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Charities' Seminar Focuses on Reintegrating Ex-Offenders

Special to the HERALD
(From the Issue of 5/18/06)

Fifty representatives from 20 parishes in the Arlington Diocese and 15 representatives from Virginia and Maryland agencies working with prisoners attended the recent seminar “When Prisoners Return,” organized by Catholic Charities’ prison ministry program.
Sister Connie Parcasio, S.N.D.S., prison ministry program director, welcomed speakers Pat Nolan, Marlo Hargrove and Alfreda Robinson. Father Paul Berghout, who serves as a prison chaplain, led the attendees in an opening prayer at St. Ann Church in Arlington.
“In the U.S., nearly 2.3 million individuals are currently incarcerated. Over 600,000 men, women and juveniles will be discharged from federal, state and local facilities this year, and over two-thirds will return to incarceration within three years,” said Nolan, president of Justice Fellowship. He decried the lack of programs and mentors available to prisoners when they complete their sentences and are released into the community.
“If we are going to create safer communities,” Nolan said, “we need to place a greater emphasis on helping prisoners when they are released from incarceration. It is a widespread feeling in American society that re-entry of prisoners is owned by the correction system, which is an erroneous assumption. All too often, when a prisoner is discharged from a correction facility, he is told, ‘you’ll be back here in 30 days.’ It is instead a community problem and the community has to take ownership of it. We need to be focused on the community, not on putting prisoners back in the jail.”
Speaking from personal experience, Nolan said that it is crucial to furnish housing, education and other programs to assist prisoners when they return to the community. “But,” he said, “relationships are actually the most important thing when a prisoner is turned out. If prisoners do not have someone who can help them through the re-entry process, they will stumble again. It is vital that members of the Church come forth and furnish this support, and 95 percent of volunteers that help in the prisons and jails are members of the Church. They are there because Christ loved the poor and the vulnerable.”
“We need to encourage members of the Church to help make a difference in the lives of these individuals, and one of the ways to do this is to mentor prisoners who are returning to society,” said Hargrove, president of Freedom Advocates Celebrating Ex-Offenders.
Speaking from personal experience, Hargrove said that prisoners become so conditioned in prison that when they come out, they often think that “the outside is like the inside.” They retain bad habits such as “acting without thinking.” They doubt if they can be trusted by others.
“They may do the same old things but look for different results and then feel sorry for themselves,” he said, adding that they also have to struggle to find a place to live and survive.
Hargrove believes that getting prisoners to make a personal conversion to God is the key to successful re-entry. He stressed, “There must be a resource available to prisoners to help them through the process of re-entry. This resource must be individuals who believe in the God-given dignity of every human being and are willing to give support to make a difference in the lives of ex-offenders.” Hargrove’s organization tries to raise public awareness of the needs and solutions of the problems associated with re-entry to society.
Robinson, president of the National Women’s Prison Project, helps women ex-offenders cope with the trauma of incarceration and find their way into healthy and profitable lives. She said she believed that “We fall down but we get up” is really the song for Church members all over the world. “We all know that everybody makes mistakes, every human faces disasters, and only with God’s help can we cope up with them,” she said.
Speaking from personal experience, Robinson said that imprisonment is an experience of defeat and ruin, a fall into the depths, and that “everything inside is designed to give prisoners low esteem so that the prison staff can maintain control over all aspects of their lives.” She said that released prisoners need support from the Church and the community.
For more information about the prison ministry program contact Sr. Connie at 703/841-3832 or cparcasio@ccda.net.