Jesus Is in the Big House
A McDonald’s near 85th Street perches atop a small hill parallel to U.S. Highway 71. To the east, a highway roils with lunchtime traffic. To the west, the hillside descends into a sprawling mass of industrial complexes hemmed in by single-family houses. Pulling away from the drive-through with a paper bag in his lap, a 53-year-old man peers over the steering wheel of his silver Grand Prix, surveying the land beneath him.
It’s territory he used to rule.
Beneath his shirt are two scars, which look like large mosquito bites, earned twenty years ago when he was shot twice by a sales clerk after botching a diamond-store stickup.
The stereo pumps the crisp guitar notes and clarion lyrics of a Christian rock band. The man drives down from the hillside, heading back toward the John Deere plant. He pulls inside the chain-link and barbed-wire fence without flinching. He mentions that it is cold today. For a man who has spent more than half of his life behind bars, this fact holds significance: He’s been in and out of prison so many times, he remembers only the weather — and not the specific dates — when he was released.
His name is Mike Smith. But names are not important. His cellmates called him “brother.” He is a servant of the Lord.
In another life, he was a bully. He grew up six blocks east of Prospect Avenue, ripping off coin machines at neighborhood carwashes. In high school, he hung out in the Prospect pool halls, bought booze from liquor stores around Swope Park, and sneaked into clubs — such as the Lakeside Ballroom in Wyandotte County or Inferno on 35th Street — drinking and partying and picking fights until 2 a.m. At nineteen, Smith earned his first assault charge for pummeling another teen at a Johnson County Pizza Hut. Facing a prison sentence, the young offender had the option of joining the Army instead and shipped out to Virginia. He went AWOL twice, eventually stealing a car and returning to Kansas City.
From there, Smith made an unglamorous tour of the nation’s prison system. He was busted for stealing cars, robbing supermarkets and shooting at a police officer during an air-supported high-speed chase that crossed the state line. He was stabbed twice during a prison riot in El Reno, Oklahoma. Warehoused with some of society’s worst criminal minds, Smith spent his downtime fine-tuning his scams with other convicts.
On probation in 1989, he fathered a child with a woman he’d married from the confines of prison five years earlier. But he was free for less than two years before crashing his Cadillac while on a drug binge and earning an arrest for drug and weapon possession. By the mid-’90s, Smith had accumulated so many concurrent sentences that he was unsure of his next release date. With nothing left to lose, he started dealing meth and pot to fellow inmates. After authorities caught him dealing inside Lansing Correctional Facility, the state transferred him to El Dorado Correctional Facility, a supermaximum security prison, for 24-hour lockdown. Smith lived in a windowless concrete cell. Once a day for an hour, he exercised in a fenced-in cage the size of a dog run.
“I had absolutely no faith that anyone but me was going to take care of me,” Smith says. “I lived my life then for myself.”
He found God in 1996. He picked up the Book of Revelations at a court hearing, and the message — that his personal hell might chase him from his cramped cell into the afterlife — resonated.
And in March 1998, Smith heard about a new idea percolating at the Department of Corrections. An evangelical Christian group called InnerChange Freedom Initiative wanted to start a rehabilitation community at Winfield Correctional Facility, a minimum-security prison 40 miles southeast of Wichita. At Winfield, inmates would live in military-style barracks. There wouldn’t even be a gate to keep them on the grounds, just a boundary at the edge of the field and an institutionalized trust that no man would cross it.
For Smith, the decision to join the InnerChange Freedom Initiative wasn’t hard.
Six years later, in the John Deere parking lot, Smith kills the engine and bows his head, giving thanks for his Extra Value Meal No. 3.
Surrounded by chain-link fencing and concertina wire, the 70-acre campus of Ellsworth Correctional Facility resembles a community college. Concrete paths crisscross snow-covered quads, and wooden planters hedge the entrances to dormlike buildings. At night, floodlights illuminate the campus. Halfway across Kansas, a few miles south of Interstate 70, it is considered a showcase prison, a model for how the Kansas Department of Corrections wants things built and run.
In the general prison population, men sleep in cluttered cells stacked two-stories high in six round “pods” arranged around a central control station. When they wake, they shuffle across concrete floors to common areas, gathering in clusters to play dominoes and checkers, slamming their pieces on tabletops to emphasize their points. The air smells of disinfectant. Bolted TVs flicker absently in the corners of the room. Starting at a loud hum, the decibel level increases throughout the day as personal clear-plastic TVs and clear-plastic radios mix with catcalls to other convicts, visitors and guards.
Prisoners say the general-population weapon of choice might be a master lock in a sock. A fair fight is ten-on-one in the shower. Inmates learn to turn up the volume in their headphones to block out screams from gang rapes.
Statistics suggest that when the men here make parole, they’ll be outside the walls for only a few years before they commit other crimes and go back to prison. One recent study by the Kansas DOC found that 61 percent of the state’s inmates are reincarcerated within five years of their release due to parole violations (48 percent) or new felony convictions (13 percent).
For the most part, the Kansas DOC has employed a holding-tank philosophy with its prisoners, focusing more on containing inmates than on correcting their behaviors. But Ellsworth offers an alternative: a new facility, on the north end of campus, run by the InnerChange Freedom Initiative. It’s safer there, with a prisoner-to-guard ratio of 47-to-1, not 64-to-1. Each individual is part of a religious “community” where everyone works together to overcome their sins.
One mid-December Thursday at 5 a.m., a guard calls reveille through a loudspeaker in Building 4. Men wake beneath blue blankets. Their building is less crowded than the general population’s, composed of just three round pods with cells in rows of ten instead of twenty.
Building 4 contains two “God pods,” deeded specifically to Christ-loving prisoners. The third pod is mixed, filled with general-population prisoners as well as dedicated Christians. (InnerChange hasn’t had enough inmates to take over the entire pod, says Program Director Don Raymond. But, he adds, “We almost do now.”)
Lights flick on as prisoners roll out of bed and pull on their jeans, each labeled with a numbered tag. Each room is identical: a 7-foot-by-13-foot cubby with two bunk beds, a slatted window, a sink and a place to squat.
Some men head to the commissary to eat in shifts, passing a Christmas tree adorned with strings of lights.
By 6 a.m., the men have gathered in one of the two God pods for morning devotions, where they will sing, sermonize and pray together. Class starts at 7:30. In one room, they sit around fold-out tables covered with Bibles and fill-in-the-blank study guides. (The guides are better than in years past: Two years ago, the men studied from Teen Challenge material. Last year, they used a taped lecture series from the 1970s, narrated by what sounds like a British swinger.)
A preacher stands at the front of the room, writing on a dry-erase board. His name is Dan Vallier, a paid Bible counselor originally from Ohio. Today’s lesson is about improving relationships. The main points:
Listen first and acknowledge what you hear.
Invite people into conversation and use “I” statements.
Translate complaints into requests.
Across the hall, another set of men face a rolled-in TV and watch John Wayne in the D-Day flick The Longest Day. Watching movies is a treat for these men; because some cable programs have lustful images, personal TVs have been banned in the God pods. Nearby, another dry-erase board is scrawled with a biblical quote to provide inspiration to face what the day might bring.
After enrolling in InnerChange, inmates move to this isolated living community and begin a two-year Bible-immersion course. For their first eighteen months, they spend more than ten hours a day, seven days a week, studying the Bible cover to cover. They attend one set of classes in the morning and another in the afternoon, and they take written tests once a week to make sure they are following the course material. In their free time, many study for their GEDs or take classes on job-interview techniques and résumé writing. They have access to a lab with forty computers equipped with basic word processing and computer games. Each afternoon, all of the students gather, sing and pray at a mandatory campuswide “community meeting.”
After a year and a half, the men spend another six months behind prison walls preparing for re-entry into society. They work dollar-a-day jobs prepping food, cleaning the cafeteria, doing custodial work, or building bikes and repairing wheelchairs for charity. They also take classes to help manage their behavior, alcohol and drug abuse or finances. Star students get the equivalent of office jobs inside the InnerChange compound, assisting Bible counselors or doing secretarial work.
Food is a form of currency in the God pods, too; unlike in regular housing units, the men of InnerChange have a Christmas banquet to which they can invite their families. After each new class orientation, directors throw a party for everyone, catered by Pizza Hut.
After two years, the prisoners are eligible for work release in Wichita, where they spend between six and ten months. There they go to church and develop a relationship with an outside mentor from the community, who helps them plan for work and housing upon their release. When paroled, they are expected to maintain contact with their new church, mentor and InnerChange officials for approximately six months to successfully graduate from the program.
With this two-year cycle, each class should bump to work release or parole each time a new class begins the program. But many of the hardcore felons who complete their studies will be ineligible for immediate work release. To deal with the overflow, InnerChange lets the men head up the GED program or teach classes. The company gets relatively free labor.
At 7 one night, more than 150 murderers, sex offenders, burglars and dope slingers congregate in the cafeteria.
There are no cameras in the blue-tiled room. No guards. If something happened here, it would take the prison’s security staff at least four minutes to respond.
Near the front of the hall, a five-person rock band of inmates bangs out guitar-heavy songs. Piles of Bibles — hardcover, softcover, glossy, leather-bound, pocket-sized, black, white, red with gold embossing — cover the picnic-style tables. Inmates joke and carouse, shaking hands. They call each other “brother” and embrace.
In the crowd, men surround a food cart, filling brown plastic mugs with hot water. One pulls a prescription vial filled with instant coffee from his pocket, emptying the contents into his drink. Behind him, a projection screen flashes God-themed lyrics on a white wall. Some sing along, following the lyrics like movie subtitles. Each song has a summer-camp simplicity to it. When a verse talks about the Holy Trinity and God, the men throw their hands up, flashing fingers like gang signs: the three and one. One man, arms interlaced with three companions, falls to his knees, and his buddies crumple with him like a crashing wave.
After 45 minutes, the band stops playing and Vallier, the preacher, takes the makeshift stage. His style is pure televangelist: slick hair, big glasses above a white shirt and tight necktie. Backlit by a set of tall rectangular windows, he faces the congregation.
“Isn’t it comical what other people are turning to today for guidance?” Vallier asks. “Violence, fortune cookies, TV horoscopes, astrology … talk-show hosts? They’re trying to get guidance for their lives, to find out what the future holds, when there is one reliable source and that is the living God.”
Like Mike Smith, a lot of men here claim to have been believers before they joined up. Most in the room are familiar with stories like Smith’s: Through God’s will — and a few strings pulled with the DOC — they might have a chance to try their luck back outside the walls.
Vallier tells the men that special dispensation awaits those who dedicate themselves to proper service — specifically, to the InnerChange Freedom Initiative.
“When you serve [InnerChange],” he says, “God says he will reward you.”
When Mike Smith joined the inaugural class of InnerChange members in April 2000, he became part of a grand experiment — one of a few dozen men to test the idea of faith-based prisons in Kansas. Winfield Correctional Facility, where the program started, was a 158-capacity minimum-security prison in south Kansas. Two years later, the state enlarged the petri dish, transferring all of the InnerChange inmates from Winfield to Ellsworth, a larger medium-security prison that could accommodate more men.
InnerChange is operated through Prison Fellowship Ministries, an umbrella organization with a $48 million annual operating budget offering Bible studies, religious magazines and prisoners’ rights programs at prisons within all fifty states. The program has more than 20,000 partner churches with nearly 36,000 volunteers.
In Kansas, Prison Fellowship reps push InnerChange in every major state and federal pen. In four years, the program has more than doubled in size, with plans to turn the entire facility at Ellsworth into one giant classroom for Christianity.
InnerChange is the brainchild of Charles Colson, former special counselor to Richard Nixon. Appointed to advise the president on nearly every decision, Colson spent the early ’70s attending morning Cabinet meetings five days a week alongside political heavies, such as Henry Kissinger. Pundits dubbed him the “evil genius” of a rampantly corrupt administration.
Throughout the Nixon administration, Colson sought to hire Teamsters to beat up anti-war demonstrators and plotted to firebomb the Brookings Institution, an anti-Nixon political think tank. He aided efforts to burglarize the office of the psychiatrist who treated Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the “Pentagon Papers” (a secret government study about the decision-making process behind the Vietnam War), in an attempt to discredit him.
Colson spent time in prison after being convicted of obstructing justice in the Watergate scandal. Released in 1976, he wrote a book called Born Again, downplaying his role in Watergate and trumpeting his acceptance of Christ. The book became a mainstream best seller, prompting a religious filmmaker to buy the movie rights. Colson began a religious speaking tour. When the dough rolled in, he founded Prison Fellowship Ministries and then later its subsidiary, InnerChange.
In 1995, Colson wrote his first novel, Gideon’s Torch, a book in which anti-abortion heroes firebomb the National Institutes of Health. He has published several other books; he writes columns for Christianity Today magazine; and he hosts BreakPoint, a daily radio show on Kansas City station KLJC 88.5.
The first InnerChange prison ward opened in 1997 in Texas, shepherded by then-governor George W. Bush. Since then, the program has expanded to facilities in Iowa, Minnesota and Kansas.
Last summer Colson made a dramatic return to the White House. In June, he stood inside the windowless Roosevelt Room, flanked by Attorney General John Ashcroft, in front of an InnerChange leadership panel that included Don Raymond, who heads the program in Kansas. A vanguard of former convicts dressed in dark suits stood by as the president announced the findings of a study by the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Research on Religion in Urban Civil Society. Over a five-year period, Penn researcher Byron Johnson studied InnerChange inmates and a control group at Huntsville Unit, Texas. He concluded that nearly 20 percent of general-population inmates were rearrested and reincarcerated after leaving Huntsville Unit — but the number of InnerChange graduates reincarcerated was only 8 percent.
Nationally, nearly two-thirds of general-population prisoners released from prison return within three years, according to Bureau of Justice statistics. Recidivism rates can be manipulated, though, using variables such as parole violations, new felonies and time before reincarceration.
Weeks after Johnson announced his findings, Mark Kleiman, a public policy professor at UCLA, posted a scathing article titled Faith Based Fudging on MSN.com. He claimed that the study had failed to count members who quit the program or were released but never officially graduated — those who cut off contact with their church or mentor within six months. The Penn researchers had cherry-picked their subjects, selecting only the most successful InnerChange prisoners to include in their study, Kleiman said. He accused InnerChange cheerleaders of “creaming” data. When analyzed properly, Kleiman argued, the data showed two troubling facts: Inmates paroled from InnerChange had a higher rate of recidivism than the general population, and those inmates who either dropped out or were kicked out while still in prison were more than twice as likely to come back.
“It doesn’t prove those things don’t work, but it does look pretty discouraging,” Kleiman tells the Pitch. “It does prove there is no scientific proof that this thing is sustainable.”
The idea is nonetheless cost-effective at a time when state budgets are in crisis. Since 2000, the Kansas DOC has paid for 40 percent of the cost of incarcerating each inmate, while InnerChange has covered the other 60 percent. The state pays about $1,200 per inmate per year, as opposed to the $4,000 it costs to rehab a criminal in one of the few state-run therapeutic communities, all of which treat substance abusers (a 24-person female unit in Topeka, a 100-person unit in Lansing, a 60-person unit in Hutchinson and a 27-person unit in Johnson County that receives funding from multiple sources). The Kansas DOC operates only two transitional-housing programs, a 24-man unit in Topeka and a 4-woman unit in Hoisington. By May, federal funding for these programs could be cut entirely, so the only alternative to InnerChange would be the 27-person drug rehab in Johnson County.
Meanwhile, InnerChange has expanded virtually unchecked.
In January 2003, facing one of the worst budget crunches in years, the DOC cut a deal with InnerChange. The state promised reimbursement at a later date, and InnerChange agreed to pay 100 percent of the cost of incarceration for program members until at least 2005.
By then, prisons could be even more fertile ground for harvesting souls. In his State of the Union address last month, President Bush proposed a four-year, $300 million initiative to help ex-cons re-enter society with job training and placement, transitional housing and mentoring with the aid of faith-based groups. “This year more than 600,000 inmates will be released from prison,” he said. “America is the land of second chance — and when the gates of prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.”
InnerChange plans to begin five more Christian-living communities in state prisons within the next three years. One will probably be in Missouri, where that state’s Department of Corrections has made at least two trips to Iowa to scout the program.
Iowa, however, is where InnerChange faces its most organized legal opposition.
Last year the Washington, D.C.-based Americans United for the Separation of Church and State filed two suits against the InnerChange program in Iowa, alleging that Christian inmates got more state-funded privileges. One suit was filed on behalf of an inmate inside the prison, the other on behalf of families who don’t get access to the visitation benefits. The suit could have been filed instead in Texas, Minnesota or Kansas, says Americans United spokesperson Ayesha Kahn. Prisons in those states use state funds to run part of their InnerChange programs.
“They have created a program that exclusively reflects the tenants of evangelical Christianity, and they treat participants in the program far more favorably than other inmates,” Kahn says.
“Our position is that rehab programs and access to vocational training and treatment need to be open to everyone in prison regardless of religion,” adds Kara Gotsch, who coordinates the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prisons Project. “What is troubling is that a program is set up in the prison system and excludes people from participating in these activities simply because they are not of the Christian persuasion.”
But Kansas DOC Public Information Officer Bill Miskell insists that Kansas DOC officials have found a way to sidestep the line between church and state. Before 2003, the state paid 40 percent of the program costs, but money also came from the Inmate Benefit Fund (an account generated from inmate fines and jailhouse phone calls, which used to help pay for prison library books and rec center equipment), so it was not taxpayer money.
“The state pays for only that part of InnerChange that is not faith-based — the education and the substance abuse and the cognitive programming, the thinking and behavioral-based part of the program,” he says. “InnerChange pays for the religious aspect.”
But the entire premise of InnerChange is built on a religious tenet: redemption for sinners. According to InnerChange’s Web site, the program proffers an “instantaneous miracle” in which behavior changes through Christ, not through group therapy or secular drug- and alcohol-addiction recovery programs.
InnerChange Program Manager Larry Furnish admits that inmates must seek help for all non-Christian acts, from homosexuality to alcoholism, by asking the Lord. “We believe it is a sin issue,” Furnish says. “And we believe that through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, He can deliver you from any sin in life.”
In the afternoons, the InnerChange office at Ellsworth bustles with men. Clad in denim coats and thermal undershirts, each wears a black WWJD necklace affixed to a name tag. On the far north side of the compound, the building looks like a double-wide trailer, but inside it’s a series of halls and tiled corridors. The inmates who work here hold honor positions, sitting behind desks, shuffling papers, taking phone calls, showing promotional videos to new recruits from within Ellsworth and compiling a national InnerChange newsletter.
Surrounded by InnerChange leaders and a DOC spokesperson, these workers sound bright, hopeful — and well-versed.
“I didn’t have the willpower before, but religion gave me control,” says David Jordan, 32, who was arrested at age 16 for murder. “I spent my whole life in conflict, but I’ve found peace. Found life.”
Terry Simmons, a 34-year-old former meth maker, agrees. “I feel like we didn’t just end up here, we were chosen,” he says. “We have a design to live by.”
“My thinking process is totally different now than it was when I came to [InnerChange],” says Jason Gonzales, 27, imprisoned for aggravated burglary and aggravated battery. “For me to be able to sit at a computer all day, to do work when there’s guys in Building 2 who sit in the day room playing dominoes, for me to wake up and go to class and then come over here, it’s a whole different freedom.”
By 4 p.m., men wearing WWJD necklaces traipse though the building’s narrow passages, past Christmas lights strung with packaging tape and past a toppled nativity scene along a metal cabinet, and pile into a burgundy-carpeted room for a community prayer session.
Standing in front of a backdrop filled with mountains, streams and a field of yellow flowers, a few men armed with acoustic guitars lead the parishioners in a rendition of “Silent Night.” Together the men give thanks for special moments in their lives: a cousin buying a house, a mother coming to visit, a friend getting a new job. Furnish calls out the names of men who had recent birthdays, and their classmates sing to them. Then, a man about to be paroled takes the stage to speak, and the men bum-rush him, laying their hands on his head and shoulders in a giant prayer circle. More men pile in as the circle extends outward. Bound together, they look like a team. A brotherhood. A blue-swathed army.
Some of them still face problems, though.
Against Christian doctrine, some have engaged in homosexual acts. And a few months ago, one Christian zealot had to be removed for beating gay prisoners. One inmate was recently booted to another facility for bringing a knife to prayer class.
Though DOC policy doesn’t allow sex offenders to enter the Christ-based community, at least three have slipped in. They may be seeking easy shelter from potential violence in the general population, where sex offenders are at the bottom of the caste system. But unless he’s prodded by the DOC, Furnish says he has no intention to remove them from the program.
“We’d rather be slow to cut the men, even if we think they’re phonies or here for the wrong reasons,” Furnish says. “We want to give them the chance to have a life change…. If they’re willing to do what’s necessary, if they’re willing to do the curriculum and become involved in the community, then we want to give them that opportunity. It’s not as if we’ve identified the guy as a phony and he’s gone. We identify that this guy has a problem and issues, and the biblical counselor needs to spend more time, increase the intensity of working with the guy to realize he has an issue he needs to address.”
Assuming the murderers, dope dealers, addicts and armed robbers in the program adequately address their “issues,” further redemption awaits. The state guarantees InnerChange inmates 40 out of 200 highly coveted slots in the state’s work-release program. InnerChange also gets to “prescreen” candidates with the Kansas Parole Board, to learn exactly what each man may need to be readmitted to the world at-large. To date, 58 born-again men have left the walls of Winfield and Ellsworth. No InnerChange member has been denied parole.
“It occupies inmate time in a positive manner so they aren’t idle,” Parole Board Chairwoman Marylin Scafe says of InnerChange. “It’s also good work for their personal growth…. When they leave the facility they get a continuum of support, which is rare. They provide a lot of release planning, which is important because it feeds into the parole plan. The better the structure in the release plan, the more we look at the inmate in a favorable light.”
In Kansas City, Smith’s InnerChange classmates have scattered. None of the former brothers spend much time together. Initially, they couldn’t — the DOC generally forbids parolees from having contact with convicted felons for a year after their release.
On a national level, the InnerChange graduates have not spoken well for themselves. In Texas, some inmates have told reporters that they have used the program merely to get away from the violence and racial tension in the general population. One ex-con says he joined the program to cut security and to get closer to his family, who lived in the Houston area. He faked his way through the program and, upon parole, cut contact with the InnerChange support system.
Kansas’ former inmates say they too witnessed prisoners faking their conversions, and some broke character as soon as they got out.
“There was a lot of them that just got into the program to make their time in prison easier,” says Clyde Huffman, a 40-year-old former methamphetamine cooker. “I’ve seen some of ’em where they came in and they didn’t really change…. There were some of them that were just playing the program.” Huffman lives on the fringes of Wyandotte County and has started his own one-man roofing company.
Teng Thao, a 28-year-old convicted of aggravated battery, lives at home with his parents in Johnson County and attends Johnson County Community College. Within a year, he wants to transfer to Penn Valley Community College to complete his degree in radiology. He goes to church regularly, but since his release, he has severed ties with InnerChange because he says his family provides enough support.
A third man, once a major pot grower, lives in the metro and works for a better-fathering advocacy group and as a motivational speaker. He spends time organizing meetings between the DOC and local faith groups, but he doesn’t want his name printed, because he fears his former crew.
One man died of natural causes at the VA hospital. Another, currently unemployed, lives near Swope Park. No one from Ellsworth has been able to contact him for months. When a Pitch reporter knocked on the door at his last known address, a woman answered. Surrounded by the distinctive smell of marijuana, she said he wasn’t there.
Though the DOC still has no recidivism statistics, these men have heard the failure stories. One man got out and picked up a DUI conviction within a year. Another ditched his Christian safety net to hole up in a pay-by-the-week motel. Busted for drugs, he’s now at Ellsworth, reapplying to try the program again.
“They weren’t sincere to begin with, it was just manipulation,” Smith says. “To them it was just a game.”
In March 2001, after less than a year at Winfield, Smith started work release, shipping bulk orders of formal wear from a tuxedo warehouse in Wichita. Because he was doing so well with his studies, InnerChange arranged for him to get out of jail early. Out on parole by the end of May, he wanted to continue his education at Calvary Bible College in the Northland. Then, he moved to the southern edge of Kansas, where he worked on a horse ranch that his mentor owned while he waited for the Parole Board’s permission to cross the state line into Missouri. He also called a philanthropist named George Kettle, whom he’d met at the InnerChange opening at Winfield. Back then, Kettle had heard his story and wished him luck. Now, he offered Smith a zero-interest scholarship to help pay for classes.
“Let me give you an accurate observation of those guys who got out of InnerChange and weren’t successful,” Smith says. “They didn’t do what they were supposed to do.” His next sentence is a near-perfect imitation of Chuck Colson’s statement on the InnerChange Web site: “God gives us a changed heart, and through that heart he expects us to stay healthy. Through His infinite wisdom, there is change.”
On weekday mornings, Smith rises before dawn to commute to work. Leaving his parents’ house in Platte Woods, he travels southeast along the highway toward Kansas City, passing former landmarks: the exit for an old chop shop; the lighted sign of a downtown liquor store; the old field where he used to throw keg parties; the barbecue joint with stained-glass windows just behind his work, where he and his underage buddies used to drink sodas and plot. He’s been working ten-hour shifts almost every day since September, driving a forklift to load and unload parts in the John Deere shipping warehouse. He takes his lunch alone, studying for classes at Calvary, where he’s a year away from earning a degree in Bible studies.
Smith has become the perfect company frontman. He speaks at InnerChange events, local churches and high schools. He has shared part of his story on 88.5, the same station that airs Colson’s show. He has the criminal record to prove he could be a threat, but he cries when he talks about his conversion. Smith is off parole for the first time in thirty years. No longer dog-tagged by the DOC, he clings to his new identity.
Since 1996, Smith says, he’s read the Bible cover to cover three times. He knows the lessons of Genesis, Romans and Ephesians, and the words practically verbatim. Through lunchtime readings, Bible studies, late-night classes, weekend prayer meetings and church on Sundays, God has given him a new direction.
On Monday evenings, Smith teaches a Bible study class with two ex-cons. The group meets downstairs at Smith’s parents’ house. They spread Bibles across their laps in a finished basement that is now Smith’s bedroom. Soon, he plans to expand the program to include more former criminals by volunteering at a new halfway house opening at 35th Street and Agnes Avenue. When the new InnerChange comes to Missouri, he wants to stay in the Kansas City area and serve.
He lives in the same neighborhood as his ex-wife and his 13-year-old daughter. A couple of times a year, he goes to his daughter’s dance recitals. Last time, more than forty parents crammed into folding chairs in front of a brightly lit stage. Smith stood in a corner, videotaping the prancing girls, the smiling couples, the nuclear families. He was happy.
