God Loves Inmates

I’m a correctional officer.  I work with male offenders in a medium-security correctional institution and have met some very shady characters.  I’ve dealt with drug cartel leaders, murderers, terrorists (though only minor ones), drug dealers, child molesters, and white supremacists, among others.  I’ve stopped reading their files because seeing the particular crimes for which they are incarcerated can make the bile rise up and the rational mind float away.  And in the nearly three years I’ve done this work, I have come up with one troubling conclusion: God loves them just as much as He loves me.

            On the one hand, I see them up to their worst: gambling, running with gangs, assaulting one another, lying through their teeth, and generally taking everything they can con from a staff member.  On the other, I’ve seen them be honest, patient, gracious, loyal, and even grateful. 

            Inmates, regardless of what they have done, are still fundamentally human and have access to the grace that Jesus Christ offers.  They have done vile things that both separate them from God and that spread blood and horror on the Earth.  In the end, though, are we non-inmates fundamentally different?  We don’t molest children, but non-inmates can also be jealous, adulterous, and selfish.  We, too, find ourselves light-years from the perfections and glories of God.  The fact that we’re inches or even yards closer than some other person won’t matter much if we don’t get closer to Him. 

            Each of us needs God’s love, and each of us has been given the freedom to decide what we want: freedom and life eternal, or captivity and eternal death.  Each of us can embrace the work of God (“For this is my work and my glory, to bring to pass the exaltation and eternal life of man”) or we can wander in strange places and do the works of the devil, and reap the rewards thereof.  In other words, we can love all men, including inmates, or we can damn ourselves with our own hate. 

            True love, the love of God, strengthens and ennobles men.  True love may not be gentle if gentleness would tempt to predation, as it would in prison.  True love may even be “tough love” if that is what wisdom calls for.  True love is acting as the Savior did, serving wholeheartedly and teaching unabashedly, for only when we love like our Savior can we truly say we love at all. 

            So when I’m giving inmates their meals, or their laundry, or listening in consternation as they ask the same question for the hundredth time, I have to love them.  God, after all, gives us our food, our clothes, and listens as we ask the same question for the hundredth time.  So let’s love one another, for if God loves inmates, then we should too.