BOB FAW, correspondent: Question: What do this longtime alcoholic, this up and coming project manager, this receptionist who was homeless, and Noah Haynes, who just turned one, have in common? Answer: The chance at a better life because of this former corporate high-flyer and mother of four.

NANCY MURRAY (Builders of Hope): We’re building houses. We’re rescuing houses that are slated for demolition, rebuilding them and making them available and affordable to families who otherwise would be living in pretty substandard conditions.

FAW: For the past five years, her program, Builders of Hope, has found houses about to be demolished and put in a landfill.

MURRAY: So far, to date Builders of Hope has rescued eleven million pounds of debris from the landfill. The only inventory that we work with is inventory slated for demolition. I’d say 99 percent of the homes that are donated that are older have hardwood floors in them. We’re able to restore those. The roofs, the rafter systems, the floor systems—all in really great shape and very usable.

FAW: Nancy Murray’s nonprofit group rescues houses from commercial, road and hospital expansion as well as private donors who want to build larger homes. The houses are rebuilt and refurbished into energy-efficient green houses, as Josh Thompson learned when he moved into his Builders of Hope home.

JOSH THOMPSON: All the paints that they use are all low-chemical and designed to kind of produce a healthy environment.

FAW: Now that’s what we see. What we don’t see—tell me about the insulation.

THOMPSON: Yeah. What you don’t see is spray-on foam insulation across the whole house—amazing energy efficiency with that. You got all these windows are the double-paned.

FAW: In Raleigh, Durham, Charlotte, and other North Carolina cities, Nancy Murray’s Builders of Hope, with help from private and government funds, has restored nearly 100 houses, selling them at an average cost of $135,000. Putting them on land she has bought or that has been donated, Murray sells them at cost to low- and moderate-income wage-earners she calls the working poor.

MURRAY: You say affordable housing and everybody thinks, “Oh, those people.” Well, those people are your teachers, your firefighters, your police officers, your nurse. It’s 70 percent of the working population of any major city, and those are the people who need affordable housing.

FAW: People like Noah’s parents, Dana and Robbie Haynes.

ROBBIE HAYNES: There’s houses like this in the downtown area, but it’s just not with our price range. We couldn’t afford to have those upgrades and different things.

FAW: New home owners like receptionist Nikki McKinnon who also could not afford to buy much of anything on her $25,000 a year salary.

NIKKI MCKINNON: Just having your own—it’s nothing like it. It gives you just a sense of pride and worth. It’s just wonderful just to say that I actually own a piece of land in this world, you know. It’s nice.

FAW: Nancy Murray gave up her job as a marketing and advertising executive to start Builders of Hope with money she inherited from her father and with the knowledge of one of his businesses—construction.

MURRAY: We were building million-dollar vacation town homes, and we were displacing people when we bought property that were renting. We would tear them down and build something else, and I thought, wow, what we’re doing is wrong. You know, I started getting a conscience, like this is terrible.

FAW: So she traded in her stilettos for steel-tipped boots, even bought her own earth-mover. It is, she says, a kind of ministry.

MURRAY: There’s a verse in Matthew that states that you shouldn’t store your money up, you know, where moths and rust and decay set in, but to take that money and invest it in Kingdom work and to really be able to use it to make a difference in loving others and caring for others while we’re here on earth.

FAW: With a staff of 60, her Builders of Hope scours a 60-mile radius looking for houses, some donated by homeowners like attorney Bryan Brice, who get a handsome tax write-off and satisfaction.

BRYAN BRICE: This is reuse and recycle and and hope in a way that is affording home ownership to lower- and middle-income families, and if you look at this whole neighborhood it’s just amazing what they’re doing here to rebuild this area. We’re glad to be a part of it.

FAW: But there is more here being rebuilt than houses. Once, this neighborhood was crime-infested.

MURRAY: Gang members were giving some problems to some of our first homeowners here, actually. This was gang territory.

FAW: Now the area is virtually crime-free.

MURRAY: That demonstrates that revitalization really does work.

FAW: Her Builders of Hope also refurbishes and rebuilds rental units. That restoration and the rebuilding of the houses is performed in part through a mentoring and training program established by Murray. Her organization hires hard-to-employ men who’ve had prison records or substance abuse problems, like the long-term alcoholic Kennie Byrum.

KENNIE BYNUM: I could see that they cared about not only just me, not focusing on let’s stop what we’re doing and care about Kennie, but let’s bring Kennie along and show him that he can be part of something that deals with caring about others. It’s a fellowship that I’ve never witnessed before or been part of before.

FAW: So lives are also being transformed here as well as houses. Phillip Brickle, once a longtime drug addict who became a pastor, now owns one of Nancy Murray’s houses.

PHILLIP BRICKLE: It’s a place of peace. It’s a place of joy.

FAW: What’s it do to someone like that? Do they change because they now can live in a home like this?

BRICKLE: I believe it gives an individual self-worth. You know, it also gives an individual a feeling of ownership, and any time you have a feeling of ownership it gives responsibility. So I do think it does bring about responsibility, and whenever you have more responsibility, it brings about change.

FAW: Juggling house moving schedules with city zoning permits, among other issues, is a true test of Nancy’s faith.

NANCY MURRAY: I would get mad at God, you know. It was like, okay, you brought me here, you convinced me to do this, you know, this project is about to fall apart. Everything is going to go by the wayside.

FAW: Finally, she says she put her fate in God’s hands to guide her to make the right decisions. It was then, she says, Builders of Hope took off.

MURRAY: You’re saying, okay, we’re here for a reason. Why are we here? What do I need to learn? What people are going to interface with me because we’re in the midst of this problem that maybe because I’ve met them something else is going to happen? So you trust that everything happens for a reason, and it’s all connected, and ultimately gets you to the place where God wants you to be.

FAW: In addition to the projects in North Carolina, Nancy’s Builders of Hope moved, refurbished, and relocated 76 homes in New Orleans that were about to be demolished to make room for a new hospital. It’s estimated about 250,000 houses a year in the United States get torn down. Cities like Detroit and Dallas have contacted Nancy about her work.

MURRAY: This is a model that can replicate, and then it does have very important ramifications, I think, nationally in terms of being able to rebuild neighborhoods and to get people back in housing, but we do need funding. We need supporters.

FAW: With the constant fundraising it is a struggle, but the satisfaction, she says, is worth all the uncertainty and aggravation.

MURRAY: You move them in over there, and the eyes and the excitement and the warmth and the pride—it’s just so sweet to see that when you do give them an opportunity and you give them a chance and something beautiful that they deserve, they take care of it and they blossom and they grow, and they really create a new community for themselves.

FAW: Here, where because of one woman’s faith a house is not just a home, it’s a new beginning.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Bob Faw in Raleigh, North Carolina.

BOB FAW, correspondent: For the women of the Magdalene community, now mornings begin quietly, with prayer.

WOMEN PRAYING: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.

FAW: With meditation and expressions of gratitude.

WOMAN: Today I don’t feel alone. I know God has got me right where he wants me.

FAW: It is a long way from the violence and addiction they have known. Tara Adcock, once in and out of prisons, started that life on the streets of Nashville at 17.

TARA ADCOCK: My pimp—I was just like his everything. He fed me with crack, bought me new clothes. I didn’t know nothing about none of this, and then just one night he said come on I’m taking you and another girl, and she’s going to show you the ropes. So he dropped me off right here. I’ve been dragged up and down this road. I was raped. I hated myself.

FAW: For 12 years, Regina Mullis also worked the streets.

REGINA MULLIS: I never thought that I would be in prostitution and an addict. I did it because this man offered me $300 to be an escort at a dinner ball, and he was a doctor, and he sent for me in a limousine, and I was like, if this is what it’s about I can do this. But throughout the years quickly it went from being a $300 escort to, you know, just accepting $5.

FAW: Regina has a job now after going back to school and reclaiming her children. She survived, along with Tara, with the help of a remarkable program called Magdalene started by a somewhat unconventional Episcopal priest, Becca Stevens—a free spirit who not only preaches barefoot at the Vanderbilt University chapel but who turned a vision into reality.

REV. BECCA STEVENS: I wanted to create a space that felt like it was healing and luxurious and safe and hopeful for women, so that there would be a space to feel like you could do the work and the healing that needed to happen in your life.

FAW: What Stevens created was a nonprofit organization for female addicts and prostitutes, most who have been sexually abused, all who have been raped. By hand they create natural bath and beauty products—soaps, balms, candles—all made under the label Thistle Farms.

STEVENS: The thistle is the weed or the flower, depending on your perspective, that still grows on the streets and the alleys where the women walk. It has the deepest taproot of any plant, and it can push through two, three inches of concrete. It is a great reminder that all of us, with our prickly outer selves, have this beautiful, deep, rich center that’s a gift from God.

FAW: Here they not only pick thistles but crush, moisten, soften and then turn the thistle into paper. With the products and through donations which Thistle Farms has raised, Stevens has opened a residential community of six homes where women off the streets are given rooms and food for two years at no charge. Stevens takes neither federal nor state money.

STEVENS: It’s great because it keeps you pretty honest, and it keeps you working pretty hard. You know, give us this day our daily bread. Be thankful for this day and for all the gifts. I mean people give to us because they’re grateful for all they’ve been given.

FAW: Here residents not only get shelter but medical help, counseling, and spiritual guidance.

STEVENS (speaking to woman): Where is God in this recovery for you?

FAW: And here faith is a component of healing, but no doctrines are taught. Nothing is force-fed or imposed. There is a very spiritual, loving foundation, Magdalene graduate Katie Lynn says, but…

KATIE LYNN: …they don’t push religion on you, so that you can make the choice of your own, because a lot of people such as myself come from a background where I was told that if anything bad I did God was going to get me.

STEVENS: I think most of the women have pretty strong feelings about what their spiritual path looks like, and I’m more interested in encouraging them to have that religious and spiritual voice, where nobody’s saying like this is what you need to believe.

FAW: For the women who come here there is no staff hovering about, no one telling them what to do. What they do get: something most of them have never gotten before.

KATIE LYNN: I felt unconditional love. They loved me for who I was, and they wanted to help me through anything, just to get better.

FAW: At first that environment, that acceptance seemed unreal to Tara and Shelia McClain. When she was very small, Shelia was repeatedly abused for years. Leaving home at 14, getting addicted, at 18 she turned to prostitution. Tara and Shelia bonded when they were working the streets.

ADCOCK: Like we’d go do a trick, a date together, or we’d go to an apartment.

SHELIA MCCLAIN: We were treacherous, okay?

ADCOCK: I would rob and she would…

MCCLAIN: I would flat-back.

ADCOCK: She would flat-back.

MCCLAIN: We were treacherous out there together.

FAW: So on a good day you could make how much?

MCCLAIN: Most days it was easy to make at least $1,000 a day.

ADCOCK: Yeah.

FAW: They both hated it, they say, but neither could break loose.

MCCLAIN: After I turned the trick to get a room, I’d feel the degradation hit and then I’d have to buy dope to medicate how I was feeling about just dealing with the trick, and it’s a vicious cycle, you know.

STEVENS: My theory is no woman ended up on the streets by herself. Whether it’s a failed family, violence experienced early on, she didn’t get out there by herself, and so it’s crazy to think she’s going to come off the streets by herself, you know, out of jail with no provisions. They’re going to call their drug dealer to come get them, and it just starts over again.

FAW: Ready for a change, Shelia wrote to her judge from prison asking to be admitted to the Magdalene program. Two years later, she graduated with the judge by her side. She is different now: clean, owns her own house, is married with two children, and a college student. Tara, who graduates in December, has also put her drug-ridden past behind.

ADCOCK: There was no judgment. They just want to help you. They showed me what I can do, you know, and I believe in myself today.

FAW: Assisted on that Vanderbilt campus chapel by her Grammy-winning songwriter-husband, Marcus Hummon, the barefoot priest sees the Magdalene homes and Thistle Farms as part of her ministry.

STEVENS: I’m doing the best that I can to live out my faith as I understand it, and I’m doing it on the path that I have chosen, and I’ve chosen as an Episcopal priest to do this work.

FAW: Her ministry springs partly from sexual abuse she suffered from a deacon in her church when she was just six to eight years old.

STEVENS: I get some of the recovery issues. I see in my own abuse in my life as in some ways strangely a gift—that I learned a lot. It’s nothing I would have asked for, but it is a gift, and it’s a powerful tool. So I’m a defender of a lot of women, because I know you don’t get over that stuff. I have a tenderness for what it does and how it makes you look at the world.

FAW: Through natural products, private grants, and gifts Stevens has raised nearly $13 million, with it sending the women of Magdalene to visit women in prison. She has also helped fund a school in Ecuador and to help establish a business for women’s groups in Rwanda—abroad and at home demonstrating what she says is the same theme:

STEVENS: That love is the most powerful force for social change. That love could be powerful enough to change a life. And what I think it means now is it has changed my life, and I think I’m really different because of the gift of this work. I believe that more now than when I started out.

FAW: What happens at Thistle Farms and at Magdalene seems to be working. Seventy-two percent of the women who complete the program, says Stevens, are clean two-and-a-half years later. And while not everyone embraces the program—this streetwalker, Angie, said she just wasn’t ready when her old friends, Tara and Katrina, urged her to join— nearly 80 to 100 women are waiting to get in. For those who do graduate from what Becca Stevens has started, there is exhilaration and pride and a conviction that their lives have been transformed.

ADCOCK: I know that now there is a different way, and I will never go back. Never. And a lot of people say you never say never, but I know I will never go back.

MULLIS: My gift now is to be, now that I’m breathing, is to be able to show other women a way out, and Magdalene was that way out for me.

FAW: A way out where abused women bond sharing simple daily chores, where they grow closer helping one another, where, with hands that have known hardship they now make candles which burn sweetly, where the faces change but the circle of healing grows stronger.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Bob Faw in Nashville, Tennessee.

SAUL GONZALEZ, correspondent: With a buffet table topped with potluck dishes and guests catching up and sharing stories, this holiday gathering at Fresno, California’s Mennonite Community Church looks like a traditional church social. Traditional, that is, until you learn that many of the guests here tonight, like Robert Wilson, are convicted rapists and child molesters, all out of prison and on parole.

ROBERT WILSON: I had a lewd and lascivious act with a minor. It was my child. And when we get together like this, yeah, it’s a good thing. Nobody else out there on the streets are going to accept us and let us come into their little private parties and stuff because of who we are.

GONZALEZ: This gathering is the work of a faith-based program called Circles of Support and Accountability or COSA. It wants to create a new model for how society deals with sex offenders by offering the offenders help and friendship.

(speaking to Rev. Clare Ann Ruth-Heffelbower): You are working with men who society thinks of as the worst of the worst of the worst.

REV. CLARE ANN RUTH-HEFFELBOWER: Yes, it’s true, and even the worst of the worst of the worst are human beings, and they can change.

GONZALEZ: Clare Ann Ruth-Heffelbower, an ordained Mennonite pastor, is the founder of Fresno’s COSA program.

HEFFELBOWER: We believe that it is possible for people to change. We’ve seen people change, and we believe coming from a faith perspective, that people created in God’s image have that good in them that can be there if they are given an opportunity to let that develop.

(at COSA meeting): “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change…”

GONZALEZ: First started by Canadian churches in the mid 1990s, COSA’s work with sex offenders centers on small discussion circles that meet weekly. In the circles, four to six volunteers from the community are matched with one sex offender, called a core member. In this circle the offender is named John.

JOHN: And I screwed up and I made some bad choices because I become careless and I become complacent, and that is something that anybody that’s in my situation cannot do.

GONZALEZ: The circles are intended to get recently paroled sex offenders to take responsibility for the crimes they’ve committed and provide them material and moral support as they attempt to reenter the community.

JOHN: I can talk about anything, anything.

GONZALEZ: Anything.

JOHN: Anything. I told them things about me that I wouldn’t tell my closest friend.

(speaking to group at COSA meeting): I don’t want to get into debates. That’s not being helpful for the core member.

GONZALEZ: John, who didn’t want his face shown or last name used, molested half a dozen children, including his own daughter. He says after decades of his making excuses, COSA has forced him to confront the ugliness of his crimes.

JOHN: I was the one that caused the harm. It wasn’t their fault. It was easy to pick up on children that were feeling abandoned, neglected, and unhappy, because I had…

GONZALEZ: You targeted the vulnerable.

JOHN: Yeah. I targeted the vulnerable. It was easy.

GONZALEZ: Most of the sex offenders in COSA, who all volunteer for the program, say while serving time they received little or no counseling.

BEN: They might call them correctional facilities and rehabs. There’s no correcting, there’s no rehabbing going on.

GONZALEZ: You didn’t get any help?

BEN: There’s no help going on in there.

GONZALEZ: This man, who we’ll call Ben, is a former teacher convicted of multiple child molestation charges. He says too many sex offenders come out of prison with the same urges they had going in.

BEN: They know if they are going to offend again or not. They know it, you know, and they can fool themselves and maybe think they don’t need any kind of support group. But they really need it.

GONZALEZ: There are more than 700,000 registered sex offenders in the United States, with more than 100,000 of them living in California. In California, like other states, paroled offenders are required to wear GPS ankle bracelets. Offenders must also follow strict residency restrictions, preventing them from living within 2,000 feet of schools and parks. Unable to find apartments that don’t violate the residency restrictions, many men have wound up on the streets, creating entire tent cities of sex offenders. Parole agent Andy Mounts and his partner showed us one encampment. They introduced us to Michael, a paroled rapist.

(speaking to Michael and Andy Mounts): In this homeless encampment, what percentage of the people living here are sex offenders?

MOUNTS: Michael, what do you think?

MICHAEL: I would say almost all of them.

GONZALEZ: All of them. Almost all of them.

MOUNTS: One or two are not. If you see 50 tents, Michael—47 or 48 sex offenders?

MICHAEL: Yeah.

GONZALEZ: Is it good for the public, please don’t take offense, Michael, but people like you and others are out here instead of in an apartment or a home or in a more stable living situation?

MOUNTS: I can’t tell you that it is.

GONZALEZ: You can’t tell me that it is.

MOUNTS: That it’s good.

GONZALEZ: It’s this reality that COSA says it’s trying to remedy.

HEFFELBOWER: As long as we keep pushing sex offenders to the edge of the community, we’re putting them at risk of reoffending. An offender who has positive, pro-social relationships is less likely to reoffend than someone who doesn’t have those relationships in place. Now that’s seems to me like sort of a, duh, everyone should know that. But that’s what COSA is about, to fill in the social gap.

GONZALEZ: And it appears to work. A recent study of COSA in Canada showed a sharp decline in recidivism rates among sex offenders involved in the program. COSA volunteers who help the sex offenders are often motivated by a combination of religious faith and a wish to protect their families and communities. Some COSA volunteers have also had a very personal experience with sexual abuse—as  victims.

ALICIA HINTON: I really want these men to know they are accountable to me personally for not creating another victim.

GONZALEZ: Until it became too emotionally taxing for her, Alicia Hinton, a victim of childhood sexual abuse, was a COSA volunteer. Although she stills sits on COSA’s board and believes strongly in its work, Hinton thinks some of COSA’s sex offenders still haven’t confronted their crimes and guilt.

HINTON: It was difficult for them to face me every week, and they didn’t want to talk about it with me.

GONZALEZ: They make excuses.

HINTON: They make excuses. They make lots and lots of excuses. It’s always somebody else’s fault, and it disgusts me. It disgusts me.

GONZALEZ: As paroled sex offenders return to communities and neighborhoods, one question often dominates. Can people who committed such heinous crime be rehabilitated to a point where they won’t harm others ever again? Unfortunately, it’s a question with no easy answer. For Heffelbower and many others who work with sex offenders, there’s no such thing as a complete “cure.”

HEFFELBOWER: It’s like an alcoholic. An alcoholic can be in recovery, but they can’t forget that they are an alcoholic, and so I think whichever perspective you take…

GONZALEZ: Meaning the impulses are…

HEFFELBOWER: Meaning the impulses may be there, but you learn how to manage them and keep them from acting on them.

GONZALEZ: COSA’s offenders acknowledge their struggles.

(speaking to Ben): You do have thoughts that still make you uncomfortable?

BEN: Yeah.

GONZALEZ: For younger men, for?

BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I don’t like that. I haven’t approached them. But unfortunately I guess still working out some kinks and whatever happened in my past.

GONZALEZ: In spite of her own ambivalence working with sex offenders, Hinton believes more programs like COSA must be created.

HINTON: There is no other option. There isn’t. If we are going to just decide that somebody else, our government, is taking care of these men, and it’s not, we are fools. We are putting our children at risk.

JOHN: People trust me. That’s good. People trust me, and they can trust me for honesty.

GONZALEZ: John says he understands the fear and loathing surrounding men like him, but believes through COSA he’ll continue his journey toward some measure of redemption.

JOHN: I don’t want to die in prison. That’s no place for an old man. That’s no place for anybody if they have any sense at all. I want to be a good man, and a good man is someone that is accomplishing something worthwhile in life.

GONZALEZ: And who doesn’t hurt others.

JOHN: And doesn’t hurt others.

GONZALEZ: But whether John and other sex offenders can ever be fully accepted beyond these circles is a different question.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Saul Gonzalez in Fresno, California.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Now 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. Compared to a national recidivism rate of 67 percent, for his ex-cons, he says, it is just eight percent. Lucky Severson reports.

LUCKY SEVERSON: It’s been a long haul for Pat Nolan, raised in a family of nine children in a crime-ridden Los Angeles neighborhood.

PAT NOLAN (President, Justice Fellowship, Prison Fellowship Ministries): Crime was an absolute part of our life there to the point that every time you went out, whether to church or school or the store, you were in danger of being robbed or knocked down and beaten.

SEVERSON: Then, after Catholic school and law school, Nolan won a seat in the California Assembly and became the Republican minority leader hell-bent on putting the bad guys in prison.

Mr. NOLAN: We built more new prisons than any state in history. We built more — I think it was 11 or 12 prisons, not one new university, and I think that’s a sad commentary. But at the time I thought that would make us safer.

JACK COWLEY (Former Warden, Oklahoma Department of Corrections): He was a madman. He was Attila the Hun when it comes to lock them up and throw away the key.

SEVERSON: But then the “lock-em-up” assemblyman got locked up himself, caught accepting illegal campaign contributions in an FBI sting. Nolan spent over two years in prison and was shocked at what he experienced there.

Mr. NOLAN: I saw virtually nothing was being done to change the mind or hearts of the inmates. Nothing was being done to prepare them to live healthy productive lives when they got out.

SEVERSON: Suddenly the hard-nosed prison builder had a change of mind and heart himself. He found a new calling — reforming the system he helped build, a system he now calls human warehousing. He’s still in favor of locking up the bad guys but says there are too many people who could be productive citizens languishing behind bars. And he is not alone. Mike Schnobrich is with the Council of Prison Locals and a guard at the U.S. prison in Florence, Colorado.

MIKE SCHNOBRICH (Council of Prison Locals and Guard, United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility, Florence, Colorado): When I hired on back in ‘92, we were told that we no longer engaged in any sort of rehabilitation. If an inmate has a drug problem, they can do a little bit of drug treatment, they can get a GED, but not a whole lot more after that. And so it really is, for the most part, almost a warehousing operation. And I think there’s not too many people in the system who would disagree.

SEVERSON: Nolan now heads a faith-based program that operates in several states called Justice Fellowship, an arm of Prison Fellowship Ministries. It offers mentoring programs for inmates while they’re still in prison and when they get out, so they’ll stay out. This year 650,000 Americans will be coming home from prison, most of them unprepared to re-enter society. That worries former wardens like Jack Cowley.

Mr. COWLEY: Because [we] can no longer tolerate a 67 percent recidivism rate in this country. It’s not tolerable, and we’re not going to put up with it anymore. Quite frankly, it’s got to stop.

SEVERSON: He says the broken system is costing American tax payers billions of wasted dollars each year.

Mr. COWLEY: You can’t afford, as a taxpayer, a $60 billion ticket for crime in this country any longer. Bridges are falling down, people, and we cannot afford to take this money and put it in something that is no longer working.

SEVERSON: There are two sets of statistics that help explain the impact on our society of U.S. prison policy. Number one: 95 percent of Americans sentenced to prison are going to be coming out, maybe to your neighborhood. Number two: as many as seven out of 10 of those will end up back in prison within three years. There are so few rehabilitation programs very few offenders are prepared to make it on the outside. And it’s no wonder that most employers won’t hire them.

One exception is Korns Galvanizing in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. At any given time, at least half the workers here are ex-cons like Jack Shipley who spent over 43 years of his life behind bars for burglary and robbery. He’s was shocked when he applied at Korns over three years ago.

JACK SHIPLEY (Employee, Korns Galvanizing Company): And then I explained to Mr. Heider who I was and what I was in this town, and he said, “We don’t care. We don’t care at all.” He said, “What we care about is what you can do, you know, if you can work.”

BARRY HEIDER (Vice President, Operations, Korns Galvanzing Company): A lot of these fellows just pump me up. They’ve got smiles on their faces and an attitude to succeed.

SEVERSON: Barry Heider is the boss here, the man who was willing to take the risk, and it’s a risk that’s paid off. The company is preparing a study on how many of the 150 or so ex-con employees have stayed out of prison, but Heider says he’s certain Korns’ rate of success is much better than the national average.

Mr. HEIDER: But I think our success rate altogether is far better, and, again, that has to do with support, what they receive allegedly from the penal system is guidance. But there’s no support.

SEVERSON: The support comes from one another, from people like Harry Price, in prison 10 years for robbery. He’s been out seven and is now the plant supervisor.

HARRY PRICE (Plant Supervisor, Korns Galvanizing Company): It has what we call Korns love. We’re a little rough on each other, but we won’t let someone else come in here and be rough on us.

SEVERSON: Religion is an important part of the program here, although no particular religion. Most employees attend church services and receive constant mentoring from the old-timers.

Pat Nolan firmly believes that without religion most rehab programs won’t work.

Mr. NOLAN: And the problem is we do nothing to reform the character of inmates to change their heart. They have no moral framework to decide whether something’s good or bad.

SEVERSON: Nolan is becoming a loud voice nationally for prison reform. Governor Schwarzenegger has appointed him to a strike team to fix California’s prison system. He travels extensively, speaks constantly, and spends a good deal of time lobbying Congress. He has become a force to be reckoned with. Jack Cowley said at first he was skeptical of Nolan’s motives.

Mr. COWLEY: Oh, here’s just another one of those politicians who went to prison and found the Lord, and, you know, I’ve got to put up with this. But he is the genuine deal. Yes, the genuine deal.

Mr. NOLAN: Morally we have to care about them. This is a child of God, and just as they have sinned, we’ve sinned, and if we can accept Jesus’ forgiveness, how can we deny it to them?

SEVERSON: Many of the prisoners released this year were incarcerated for nonviolent crimes like drug possession, which landed Sedrick Crochron in prison. He’s now a Korns employee.

SEDRICK CROCHRON (Employee, Korns Galvanizing Company): I had a son. I tried to take care of him the fast way and, you know, “Johnny Lawman” caught up with me.

SEVERSON: What’s changed in Sedrick’s life is that he now has a skill and someone who cares for him.

Mr. CROCHRON: They’re excellent bosses. I like Harry and Barry. They’re like the uncles I never had.

SEVERSON: Pat Nolan says there’s overwhelming evidence that Justice Fellowship does work.

Mr. NOLAN: A University of Pennsylvania study studied our graduates with a matched set of people with similar offenses. Those that graduated from our program, completed it all, had an eight percent recidivism rate.

SEVERSON: There are still wardens who are reluctant to allow such things as mentoring programs, but reformers like Jack Cowley are fighting back.

Mr. COWLEY: What we tell wardens is you’re no longer the king, as I used to be, quite frankly, behind these walls, because what goes on here affects my life outside. It affects my public safety. And what I tell wardens is, okay, you don’t want to reduce recidivism — fine. I’ll just call the local newspaper and tell them that you’re not interested in providing programs that work.

SEVERSON: Pat Nolan is convinced that his time in prison was all part of God’s plan to get him where he is today.

Mr. NOLAN: C.S. Lewis says that we’re like God’s sculptures, and it’s the chisel strokes that are so painful that he uses to make us his work of art.

SEVERSON: These days you’ll find this sculpture-in-motion lobbying Congress and anyone who will listen for a new Second Chance Act to help prisoners re-enter society.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Lucky Severson in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Today, we have a special look at the gang world of Los Angeles, a place where violent death is common and hope, scarce — but not totally absent, thanks to a dedicated, savvy priest. Lucky Severson begins his report on the street with a gang member.

LUCKY SEVERSON: He goes by the name of Angel and he is in the process of trying to undo what he has done a good part of his life. Like most gang members or “gang bangers,” in addition to his life of street crime, Angel was a graffiti artist. We look at the scribble and see scribble. Angel sees something else.

(To Angel): Angel, what is the point of this?

ANGEL: For fame. See who can write the most. The more you see that name, the more respect and fame you get among them and their peers.

SEVERSON: So when a gang member does this and it is cool, it elevates his prestige?

ANGEL: His prestige. It shows how good he is. You know, he has style. All of these matter amongst them.

SEVERSON: Angel was one of them, until prison and now this effort at redemption. His real family was messed up and drugged out. His gang family took care of him, and he took care of them. Angel was no angel.

ANGEL: Wherever you have your friends, you stick together as tight as you can.

SEVERSON: But you take other kids’ lives?

ANGEL: Well, you have to before they take yours. What are you going to do? If someone is coming to your block and is going to shoot you, what are you going to do, let them shoot you down? Let them shoot your friends? It can’t go down that way. So, it’s sad that you have to die just for a stupid street.

SEVERSON: Robert is another homeboy — local slang for kids in a gang. Except for the eight years in prison for car-jackings and robbery, the gang was the only family he knew.

ROBERT: I joined a gang for a family. I never had one when I was growing up. I joined the gang for a family. That’s it.

SEVERSON: Now they have a new gang, which is also their employer: Homeboy Industries. They call their boss “G-dog” or “Father G” — also known as Father Greg Boyle, Jesuit priest of the poorest pastorate in Los Angeles.

Father GREG BOYLE: I buried my first kid in 1988. I buried my 128th yesterday. There is a lethal absence of hope in a community like this. You get more kids planning their funerals than their futures. And what you hope to do, especially in a program like this, is to help them conjure up an image of what tomorrow will look like, because if you can’t see your future, you aren’t going to find your present very compelling. And that is a dangerous place to be.

SEVERSON: The surrounding neighborhood may not look dangerous. But of the 750 gang killings in Los Angeles over the past three years, many took place here, in broad daylight. Not a great place to grow up. And in the middle of it — Homeboy Industries, founded by Father Boyle and funded mostly by private contributions. Over the years, Homeboy has employed and found jobs for hundred of wasted gang members.

Father BOYLE: We get 1,000 folks a month. If they walk in, that’s hugely successful. It means they have taken this very important step, you know. It is like recovery, drug rehab. If you walk into a drug rehab, it doesn’t matter where you have been or how long you have been a drug addict: Welcome, this is really significant.

(To gang members): You guys taking care of business? What about school? What happened to school?

SEVERSON: And if they don’t cut it, he fires them. But those who stick around learn how to present themselves to a skeptical society, politely. And for the first time in their lives, they learn how to work. But it’s more than just work.

Father BOYLE: It is absolutely all religious. There is no kind of “Here’s the part that is spiritual, here’s the part that is God. Here is the part that speaks a spiritual message,” you know. It is far more important not to announce a message to the folks that come in here, but to become that message to the folks that come in here.

SEVERSON: Many come in, like Robert, regretting the body art they once thought was cool.

ROBERT: My first one was this, and it is gang related. Honestly, I do regret them. I wish I had none.

SEVERSON: It’s hard to get a job in a body that screams that you’re a gang banger. So Father Boyle brought in a doctor and bought a laser. There’s a waiting list to get tattoos removed. For Gloria, it’s a matter of erasing something she actually thought was fun.

GLORIA: Out on the street with my homeboys, they give me respect, I give them respect. It was just fun at the time.

SEVERSON: Gloria is not typical. Only one in 20 gang members is a girl. In this area, almost all are Latinos. Gloria’s home life was miserable. She was 16 when she joined a gang.

GLORIA: I could have lost my life a lot of times.

SEVERSON: In what kind of situations?

GLORIA: Number one, almost all of them shootings. You can’t even tell what kind of car I had. It was just full of bullet holes. It was funny at that time and it was down, what we did. I think back now, just to think I could have lost my life. My son could have lost his mom. Yeah.

Father BOYLE: It is about kids who don’t care. The kids who are shooting are kids who don’t want to kill. They want to die.

JOE: They shot me four times in the head with a .38 slug.

SEVERSON: Joe was shot after he retaliated for the drive-by killing of his five-year-old son.

JOE: I wasn’t into drugs. I was more into gangs. That was my drug. That was my addiction. It gave me a sense of power. It gave me control, respect, even though I had all those terms twisted. I didn’t know what the definition of “respect” was, except for fear. That’s what I thought it was.

SEVERSON: Withdrawing from gang life is similar to recovering from an addiction. It’s never-ending.

ANGEL: It never leaves. Because there’s still people that still know me. I still have enemies at this stage. It always follows you, you know. Anything in your life follows you.

SEVERSON: It followed fellow homeboy Miguel Gomez, who was shot and killed in June removing graffiti.

ANGEL: It is not as fun as it used to be. We are not as at ease as we used to be. Now we are more, I mean, a little bit leery.

Father BOYLE: These are human beings who deserve a chance. Not even a second chance, you know. Who gave them their first one, you know? And that is what this place stands for.

SEVERSON: Police said the shooting was an old vendetta not related to Homeboy, and so the project moves on.

Father BOYLE: It is heartache and hilarity all in the same day, you know, and you’re fully engaged in the lives of people and it is eternally interesting and it’s heart soaring as you watch people possess who they are. It couldn’t be better.

SEVERSON: There’s been a shooting just right down the street, half a block away. A half hour after our interview with Father Boyle, it was all heartache.

UNIDENTIFIED POLICE CAPTAIN: We had a homicide today and that occurred about 12:30. And what we know at the present time is that the victim does work for Homeboys Incorporated.

SEVERSON: The victim was shot several times a hundred yards from the Homeboy office, on his way to remove graffiti. His name was Arturo Casas. He was 25. For homeboys, it was another death in the family.

ROBERT: Unfortunately, the gang-banging life only leads down two roads, you know. You basically go to jail or you get buried.

SEVERSON: Arturo was the 129th gang banger Father Boyle has buried. For the time being, Father G has suspended graffiti removal. But he hasn’t suspended hope.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in south central Los Angeles.