DEBORAH POTTER (Correspondent): At first glance, the Front Porch Cafe could be any neighborhood coffee shop. But the make-shift kitchen isn’t quite up to par, and those guys at the grill aren’t your typical cooks.

JON SCYOC (Former Inmate): I actually have a small felony on my record. Well, it’s still a felony. And I know how hard it was for myself to get jobs.

THOMAS JONES (Former Inmate):Since I had my felonies I been having real poor jobs. And I chose to do street life, and street life is nothing but trouble—death, jail, or, you know, both.

POTTER: Most of the workers here are ex-offenders. The cafe is run by South Street Ministries, a Christian fellowship that also offers Bible study for inmates.

Former Inmate: What are they doing for like housing for like ex-felons?

POTTER: A place to live, a job, even just a “welcome home” are hard to come by when you’ve been where some of these men have been.

MICHAEL STARKS (Former Inmate): I’ve been arrested 117 times. I’ve been shot four times. I’ve been convicted 12 times.

PERRY CLARK (Former Inmate): We want fast money, OK? So consequently I went to prison for ten years for aggravated robbery, OK? Behind the aggravated robbery was drugs.

POTTER: Perry Clark now runs a construction business. Michael Starks is a community organizer. Both former drug users say they went straight after finding faith behind bars but that when they were locked up the churches they knew were not on their side.

STARKS: The church was of the mindset that, hey, he did wrong, he’s being punished. They thought that if you did wrong, you went to prison and that was it, and they were going to throw away the key.

CLARK: I wrote three churches to let them know, not asking for anything, that I was reentering back into the community after ten years of incarceration. And I didn’t get a response back.

POTTER: Both men are now involved in active prison ministries, helping ex-offenders rejoin the community.

CLARK: I want them to know that they can live normal life once they out.

(Speaking with woman) It’s not easy, though, when the problem is enormous.

POTTER: More than two million Americans are now imprisoned, four times as many as 30 years ago. The major reason: mandatory sentencing for non-violent crimes and drug charges. But the war on drugs, declared in the 1980s, has not had the effect its backers predicted. Arkansas Circuit Judge Wendell Griffen has seen the results.

JUDGE WENDELL GRIFFEN (Arkansas Circuit Court): Drug use has not declined. All it has done has produced an explosion on our prison population. The whole mandatory sentencing guideline mantra was sort of like the Kool-Aid that we should never have drunk.

POTTER: Behind bars, the racial disparity is striking. Black men are six times more likely to be imprisoned than whites, especially for drug offenses, even though the rate of drug use is only slightly higher for blacks. Law professor Michelle Alexander, author of the book, “The New Jim Crow,” says the nation faces a human rights nightmare more than 40 years after the end of legal segregation.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER (Author, “The New Jim Crow“): In cities like Chicago, more than half of working-age African-American men now have criminal records, and they can be legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits. So many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind in the Jim-Crow era are suddenly legal again once you’ve been branded a felon.

POTTER: In the 1960s, ministers like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were in the forefront of the civil rights movement. There’s been no similar movement to end mass incarceration.

ALEXANDER: I think Dr. King would be just so deeply saddened and appalled by what we’ve allowed to happen in this country in the years since his death.

TOM NAVIN (Social Action/Prison Ministry, Catholic Diocese of Little Rock, Ark.): We’re told to visit the prisoner, and so that goes with what we do and who we are.

POTTER: Tom Navin oversees prison ministries for the Catholic Diocese of Little Rock, but he says Jesus’ command to care for prisoners is not widely followed.

NAVIN: We’ve gotten people to be interested in prison ministry and contribute money to us and pat us on the back, but it’s really tough to get people to volunteer to go into the prison. That’s really a tough sell.

POTTER: As an ordained Baptist pastor, Judge Griffen believes churches should lead a national campaign against mass incarceration.

JUDGE GRIFFEN: We don’t recognize the God in our brothers and sisters who are in prison, and the biblical imperative is for us to see that our sisters and brothers in prison are our sisters and brothers. We owe it to God to get them out.

ALEXANDER: Just as in the days of slavery it wasn’t enough to shuttle a few to freedom, today we’ve  got to work for the abolition of the system of mass incarceration as a whole and that means, in my view, that the church has got to find its prophetic voice in the era of mass incarceration and really call on politicians and policymakers to undo the massive tragedy that has been done.

POTTER: Some legal reform is underway. States from Ohio to California have approved early release programs and lower penalties for lesser crimes, changes driven largely by the high cost of keeping so many people behind bars.

ALEXANDER: I think Martin Luther King Jr. was right when he said we have to be careful of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. If we can afford once again to lock people up en masse, nothing will prevent us from doing so if we don’t learn the most important lessons from this time, which is that none of us should be viewed as disposable. None of us should be treated as throwaway people, rounded up, locked up and then branded criminals and felons and ushered into a permanent second class status. That’s the lesson we have to learn from this time, and it’s not about saving money. It’s about saving lives, saving our own sense of humanity.

STARKS: If you got people in prison, they need to be loved, too, because if they cannot see the love of Christ, in spite of their circumstances, then they’ll never come to accept the fact that Christ cares about them at all. How can he care about me when no one from the church is in my life, no one from the church steps forward to give me an embrace?

JUDGE GRIFFEN: Talking about congregational involvement requires getting congregations to be about social change, and we in the American religious community have been very, very content to sing our way to heaven, but we have forgotten that in the Lord’s Prayer the word is “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

POTTER: Without more support from faith-based or community groups, many of these prisoners face a tough road. Within three years, national statistics say, more than a third of them will be back behind bars.

For Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Deborah Potter in Akron, Ohio.

DR. BRENDA WILLIAMS: (singing) God is a good God, yes he is. God is a good God, yes he is. One more time.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: This is the medium security pod at the detention center in Sumter, South Carolina, and this is Dr. Brenda Williams, all four feet, eleven inches of her.

DR. BRENDA: OK, now listen up. What were going to do is this. A couple of things, then we’re gonna go on, ’cause I am a very short-winded person.

SEVERSON: She says she was afraid to talk in public until the teacher made her give an oral report in 7th grade. Her husband, Dr. Joe Williams, says that was just the beginning.

DR. JOE WILLIAMS: She was talking when I first saw her and she’s continued to talk since then.

DR. BRENDA: (To inmates) Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. That’s all some folks do. We do more than talk. We back up our talk.

I called Mr. Mathews and said, “Hi, my name is Brenda Williams,” blah, blah, blah, and he said, “I know about you. You don’t have to give me an introduction.”

SEVERSON: Few in Sumter would deny that Dr. Brenda Williams is a force of nature, or that her husband Dr. Joe is the calm in the eye of the storm. She’s a general practitioner. He’s an internist and geriatrician. They’ve run a clinic in this city of 100,000 for 30 years. No one is turned away. Her latest project is called Do Right and the folks who agree to “do right” get on the list to get a free home. So far they’ve given away four.

PATRICIA DUNHAM: This is my dining room. I never had one of those before.

SEVERSON: (to Patricia Dunham) It’s a nice dining room.

It’s the first house Patricia Dunham has ever owned. For her and her husband and three kids, it’s a dream come true. It may be comfortable now but it wasn’t when the doctor found it.

DR. BRENDA: The house had a porch that was falling in. It had 59 broken window panes. All of the wiring was stripped of copper. The plumbing stuff was missing.

The houses are not just given, quote unquote, “given” to the families, they have to work for it. They have to earn it.

PATRICIA DUNHAM: I do community service, clean up paper, go to church, be active in my kid’s schooling, come to the meetings once a month, basically easy stuff that’s not hard to do to get a free home, and I thank you very much. (hugs her)

SEVERSON: The cost of fixing-up these fixer-uppers comes out of the Williams pockets. They receive no outside funding. But they’re not pushovers. People who don’t follow the rules don’t get a home.

DR. BRENDA: The Do Right families have to do at least 4 hours of community service a week. The Do Right families have to turn in a church program. The pastor or the leader of the religious organization has to sign that program and date it. I want a written report, not an oral report, it has to be in writing…

SEVERSON: You’re pretty tough.

DR. BRENDA: Yes, I know.

SEVERSON: Nick McCormac is a staff writer for Sumter’s newspaper The Item. He’s covered Dr. Williams.

NICK MCCORMAC (The Sumter Item): She doesn’t want people to take things for granted, basically. She wants them to earn it. It’s to give them that empowerment, to make them proud of themselves, to build themselves up so they can go on and own their house or be a voter and be engaged and have that pride that comes along with those kind of things.

DR. BRENDA: It’s demanded that the recipients of that free home go back to school and get a high school diploma if they haven’t graduated from high school. It’s mandatory.

SEVERSON: Patricia got her high school diploma. Now she’s attending college, and she has her own home.

PATRICIA: It feels so good when I go pay my taxes in January.

SEVERSON: Linda Prince earned her new home by following the rules, which includes cleaning up litter in the neighborhood.

DR. BRENDA: The neighborhood is improving and you know one thing, we ran the drug dealers away. OK, there might still be one or two hanging around somewhere, but there was a house not too far from here, by the way, that was all the time frequented by drug dealers, and they’re gone now.

DR. JOE WILLIAMS: I for one believe that this is the best country in the world. I believe that we all have to figure out a way to make it better.

SEVERSON: It’s a calling for them, making things better, a way to pay back for their good fortune. Both are deeply religious. He is a United Methodist. She belongs to an Apostolic church.

DR. BRENDA: (singing) And we all know that he loves us.

SEVERSON: She says she gets her inspiration from the good book, from scriptures like the 41st Psalm, verse one.

DR. BRENDA: “Blessed are ye who consider the poor for the Lord will deliver you in your days of trouble.”

DR. JOE: There’s a large portion of our community, the so-called underclass, that seem to be mired I poverty. And really, as I tell my wife all the time, those are the people I’m really concerned about.

SEVERSON: For them, the core of the problem facing the African-American community is the break up of the family.

DR. JOE: We have problems with men and women not getting together and getting married, or breaking apart in terms of the family, that we really feel very discouraged about.

SEVERSON: Makesha Kennedy is an exception. She and her husband were married ten years ago after the Williams prodded them and other couples to tie the knot.

Makesha has three children, getting good grades, with a father at home. She now works at the doctor’s office. So does Amanda Elizabeth Wolf. She met Dr. Brenda, as the staff calls her, when she was in jail a year ago.

AMANDA ELIZABETH WOLF: I mean, we’ve come a long ways, and you know, I have to give number one credit to God, but if it weren’t for Dr. Brenda and Dr. Joe, I wouldn’t be blessed with this house right now.

SEVERSON: Amanda is now a member of what is known as the Do Right Crew, mostly former inmates who meet with the Do Right Kids, youngsters Dr. Brenda has recruited, to do community service and talk about the problems of growing up.

AMANDA ELIZABETH WOLF: You know whenever I do, I guess, want to relapse or think about going back to my old ways, I think, you know, well I’m accountability to the Do Right kids, you know. And I don’t want to have to go to them and say, “Hey, listen, I screwed up, I’m back in jail.”

DR. BRENDA: I need you to sign up. Here’s lime-green paper, it says do right, do right, do right. If you’re part of the Do Right Crew, there’s so many benefits that come along with being part of the Do Right Crew.

SEVERSON: Even these prisoners are eligible for a free home, and she’ll help with a job too, if they “do right.”

DR. BRENDA: I’ll do everything I can to find you a job. I can’t promise you that job will come but I’ll sure do my doggone best to help you get a job.

SEVERSON: The director of the detention center says he had to turn the lights out late one night to get her to go home, but he’s glad she comes.

SIMON MAJOR (Sumter Lee Detention Center): She’s very encouraging, but not only that now, there’s another population that she talks to also, as she speaks with the inmates, our officers get to hear that same encouraging word.

SEVERSON: And then she gets to her most passionate cause right now, registering pre-trial inmates to vote.

DR. BRENDA: Your vote is just as powerful as Donald Trump’s vote. Your vote is just as powerful as President Barack Obama’s vote. Your vote is just as powerful as Oprah Winfrey’s vote. Your vote is just as powerful as Bill Gate’s vote. They’re billionaires. You have power.

SEVERSON: Before she was done, most of the men signed up to register to vote. It’s not an easy process in South Carolina.

DR. BRENDA: (To inmate) I’ll bet your momma has your birth certificate.

(To inmates) You all come and give us a hug, we love you now..

The bible says that many are called but few are chosen. But I truly believe that he chooses certain individuals to do his tough stuff.

(singing) Thank you Jesus.

SEVERSON: For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson at the Sumter Lee Regional Detention Center in South Carolina.

SAUL GONZALEZ, correspondent: Los Angeles County’s Twin Towers Correctional Facility: it’s one of the largest jails in the country. Behind its walls, over 3,000 men are locked up as their criminal prosecutions continue. Many prisoners are accused of committing murder, rape, and a variety of gang-related crimes. However, this jailhouse is also a house of worship to Dennis Gibbs, a senior chaplain at Twin Towers. His Sunday services are like few others, held in a cell block and closely watched by sheriff’s deputies.

CHAPLAIN DENNIS GIBBS: I think this is a holy place. I believe that we are standing on holy ground. This is a place of reconciliation and healing, and so I really see this as—in many ways this is my parish.

GONZALEZ: Chaplin Gibbs is one of dozens of clergy men and women from a variety of faiths who offer pastoral care and spiritual guidance to the inmates at Twin Towers. Although an Episcopalian, Chaplain Gibbs provides spiritual counseling to all prisoners who approach him, no matter what their particular faith.

GIBBS (speaking to prisoner): Hey, man, how is it going? Good to see you again.

PRISONER: Could you say a little prayer for me and my girl, my baby?

GONZALEZ: Although the chaplain doesn’t condone what these men are accused of doing, he also doesn’t apologize for showing them compassion.

GIBBS (praying with prisoner): God the Holy Spirit be upon you and remain with you forever.

GIBBS: These men are wounded, these men are orphans, and these men are largely forgotten, and I think it’s powerful that we bring church to them and remind them that they are a part of our community, and that they are beloved by God.

CARLOS ORTIZ: You build a bond, I’d say, with the chaplain. You build a bond of friendship.

GONZALEZ: Carlos Ortiz, who’s been at Twin Towers for six months, was recently convicted of drug possession. He says Chaplin Gibbs and other jailhouse clergy help inmates sustain and develop their faith when they need it the most.

ORTIZ: If you don’t have faith, they provide faith. You know, I am a man of faith, so just the fact there is someone that you can talk to, someone that can acknowledge about God, that’s something good for inmates. The situation you are at might not be good, but he makes you realize that you are good spiritually and physically, you are in a good spot.

GONZALEZ: Along with larger worship services, the chaplains spend much of their time holding private one-on-one sessions with prisoners who want to talk to them. Episcopal chaplain Greta Ronnigen says she’s not interested in why the men she ministers to are here.

GONZALEZ: You don’t care what the guys are in here for?

CHAPLAIN GRETA RONNIGEN: No.

GONZALEZ: Why? That seems counter-intuitive.

RONNIGEN: Because I am here for their spiritual support. I am not a lawyer. I am not social services. I’m about where they are with God. I am here to talk to them as they turn, turn away from the dark that has been their past, and they are looking, they are seeking.

GONZALEZ: Some of the prisoners at the center of complex cases, such as murder or gang-related crimes, can be held at Twin Towers for years before they’re convicted and sentenced to state prison. Except in extraordinary circumstances, say when an inmate might be threatening to murder someone, the jailhouse clergy keep confidential what they hear from prisoners, as Chaplain Gibbs explained in a conversation back at the Los Angeles Episcopal diocese.

GONZALEZ: If an inmate says something in a confession and admits to something horrible you don’t have to report it, right?

GIBBS: It’s protected.

GONZALEZ: It’s protected.

GIBBS: Yeah, it’s protected. The nature of confession is that it is a sealed sacrament, and that’s important for the men. Once the priest puts on that stole and enters into the sacrament of the church, it is a completely sealed and confidential conversation, just like it would be with somebody confessing in their church.

GONZALEZ: The presence of the chaplains at county lockups also helps ease tensions and assuage anger, and the sheriff’s deputies welcome that. However, at Twin Towers security and punishment always come before worship, and that’s especially true in the jail’s highest security units or pods.

GIBBS: In this particular unit they are complicated cases. I would say a very good majority of the men are in here for homicide, and there’s a lot of gang-related crimes in this pod.

GONZALEZ: Here, services are often conducted through steel doors and plexiglass, and services, as in the day we were shooting, are often cut short by lockdowns.

GIBBS (speaking to Chaplain Ronnigen): Greta, full lockdown. We gotta go.

RONNIGEN: Sorry, guys. Peace.

GIBBS: Yeah, the jail just went on full lockdown, so we never really know what that is about, just that a full lockdown means that there is no movement whatsoever, so we want to wrap up rather quickly. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get out of the jail.

GONZALEZ: Although he doesn’t get into the details, Chaplain Gibbs knew about confinement long before he arrived at Twin Towers six years ago.

(speaking to Chaplain Gibbs): You were in jail yourself?

GIBBS: I was, yeah. I have lived this despairing life to a great degree, absolutely. My personal response to the call to follow Christ has led me back to the streets where I once was homeless. It’s led me back to the drug-addicted and alcoholic, as I once suffered. It’s led me back to the jails, where I once was a prisoner.

GONZALEZ: I’m sure, Chaplain, when the men at Twin Towers hear about your past, and I’m sure you share some of your past with them, it gives you a particular credibility.

GIBBS: I think it does. I think it changes the conversation to a degree and kind of alerts people that I am not just some do-gooder Christian guy coming in to tell you that Jesus loves you.

GONZALEZ: That’s certainly the case for prisoner David Yi.

DAVID YI: He does give us hope. That he was once an inmate also and now this is where he’s at, helping other people find themselves—it’s just a lot of hope.

GONZALEZ: He’s a good model to follow?

YI: Exactly. Someone you can lean on.

GONZALEZ: One of the Twin Towers prisoners Chaplain Gibbs has gotten to know the best in recent months is also the most unusual. He’s William Manson, a scholarly 80-year-old physician recently convicted of killing his ex-wife. Already in the hospital ward, Manson knows he’ll likely die behind prison walls.

WILLIAM MANSON: I think that the sentence was just under the circumstances. I did the crime. Now I’m paying the price.

GONZALEZ: And spiritually are you armed for this, for this life that you have ahead of you, being a man of faith?

MANSON: I don’t know. I think so.

GIBBS (speaking to William Manson): God bless you.

MANSON: Thank you very much.

GIBBS: Would you like to pray?

MANSON: Yes.

GIBBS: As chaplains we absorb people’s sadness, their brokenness, their wounding, their depth of spiritual despair, and we are very aware of that as chaplains. I think in many ways we hold for these inmates often what they cannot hold for themselves.

(anointing and blessing prisoners): May your wounds be healed.

GONZALEZ: For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Saul Gonzalez in Los Angeles.