Diversity behind bars

Editorial

The federal government last week announced it intends to fire all part-time prison chaplains in a bid to save money. About 100 part-time chaplains will get the boot, leaving the 80 full-time clergy to address the spiritual needs of Canada’s inmates.

If Canadian prisons were filled with nothing but Christians, this would not be an issue. But of the 80 full-time clergy, only one is not a Christian. (He is a Muslim.) Among the 100 part-timers being let go, about 20 serve the non-Christian prison population.

The CBC reports that 57 percent of Canadian inmates identify as Christian, while 4.5 percent of inmates are Muslim, four percent adhere to a First Nations spirituality, two percent are Buddhist, and less than one percent are Jewish or Sikh. But numbers are not as significant as either the practical impact on the comparatively small number of individual inmates who are not Christian, or the symbolic message this decision sends about the Canadian government’s approach to religious diversity.

In its defence, Conservative government officials have said they are shifting to the chaplaincy model employed by the armed forces, in which clergy of any faith minister to the spiritual needs of all those seeking the service. Additionally, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews noted that there are 2,500 volunteers providing spiritual support to inmates and the government wants to encourage more of that.

Of course, the government could save a lot of money if it encouraged volunteers to, say, construct roads, enforce the law or perform other activities for which people are currently paid. But allocating funds is a statement about the importance the government places on professional, reliable provision of services.

It is also somewhat laudable to idealize an ecumenical chaplaincy system in which basic spiritual care supersedes the potential for proselytizing, allowing, say, a Muslim imam to discuss spiritual issues with a Christian or Hindu inmate from a broadly humanitarian and cosmological, rather than a narrowly clerical approach. But such a theoretically open approach is dubious, because the only professional chaplains an inmate is likely to see (a 99 percent chance, approximately) will be a Christian minister or priest.

A spokesperson for Toews said that “... the government of Canada is not in the business of picking and choosing which religions will be given preferential status through government funding. The minister has concluded his review and has decided that chaplains employed by [the Correctional Service of Canada] must provide services to inmates of all faiths.”

The thing is, the government is doing precisely what they claim not to be doing. If, among the 100 full-time chaplains, the government assured a mix of religious denominations, including appropriate geographic distribution based on need, again, this would not be an issue. Instead, they intend to fire all the part-time chaplains (including all but one of the non-Christians currently serving) while apparently keeping all the full-time positions (including one Muslim and about 79 Christians).

More important even than the symbolic issue of the appearance of religious equity, more important even than the individual lives affected by the chaplains, is the overarching matter of the purpose of the prison system in the first place: to rehabilitate criminals in order to create a safer society. On this matter, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs made the case starkly clear.

“While this is a matter of protecting freedom of religion, there is also an important aspect of public safety at stake in this decision,” said David Koschitzky, CIJA’s chair, in a statement. “It is no stretch to say that chaplains are at the forefront of the rehabilitation process, and work every day to ensure that inmates awaiting release have the tools they need to avoid re-offending. That Jews and other non-Christians are a minority of inmates in no way diminishes the critical importance of their access to chaplains of their own faith – who provide a moral compass to help inmates navigate their way to a productive life following incarceration.”

British Columbia Rabbi Dina-Hasida Mercy, one of the part-time chaplains expected to be let go, told CIJA she gets paid for about 17.5 hours a month of service, a fraction of the time she says she actually devotes to prison chaplaincy. This suggests the government is ending a service that is extremely economical. Even so, there is nothing inherently wrong with firing all the part-timers in order to establish an exclusively full-time cadre of prison chaplains, if that is the route the government decides to go. No, the problem is that all but one of the non-Christian chaplains are to be let go as an apparently unintended consequence of the shift to full-timers only.

The ecumenical concept of chaplains providing spiritual services to people of different faiths is probably fine. But the chaplains themselves must reflect at least some of the diversity of both the prison population and the country as a whole.

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