Prison is not a monolith. It is a society—a broken, compressed, volatile society, but a society nonetheless. Within its walls, you will encounter a range of human beings as diverse as any city block, except that the veneer of civilization is thinner here, the consequences of misjudging someone are more severe, and the motivations that drive men are stripped to their most elemental forms: survival, comfort, power, and—for a few—genuine spiritual longing.

Understanding who populates the world behind bars is not optional for anyone involved in prison ministry. Whether you are the incarcerated Christian trying to navigate your environment, the volunteer visiting on Thursday afternoons, or the family member trying to understand what your loved one is enduring, you must understand the people. This chapter will introduce you to the major categories of individuals you will encounter, drawn from my nearly six years of living among them.

The Inmates

The men of módulo 118 were, in the words of one seasoned inmate, a motley collection that defied easy categorization. Yet certain types recur across every prison, every country, and every era. Allow me to describe them.

The violent. These are men convicted of murder, assault, armed robbery, or similarly aggressive offenses. Some are remorseful; many are not. In 118, I lived alongside a man who had shot and killed the mother of his child on school grounds—the act captured on surveillance video. He did not deny his guilt and cooperated fully with the police. He was seventy years old, an atheist, a retired businessman, and one of the more intellectually stimulating conversationalists in the módulo. His case was a reminder that violent men are not always what you expect. Some are articulate, well-traveled, and generous, yet capable of terrible acts when provoked beyond their threshold of self-control. The lesson for the minister: do not confuse pleasantness with repentance, and do not confuse brutality with stupidity.

The addicted. Drug addiction saturates the prison system. Marijuana and freebase cocaine, in particular, flow freely. Men smoke it in doorways, trade for it openly, and finance their habits through an elaborate economy of stolen goods, extortion, and family remittances. One of my early cellmates acquired pot regularly, and even coaxed me into lending him five thousand pesos to buy a joint—after which I put my foot down and refused further participation. For the Christian in prison, the addicted are simultaneously the most sympathetic and the most exhausting of your neighbors. Their need is genuine, their behavior is destructive, and their promises of reform are, more often than not, short-lived. Love them. Help them. But do not enable them. “If any man will not work, neither shall he eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10) applies not only to labor but to the broader principle that biblical compassion never subsidizes sin.

The innocent. Yes, they exist. The wrongfully accused and unjustly convicted are more numerous than most people outside the system imagine. In 118, several men claimed innocence, and at least a few were credible. A retired naval aviator, convicted of sexually abusing a child relative, protested his innocence with a consistency and sincerity that made one tend not to doubt him. He was one of the most trustworthy and helpful inmates, a Roman Catholic baptized later as Evangelical, hedging his bets, who believed in rewarding good works and showing love to newcomers and the handicapped. An ex-gendarme was jailed for six years for defending himself and his father against knife-wielding assailants—a case nearly identical to my own. The man was innocent before God but guilty under Chilean law, which forbids disproportional defense. These men are your brothers in suffering, and they need to know that someone believes them when the system does not.

The religious. Prison produces more professing Christians per capita than any revival meeting. Some are genuine converts; many are not. The módulo designated for evangelicals—módulo 103 (several years later moving to 104), housing some seventy “brethren”—was, according to insiders, a den of hypocrisy. Of seventy professing evangelicals, only about ten, I was told, were uninvolved in the sexual extortion scheme that pervaded the prison, wherein inmates used cell phones to lure pedophiles with stock photos, then blackmailed them for cash. The worst offenders among the supposed believers earned high wages. The guards overseeing particularly corrupt cell blocks could earn as much as seventeen million pesos (over 20,000 USD) per month from drugs sold to inmates practicing this scheme. Some professing evangelicals dealt drugs. The módulo’s floor administrator was complicit, and any believer who reported the activity was expelled from the fourth floor and sent down to live with the general population.

I confronted the evangelicals I met in quarantine about these practices. Most denied involvement; some were more practical about it. I was somewhat relieved, though still in shock. “They are all just wolves in sheep’s clothing who practice such extortion,” I concluded. This reality is essential for the prison minister to understand. You will encounter men who speak fluently in evangelical jargon, who attend every Bible study, who lead prayers and sing loudly—and who are simultaneously running extortion rings, dealing drugs, and exploiting vulnerable people outside the walls. Discernment is not optional. It is essential to your ministry and to your safety.

The manipulative. Some inmates are neither violent nor addicted nor religious—they are simply cunning. They identify who has resources (money, food, connections) and work to extract those resources through charm, deception, and feigned friendship. An ex-cop I lived near was intelligent but sly and mendacious—he called himself a criminal, and no one doubted it. A young inmate named Rodrigo pulled a scam on me, offering to sell me a cheap phone, taking my thirty thousand pesos (about 35 USD), and then claiming to have given it to someone else. When confronted, it was lies piled on lies. The phone he attempted to replace it with turned out to be stolen from another inmate, nearly getting me stabbed in the process. My reflection at the time was apt: “The mendacious nature of both criminals and politicians seems to provide a direct nexus between the two. Neither one seems to have an iota of respect for property rights.”

The Guards

The gendarmes—prison guards—are the institutional face of the Chilean state within the walls, and they embody all of the corruption, indifference, and occasional decency that one would expect from poorly paid public servants, recruited from the lower socio-economic classes, vested with near-absolute authority over a captive population.

The range of human types among the guards was as wide as among the inmates—perhaps wider, because the guards had the power to act on their characters without consequence. They made terrestrial hell more vicious.

Some guards are genuinely decent men. Cabo Ortiz, who oversaw 118 during a critical period, was friendly to me and facilitated my cell change when I needed to escape a hostile living situation. Sargento Segundo Silva was a by-the-book administrator who took no bribes and profited from no food sales—a rarity. When Silva replaced the previous módulo chief, he made real changes: tearing down storage shed walls to enlarge the patio, reorganizing cell assignments, and running the block with a fairness that earned grudging respect. But most inmates, and especially the mozos, hated him because he thwarted things from getting done and profitable arrangements from being made.

Others were openly hostile. A guard named Rioseco, in what could only be described as a manic bipolar phase, terrorized inmates with arbitrary punishments. Cookie denied me food and called me a nark or “sapo.” Cabo Fuentes regularly shouted “Gringo! Antiyuta!” as a greeting—a term for someone who hates the police—which, in my case, was not entirely inaccurate. And then there were men like Hermosilla, who seemed to understand most clearly that God was working His will in the gringo pastor’s life, and Cabo Nicureo, who was always helpful, and Dalidet, who actually purchased a copy of my book. The guard who buys your book and the guard who steals your food may work the same shift. Welcome to the moral complexity of prison.

Most guards, however, operated within the corruption that pervaded the system. A shrewd gendarme could at least double his salary with undeclared cash from inmates. Money bought privileges: a private cell, better food, protection from being transferred, and favorable conduct reports that affected parole eligibility and early-release benefits. Cell phones, officially prohibited, entered the prison mainly through corrupt guards, and occasionally through lawyers who smuggled them in, and through visitors who concealed them in body cavities that the guards were legally forbidden to search. For the right price, anything could be obtained in prison. “Money answereth all things” (Ecclesiastes 10:19), and nowhere is this proverb more literally fulfilled than behind bars.

The practical counsel for the Christian inmate is this: be respectful but not obsequious. Address guards politely. Comply with legitimate orders. Do not seek to buy your way into privilege if doing so violates your conscience. But don't be naïve about the system you inhabit. The guards are not your friends, even the friendly ones. They are agents of an institution that does not care about you, and their first loyalty is always to the institution—and often to their own financial interests. “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help” (Psalm 146:3). If you need something, don’t be afraid to buy it from the guard, but do not expect him to be loyal to you or generally trustworthy.

The Lawyers

From inside the prison, the legal system looks very different from it does from a law school lecture hall. The system is not designed to find truth; it is designed to process cases. And the men tasked with processing your case—the lawyers—range from dedicated advocates to indifferent bureaucrats to outright predators.