"As chaplains we absorb people’s sadness, their brokenness, their depth of spiritual despair," says Dennis Gibbs, an Episcopal chaplain at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in Los Angeles. "In many ways we hold for these inmates what they cannot hold for themselves."

The head of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles says leadership in his church is open to all, including gays and lesbians.

"We must return to the values that made the black church a true success," says Rev. Mark Whitlock, director of community initiatives at USC's Center for Religion and Civic Culture, where a mentoring program trains African-American clergy in community organizing, economic development, and church leadership strategies.

After ministering in inner-city Los Angeles for almost four decades, Father Peter Banks, an Irish Catholic priest, says "hope is to be able to sing in the middle of the darkness, and I can still sing in the middle of the darkness."

A story about a former state legislator who believed the answer to crime was more and more prisons -- until he got locked up himself. Now he's leading a faith-based program for prisoner rehabilitation, and he says it works.