Jail ministry hopes to give inmates new life in Clark, Floyd counties

By MELISSA MOODY
Melissa.Moody@newsandtribune.com

March 22, 2008 05:10 pm

— Dan Anderson spends his free time in a place most other people are desperate to escape.
With cement block walls, 300-pound doors and regulation orange jumpsuits, the Michael L. Becher Adult Correctional Complex is a place you’d avoid if you weren’t forced to stay there.
But Anderson is on a mission from God to save the inmates at the Clark County jail. More than a decade ago, God saved him in that very same place.
“I believe this is the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he said. “Going to jail saved my life — if something had not stopped me, I wouldn’t have stopped myself.”
Tim Caruthers and Carmell Frazier, like many inmates at the jail, are imprisoned for drug- and alcohol-related charges. Unlike fellow inmates, they hope that God, and Dan Anderson, will help them turn their lives around.
Caruthers and Frazier have been helping turn a small jail classroom into a chapel for those who come to preach and those who come to pray for the past seven months. Frazier loads a laundry bin with speakers, a keyboard and sound equipment, and Caruthers pushes a podium on wheels complete with a built-in microphone.
Both men look forward to this day more than any other. Caruthers gets behind the podium, both hands clutching either side, and reads into the microphone. It’s a sound check, but it is also a way for Caruthers to see life from the other side.
The other prisoners and six men from Christ Gospel Church in Jeffersonville arrive together signaling the start of the service; the difference is the inmates are wearing jumpsuits and the pastors are wearing two-piece suits. The church members have brought a bass guitar, and the lively service has all the inmates on their feet, clapping and raising their hands to the ceiling and quietly singing along.
“This could be the very first day of the rest of your life,” said Robert Mitchell, to the group of inmates.
The Palm Sunday service centers around Jesus’ death in the tomb. Rev. Darrell Parker makes an apt comparison for the inmates locked in jail cells.
“Sometimes we make a stinkin’ mess of our lives — sometimes we get put in jail, put in a tomb,” Parker said. “The tomb is the very place Jesus Christ will come looking for you. We are not here to tell you how bad you are, we are here to tell you how good God is.
“The reason a caged bird can sing is that everything he needs is inside the cage with him.”
The Bible, and God and Jesus and maybe even Anderson, keep Caruthers sane in a world where the opposite is the norm. It gives him hope that there is another path than the one he has traveled for the last 49 years.
“I used to run around and blame other people — but it’s not the other people, it’s the choices I make and how I look to the Lord to help me follow the right way,” he said. “You’ve got to be spiritually free before you’re physically free.
“That spiritual freedom will break that cycle we’re in.”
Caruthers was locked up nine months ago for possession of crack-cocaine. It looked like he was going to get 10 years, but he was offered a plea bargain, according to Anderson. Caruthers has been in and out of the jail his whole life, mostly for drugs and alcohol.
God has turned his life around though, he said. And the Bible has shown him another way to live — a way of life most other inmates have yet to embrace.
About 28 percent of the inmate population at the Clark County jail on average attend Sunday worship services, about 10 percent attend weekly Bible study, and about 8 percent attend mentoring held by Christian Formation Ministries. At the Floyd County jail, on average about 30 percent of the imate population attends Sunday services and about 5 percent seek other religious services like counseling.
“That difference is what you’re seeing,” Anderson said. “[Tim’s] somebody that really wants to change their life.
“He’s finally had enough — he’s ready to make a change and take a chance. He’s the one I tell the prosecutors is the most likely to succeed.”
And Anderson knows what that kind of success looks like, because he found it himself at the jail. He was arrested for selling cocaine in 1990, and he spent two years as an inmate at the Clark County jail. During his time there, church congregations sent volunteers to conduct worship services and offer mentoring to the inmates.
“Things that I had never put together before suddenly made sense,” he said. “I didn’t have anything to lose — I took a chance, I took a chance on Jesus.”
As the volunteer lay coordinator at the jail since November, Anderson is in the unique position of understanding the life of an inmate and he is uniquely capable of finding ways to reach them.
“I’ve been doing this for 18 years and I’ve seen a lot of people attempt to change — I’ve never seen anybody do it that didn’t include spirituality,” Anderson said. “It takes a lot of presentations.
“You’re asking people to accept middle class values that they’ve never experienced, you’re asking them to give up their way of life, their friends.”
Caruthers carries his Bible with him just about everywhere he goes, and he can quote scripture he’s learned by heart from reading in his cell. Frazier, his cellmate, looks to Caruthers for religious instruction and insight. They sit side-by-side during the service listening intently to Rev. Parker’s sermon, two people that lost faith in themselves and the world finding it again in an unlikely place.
“Hopelessness is the driving emotional force for inmates,” said Larry Bracken, one of four chaplains at the Floyd County Jail. “If we can give them a glimmer of light at the end of that tunnel that’s not a freight train coming to plow them down, then we’re doing the Lord’s thing.
“It’s standing in the midst of all that and saying there is hope.”

Participating religious organizations
• Christ Gospel Churches International, Inc.
• Giltedge Baptist Church
• Wesley Chapel United Methodist Church
• River Falls Assembly of God
• Evangel North Church (Floyd County)
• Graceland Baptist Church - represented by the Christian Motorcycle Association (Floyd Co.)
• Northside Christian Church — represented by Crossroads Ministry (Floyd County)
• Midwest Church of Christ (Louisville)
• Oasis of Faith Church (Louisville) (new)
• Greater Bethel Temple (Louisville) (new)
• St. Mary’s Catholic Church (Navelton) will begin having monthly services on Monday afternoons soon.
• Christian Formation Ministries (New Albany) Thursday evening mentoring groups
• Midwest Church of Christ provides Bible Studies on Mondays for women and on Tuesdays for men.

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