections were abandoning rehabilitation in favor of incapacitation and deterrence, prison chaplains continued to believe—and to act on the belief—that human beings could be transformed.

Sundt, Dammer, and Cullen found that chaplains spent the majority of their time in counseling—not in worship services or administrative duties, but in one-on-one pastoral care with inmates.⁷ This is a finding of considerable practical significance. It means that the chaplain functions, in effect, as the primary mental health provider for many inmates—a role for which most chaplains are trained by seminary education rather than clinical licensure, and for which they receive neither adequate compensation nor institutional recognition.

The more recent systematic review by Jarrett and colleagues, published in 2024, confirmed and extended these findings about the integral involvement of chaplains in prisons, while highlighting that reports of chaplaincy impact remain based on intention or perception rather than rigorously measured outcomes.⁸ This disconnect is not merely an academic curiosity. It means that the people best positioned to document the impact of religious ministry in prisons—the chaplains themselves—are often disengaged from the process of evidence generation. The reasons are not difficult to identify: chaplains are overworked, under-resourced, and rarely trained in research methodology. But the consequence is that the case for chaplaincy must be made largely by outside researchers who observe the work from a distance rather than by the practitioners who know it from the inside.

I experienced this reality firsthand during my own incarceration. The regional chaplain at my facility in Rancagua was a decent man who did his best under impossible conditions. He served hundreds of inmates with minimal staff support, inadequate facilities, and a bureaucracy that treated religious programming as an afterthought. Yet, I only saw him once in three months. I never knew the regional Chaplain for Valparaíso (which includes Casablanca), but those given charge of the facilities were anything but exemplary, given their poor theology. But the regional chaplain in Rancagua might have qualified, in the language of Sundt and her colleagues (2002), as a “forgotten professional”—essential to the functioning of the institution but invisible to those who made policy.

The Angola Seminary Model: Deploying Inmate Ministers

Perhaps the most innovative development in American correctional practice in the past thirty years is the seminary program at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola—commonly known simply as “Angola.” The program, established in 1995 through a partnership with the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, offers incarcerated men a fully accredited bachelor’s degree in ministry. Graduates are then deployed throughout the facility in pastoral roles—leading worship services, conducting Bible studies, providing pastoral counseling, and ministering to the dying in the prison’s hospice unit. Chile had nothing like this program.

The definitive academic study of this program is Hallett, Hays, Johnson, Jang, and Duwe’s The Angola Prison Seminary, published by Routledge in 2017.⁹ The researchers document a transformation that even secular criminologists have acknowledged as remarkable. Angola, once considered the bloodiest prison in America—a place where inmate-on-inmate violence was endemic, and the annual murder rate rivaled that of small cities—has experienced dramatic reductions in violence and disciplinary infractions since the seminary program’s implementation.

The theological model at work in Angola is, whether the researchers use this language or not, essentially a form of the Reformation doctrine of the priesthood of all believers applied to corrections. Rather than relying exclusively on outside clergy who enter the facility for a few hours per week, the Angola model trains men from within the prison population to serve as ministers to their peers. These inmate ministers live among the general population. They are available twenty-four hours a day, as communication within and between cells is continuous. They understand the culture, the language, the pressures, and the temptations of prison life because they share them. They are not visitors; they are residents.⁹