Category Archives: Race and race relations

Pastor Ken Barbour mentors the men enrolled in Kingdom Life Ministries. A former drug abuser himself, he has worked in jails for 13 years.”Some of them have just given up,” he says. “We help them believe they can achieve.” Photo credit: Style Weekly, Scott Elmquist.

by James A. Bacon

In my previous post replicating an article published in Style Weekly, I put a human face on the ongoing battle to reduce recidivism, save taxpayer dollars and turn criminals into productive, contributing members of society. It is so easy for policy wonks like me to dwell in the abstract realm of tables, graphs and position papers. That article reminds us that we are talking about real flesh-and-blood people.

Karl Green, the former drug addict and street enforcer profiled in the article, grew up in Wickham Court, one of Richmond’s more notorious housing projects. He described to me how he had to fight to survive from a very tender age. Literally, fight to survive. When he was seven or eight years old, older kids would snatch him up along with other children and make them fight little kids from other neighborhoods. The older guys would lay bets on who would emerge the winner. Green learned early on that only the strong — and the canny — survive.

For a man who has led a thuggish life, Green has a keen native intelligence. He actually made it through 11th grade and maintained a B average, he says. In prison, he became an avid reader of thrillers by Robert Ludlum, Dean Koontz and others. He has a natural gift for story telling and a knack for the vivid metaphor. But the life of the street — the drugs, the women, the partying, the violence, the macho posturing and in his case, the challenge of psychologically manipulating those around him — proved too powerful an allure. As he is the first to admit, he made bad choices. He dropped out of high school, became addicted to drugs and, except for a few years early on, never had a steady job. He had few possessions and rarely had his own place to live. He made money by selling drugs, robbing stores and beating up people.

How does a man like Green turn his life around? Getting old is part of the story. The drugs and violence wore him down. He bears scars on his arm from being stabbed on one occasion and sliced with a broken jar on another. He had a toe amputated from a gunshot wound. (His life is an amazing story; one day I hope to tell it.) At 49 he got tired of it all. He realized how empty and directionless his life was. That’s where Kingdom Life Ministries (KLM), a faith-based ministry operating in the Richmond City Jail, came in. While respectable society fears and ostracizes men like Green, KLM preached that God forgives all men, and that all men are equal in his sight. KLM provides structure, discipline and a peer-based support network as an alternative to the street, and it provides convicts with an avenue to achieve respect in the community as “men of God.”

As long-time readers know, I am an atheist. But I am not one of those atheists who is hostile to religion and wants to see it expunged from the public sphere. Religion can be a powerful force for good. For men like Karl Green, Christianity  can fill the void with purpose and meaning. I may be an atheist, but I marvel at the power of faith-based ministries, be they Christian, Muslim or any other, because I’m interested in what works. And there is little question that some of these programs work. The trick is developing metrics that allow us to distinguish between the successes, the duds and the also-rans. And that’s another reason I like KLM — the organization keeps careful track of what happens to alumni from its program. All programs that aim to rehabilitate need to do the same.

The Commonwealth of Virginia spends $1 billion a year on the state corrections system, and local governments probably spend an equal amount. For too long, jails and prisons have been revolving doors, as inmates go in and out, in and out. Lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key does do one thing: It keeps criminals off the street. But it’s also incredibly expensive, and the system has done too little to equip inmates with the skills to enter productive society, which makes it doubly expensive.

Convinced that it has a winning formula, KLM is gearing up for expansion. Its transition house in north Richmond has room for only nine men. Many, many participants of KLM’s prison program have to be turned away. The organization has set a goal of setting up 15 or so houses around the state. The beauty of its  “business model” is that it costs so little. KLM rents a house for eight or nine men. The men are required to find a job within a month or two and contribute $300 a month to cover food and rent. There is an initial start-up cost for rental deposit, utilities and furnishing the house but each house is largely self-sustaining.

Supporting a mostly volunteer organization like KLM is not something that government does well. But it’s something the community does do well. I urge you to join me in supporting KLM financially. Here is KLM’s Facebook page. If you are so inclined, mail a check to:

Kingdom Life Ministry, Inc.
P.O. Box 71059
Richmond, Virginia  23255

Karl Green,a former heroin addict and street enforcer in Richmond’s inner city has found a new life. Photo credit: Scott Elmquist, Style Weekly.

From the toughest tier at the city jail to new jobs and a fresh start, Kingdom Life Ministries gives inmates a second chance.

by James A. Bacon

Karl Green recalls committing his last act of violence as if it were yesterday. Three years ago he was serving time in the Richmond City Jail. A veteran of Virginia’s correctional system, he had a simple survival strategy: Don’t take nothing off nobody. “I was like a beast in the jungle,” Green says. “I had to become wild to survive.”

When he wanted to watch something on TV, he changed the channel. If someone didn’t like it, he threw the TV on the floor. He used the phone whenever he wanted. If someone objected, he yanked the phone out of the wall. Kindergarten rules don’t apply in jail, he says: “There are wolves snapping at you!”

Prison authorities had stuck Green in a small, high-security tier for beating up a man in a poker game. The street enforcer, now 52, quickly established his dominance over the younger men; they called him “uncle,” a term of respect given to older inmates. Then a new guy showed up. This dude was big and strong, and he acted like he ran the show. Picking fights, he intimidated the younger guys. “He thinks he’s tough,” Green told himself. “I’ll show him who the real five-star general is.”

One day the new guy was watching television. Green turned the knob to a different channel.

“He said, ‘Man, what you doing?’ I said, ‘Nigger, I don’t want to look at that.’”

He changed the channel. Green changed it back. “I said, ‘I know you’re a talker now. We don’t have to do the dance with the TV. I’m challenging you. I’m going to beat your ass to submission.’”

Half a lifetime of heroin addiction had sapped some of Green’s natural strength, but he still had quick hands and lots of street-fighting experience. After some more posturing and trash-talking, the two men grappled. The younger man tried to grab him in a bear hug. Green hit him with an upper cut and again in the cheek. He slammed his head into the prison bars and, as the fight rolled around the tier, into the commode.

“He started crying, started pleading to the little dudes to pull me off him. I was stomping him on the back. He rolled under the bed. ‘Uncle, I don’t want no more. You’re the best.’”

One of the younger men in the cell asked Green to stop. And he did. He sat down on a table. “I started to cool off,” Green says. “The blood-red veil came off from my eyes like a curtain lifting.”

That night he lay in his bed. “I prayed that Jesus would come into my life and I would never have to do another violent act,” he says. He was getting bone-tired of dealing drugs, beating people up, floating from place to place and having few true friends. He stayed up that night reading the Bible. The next morning, the guards said, “Pack your bags.” They were moving him to a different tier, the so-called McCovery tier.

The McCovery tier was a section of the jail where outsiders put on self-improvement programs, including Narcotics Anonymous, anger management, Bible study and preparing for life on the outside. Green fell into a circle of men involved in a program that later would be called Kingdom Life Ministries.

“I got serious about reading the Bible,” he says. “The more I did, the more I saw my life becoming free, clear, with more promise, more hope and more purpose.” He says he started shedding his aggressive behavior “like a snakeskin.”

After a while, the authorities moved Green to the state prison system. He missed the fellowship of the inmates on the McCovery tier, and worried what would happen when he was released. If he moved in with family or friends, as he’d done before, Green feared he would drift back to the streets. He wanted to reconnect with the men on the program tier. As luck would have it, when his sentence was up, Kingdom Life Ministries had an empty slot at its transition house near Virginia Union University.

Moving in, Green committed to remain there a year and promised to live by the strict house rules: no drugs, no alcohol, no women. He studied the Bible and went to church. He found a job, went to work every day and paid his share of the rent. After his year was up, he found his own place.

Does Green ever fear he’ll slip back into his old ways? “That doesn’t even cross my mind. I won’t go back,” he says. “I’m three years clean, and I’m not going to give that up. I want to stay in God’s grace until he calls me home.” Continue reading.

This article was first published in Style Weekly. Click here to see the original layout with all of Scott Elmquist’s great photography.