Group sues Iowa over religious prison program

By The Associated Press

02.17.03

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DES MOINES, Iowa — An advocacy group filed suit against Iowa and its top prison officials over a rehabilitation program for inmates that is centered on fundamentalist Christianity.

The Washington, D.C.-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State claims state funding for the faith-based program is unconstitutional. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Des Moines on Feb. 12, claims prison officials use profits from inmates’ telephone accounts and proceeds from the state’s tobacco settlement to fund the InnerChange Freedom Initiative.

“State moneys that were obtained from persons who do not subscribe to the religious teachings of the InnerChange program and from a fund that was created to generally benefit the public health have thus been used and allocated to pay for pervasively religious, evangelical, fundamentalist Christian instruction,” according to the lawsuit..

The suit comes as President George W. Bush works to expand the role of religious groups in social services, drawing complaints that he is blurring the constitutional boundary between church and state.

The InnerChange program, offered at Iowa’s Newton Correctional Facility since 1999, aims to reduce recidivism among inmates.

The program, operated by Prison Fellowship Ministries, also is run in prisons in Texas, Kansas and Minnesota. Reston, Virginia-based Prison Fellowship was founded by Chuck Colson, a former aide to President Nixon and a Watergate defendant.

“The InnerChange program contains everything that is wrong with the president’s faith-based initiative,” said the Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of the nonprofit Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

“It uses government funds for pervasively religious programs, funding for religious conversion, discrimination in hiring practices — ignoring entirely the principle of separation of church and state.”

The lawsuit alleges that the state told family members who paid money into inmates’ telephone accounts that if they stopped funding the accounts they would no longer be able to contact their relatives inside the prison.

One such case involved inmate Jerry Ashburn, whom the advocacy group is representing in a separate case. Americans United put money into Ashburn’s telephone account to speak with him about the case. Money from that account was used to fund the InnerChange program, the lawsuit states.

“The state has confronted Americans United with a choice of foregoing communications with a client they represent or funding a religious program they oppose,” the lawsuit states.

The suit says the program is funded almost entirely with government money, with 99% of its $689,877 in revenues in fiscal 2001 coming from the states of Iowa and Kansas.

InnerChange transferred the revenue to Prison Fellowship, which then disbursed the money to pay for InnerChange programs and salaries.

Fred Scaletta, spokesman for the Iowa Department of Corrections, declined to comment on the lawsuit.

Mark Earley, president of Prison Fellowship Ministries, said the suit’s allegations are baseless.

“The InnerChange Freedom Initiative in operation in Iowa in no way violates ... the First Amendment to the Constitution,” he said. “In fact, federal law allows a state to include religious organizations as social service providers.”

InnerChange uses state money solely for nonsectarian expenses while private funds are used for religious programming, Earley said.

The lawsuit also alleges that inmates who voluntarily enter the program receive numerous privileges not afforded other prisoners.

Such inmates live in an honor unit where they are given keys to their own cells and have access to private bathrooms. They are allowed extra visits from family members, free telephone calls to family, access to computers and big screen televisions.

The program, Americans United says, “gives inmates incentives to subject themselves to religious indoctrination.”

“That’s what’s at the heart of this,” Lynn said. “This is coercion using state funds to become a fundamentalist Christian.”

Americans United is joined as a plaintiff in the lawsuit by two family members and a fiancé of inmates in the Newton prison. The lawsuit names as defendants: Prison Fellowship Ministries; the InnerChange Freedom Initiative; Terry Mapes, the warden of the Newton prison; former state Department of Corrections Director W.L. “Kip” Kautzky; Acting Director John Baldwin; and the seven individual members of the state Board of Corrections.

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