The roots of adversity and affliction spread out in a prison, infiltrating the most obscure corners of the complex. Sometimes they run deep into the heart of the nefarious criminal justice system itself, reaching down to the worst judges and rabble prosecutors, sucking nutrients from the very essence of evil, incompetence, and corruption. Other times they spread out broadly from módulo to módulo, finding damp, fertile ground among the rogue segment of inmates who are actually criminals—and those gendarmes that undertake exacting affliction on many hapless and beleaguered machucados. In módulo 118, some men were undeservedly afflicted by the vile bane flowing through this system, and I was compelled to witness it daily.

Isaiah wrote, “And though the Lord give you the bread of adversity, and the water of affliction, yet shall not thy teachers be removed into a corner any more, but thine eyes shall see thy teachers” (Isaiah 30:20). That verse has always struck me as one of the most paradoxical promises in all of Scripture. God does not promise to remove adversity. He promises that adversity will become the very context in which His people learn to see. The bread of adversity is still bread—it sustains, albeit bitterly. And the water of affliction is still water—it keeps the soul alive, even when every swallow burns. What makes the promise bearable is not the removal of suffering but the presence of instruction within it. God’s teachers are not removed into a corner; they become visible precisely when the affliction is most acute. I found this to be true in the Valparaíso Penitentiary, though the lessons came from directions I never anticipated and the teachers were often men whose own suffering far exceeded my own.

The Eighty and the Twenty

Ismael—a man whose own body bore scars from prison knives and spears acquired during his years in the Antofagasta penitentiary—once estimated that roughly eighty percent of the inmates in the Chilean prison system were actual criminals, while the remaining twenty percent were basically innocent or improperly sentenced. Miami and I found that assessment credible, though we suspected the percentage of the unjustly afflicted was higher than most outsiders would believe. The moral horror of this situation cannot be overstated: the Chilean penal system, like penal systems throughout Latin America and indeed throughout the world, routinely subjects innocent or improperly sentenced men to the same degrading, dangerous, and dehumanizing conditions endured by murderers, drug traffickers, and serial predators. There is no meaningful classification. There is no serious effort to separate the wheat from the tares—to use our Lord’s imagery from Matthew 13—until the harvest comes. The state simply throws all men together behind the same walls, feeds them the same wretched food, locks them in the same cramped cells, and leaves the consequences to sort themselves out through violence, extortion, and despair.

I thought of this doleful reality as thirty-four-year-old newly arrived Sergio, from 118B, showed me his scars from stab wounds he had received while housed in módulo 114 and in the Colina prison near Santiago. He was a big, chubby fellow who had been imprisoned eleven years earlier—when his daughter was just six months old—for stealing fifteen million pesos in cash plus some guns from the house where he served as caretaker. His crime was real enough, but the punishment had consumed eleven years of his life, left his body scarred by prison violence, and severed him almost entirely from his child, who was now approaching adolescence without a father. His girlfriend had long since taken up with another man and never brought the child to visitation.

But how could men like myself, Miami, Guillermo, and Ismael be subject to—or threatened by—such treatment? Afflicting the innocent or partially innocent is an unbearable load on the consciences of civilized people, yet that is precisely what one finds in Chilean prisons—and Valparaíso’s penitentiary was one of the worst cases. Nonetheless, hardly anyone seemed to care beyond the core members of support groups for unjust sufferers, like the one I was blessed to have. Almost no one, by contrast, cared about what was happening to Guillermo.

Guillermo’s Crisis

Some afflictions were more severe than others—like what Guillermo, a merchant marine cook, was facing at that time. He had been moved to módulo 111, where a drug thug in his cell was demanding payment. I spoke with Miami, Rubén, and Ismael about the situation, and messaged Cristián in módulo 111 as well, concluding that sending Guillermo money to pay off the extortionist would neither help him nor help me.

Pamela, as she so often did, cut to the heart of the matter with unflinching clarity: “He knows that Guillermo lived with the Gringo in 118, and once he figures out the funding source, the extortion will never end. He will keep milking the Gringo or his friends for all he can.”

She was right, and her wisdom illustrates a principle that every prison ministry supporter must learn: there are situations in which paying a ransom—whether to a drug thug, a corrupt gendarme, or a compromised official—does not purchase safety but merely establishes a revenue stream for the predator. The extortionist does not think, “I have been paid; the matter is settled.” He thinks, “I have found a source; let me see how much more I can extract.” Bribing the gendarme officers or módulo 111’s paco Contreras would have been even worse. The pacos would have swarmed me to extract as much as they could. This is the economics of extortion in a closed system, and it operates with the same remorseless logic inside a prison as it does in any other criminal market.

Guillermo simply had to carry all his belongings down to the paco in charge of 111, be it Contreras or otherwise, and tell him he could not return to his assigned cell for fear for his life. Then, in his new cell, he would have to await official appointment as chef and subsequent transfer to 118. The situation seemed desperate—yet that afternoon, Guillermo wrote to me that he had found a big choro (tough guy) who stuck up for him against the drug thug, keeping him safe for the time being. That service would not be free; he would owe money or favors. But he would be kept out of harm’s way in the meantime. Shortly afterward, he wrote again that two new, more reasonable machucados had been assigned to his cell. They would mitigate the circumstances—an answer to prayer.

I do not want the reader to miss the theological texture of what I have just described. A man who may well be innocent—or at least improperly sentenced—is confined in a cell with a violent drug dealer who demands payment under threat of bodily harm. His Christian friends on the outside cannot pay the ransom without creating a worse problem. His only recourse within the system is to beg a prison guard for relocation or to find a strongman willing to protect him in exchange for future obligations. And yet, in the midst of this entirely human and entirely corrupt network of power, God answers prayer by rearranging the cellmates. The providence of God does not work only through clean channels. Sometimes He works through the rough mercy of a choro, just as He once worked through Cyrus the Persian, whom He called “my shepherd” in Isaiah 44:28, to accomplish His purposes for Israel—much like He calls the state (Imperial Rome under Nero around 57 A.D.) his deacon (διάκονος, servant) in Romans 13:4.

Minor Afflictions and the Bread of Daily Life

Other afflictions were minor or trivial by comparison, though even the trivial wears on a man when it accumulates day after day without relief. For instance, the sun did not come out until long after the reos in 118 were locked in their cells. That fact not only meant that there was no vitamin D supplement available but also that the sheets Miami had just washed for me would not dry. I would have to cover up over a bare mattress that night or try to use the oversized sheets I had for conjugal visits. One has to be in prison to really appreciate what it is like to sleep atop a jail-issued, cloth-covered foam slab without sheets. It is the sort of discomfort that sounds trivial when described but gnaws at a man’s dignity hour after hour.

Michael had a throbbing toothache and, in Chilean prisons at least, a fat chance of getting any relief from a dentist. Indeed, the luckier machucado will get someone at the infirmary to pull his tooth out; the unlucky ones just suffer adversity. At least in 118, some other reos cared and wanted to alleviate suffering. I asked Pamela to sneak in some cloves—a home remedy for tooth pain—into the lining of the pizza box, which would be coming in encomienda the next day. My own molar had had a hole in it for months, and I would possibly soon need a clove myself.

Other emotional adversities accumulated: the continual and cruel postponement of court hearings, the agonizing slowness of my case before the Supreme Court, and the frequent door banging and screaming of machucados in other módulos all around 118, which was nerve-wracking for anyone with functional nerves. Prisoners know gnawing pain well.