Presidential candidate goes to jail
Grabbing headline, eh? But here’s the interesting story.
Sen. Sam Brownback took his budding presidential campaign to prison this weekend, spent a restless night among inmates and pressed his message that faith can work even to improve the lives of hardened criminals.
The Kansas Republican had no expectation that the drug cartel hit man, serial rapist or other convicts in his cell block would vote for him. After all, about nine in 10 of the inmates are serving life sentences. His mission at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, rather, was to promote religious-based prison efforts to curtail violence and provide inmates with an alternative to crime once — or if — they got out.
On Friday night, Brownback joined hundreds of inmates at a prayer service before prison officials escorted him to his modest sleeping quarters. On Saturday morning, he emerged from his 7-by-10-foot cell to tour the maximum-security facility and take a walk down death row.
“There aren’t probably a lot of votes for me here,” he said. “There can be a lot of prayers, though.”
Watch any mainstream media folks who pay any attention to this story chalk it up as a stunt. As if — out of the thousands of possible places to meet potential voters — any presidential candidate would even think of going into a prison. Especially this one.
About 90 percent of the 5,108 inmates at Angola are lifers. Half are convicted murderers. Eighty-five are on death row.
Burl Cain, the prison’s warden since 1995, attributed a drop in violence at the prison to Angola’s commitment to “moral rehabilitation” programs. The prison has six interfaith chapels, nightly prayer services, four part-time chaplains and a “Bible college” that has trained dozens of inmates to be ministers.
Brownback, 50, said programs such as Angola’s can “break the cycle” that sends two-thirds of inmates back to prison after they are released.
“We don’t want to build more prisons in the country,” he said. “We don’t want to lock people up. We want people to be good, productive citizens.”
That’s trying to work change into the culture from the roots up, instead of ‘top-down’ social programs. And speaking of government sponsored programs, the faith-based initiatives are proving more successful, in spite of ACLU-like opposition to any possible intersection of the word ‘faith’ with members of society. Sen. Brownback has long championed that approach.
“I believe in a separation of church and state, but I do not believe in a removal of faith from the public square,” he told the prisoners. “Our motto of our land is, ‘In God We Trust.”‘
And as long as we can hold off the ACLU and the Ninth Circuit, it will remain that.