THE PRISON CHAPLAIN
By SIR ALEXANDER PATERSON
T
O every one of His Majesty's prisons and Borstal institutions
T
O every one of His Majesty's prisons and Borstal institutions is attached as chaplain an ordained priest of the Church of England. At the larger ones he serves in a whole-time capacity; at the smaller ones he attends for a few hours each day and is other- wise usually occupied as the incumbent of an adjacent parish. His duties are manifold, and the more devoted he is the more they devour of his time and energy. Apart from his purely spiritual functions, he usually grows so absorbed in the general well-being of his men as to become a sort of welfare officer, concerned with the administration of the prison library and the organisation of all classes, lectures and cinema exhibitions, not to mention the problems connected with the future of a man on his discharge. The prison is his parish, but after a few years he will probably pass on to a very different sort of parish, where perhaps the pre-fab. but may remind him of the cells he used to visit.
On Sundays and saints' days he conducts all the services in the prison chapel. This is his opportunity to deal with his men in the mass and to speak to a congregation which probably has a greater hunger for hope and faith than he will find in many churches outside. Chaplains who have a simple and sincere gospel to preach will find they have the most responsive of all hearers. There was once a Borstal padre who preached twice every Sunday on the God of Love. A very astute and unattractive Jew from Stepney was spending his three years of training there. I should never have thought him very honest or simple or sincere, but he could not keep away from the chapel. He came to every service, and hung on- the chaplain's every word. The chaplain was unconventional in the .presentation of his message. On occasion he said things that might seem to conflict with discipline and good order. I was asked by some of my colleagues, whose opinion I valued highly, that I
should 'recommend his removal from office. But I had seen the Jew East-ender in chapel, and spoken to him in his little room, and I should have liked to say to the critics, " Why does this nasty little Jew kid whom you and I can't influence cling to this padre?" The only answer was that after a good deal of experience he was convinced that this padre had " the words of eternal life " and if he felt like that, I dared not take the responsibility of suggesting the padre's dismissal.
In a small country prison a local vicar acted as part-time chaplain. He could arrange to preach in the prison only on alternate Sundays. Now it is the right of every prison officer to have each alternate Sunday off duty, so that he may spend it with his wife and family in his quarter. On visiting the prison, I found to my surprise that officers were coming in voluntarily on Sundays to attend the prison chapel and to hear the padre talk about Christ and his faith. These are two tributes which I gladly pay to the power of the prison chaplain in the pulpit. But the main burden of his work lies in visiting men in their cells. Each landing is to him a street in his parish. He passes along the corridor from cell to cell. He does not need to knock at each door, for we have supplied him with a cell key which unlocks every cell in the prison. He enters and sits down on bed or stool or table. In the course of a week he may pay a hundred or a thousand such visits, for a landing may consist of thirty or three hundred cells.
It is an old-fashioned idea that the chaplain will at this meeting talk to the prisoner " for the good of his soul," deliver a little sermon, give a tract. The modern padre spends most of the time in the cell listening. The prisoner lives in a very small world , with him ant- heaps become positively Alpine. The chaplain listens, and he earns among the other prisoners the reputation of being " the sort of bloke you can talk to." Sometimes it is by his very silence and restraint that he makes progress in the cell. Never can I forget a very truculent adolescent in a Borstal institution on whom no form of punishment, dietary or corporal, had any effect. I brought to him one day a friend of mine who was a padre from Canada. The padre stayed for two hours in that cell with the impossible boy. Afterwards the lad worked hard, went back to his House and became a good leader or prefect. Like any amateur I wanted to know how the expert had done the trick. So I asked the lad what it was that the padre had said that had altered his attitude, and he answered simply, " It was not anything he said, but something he was going to say ; but he stopped short and said nothing."
The prison chaplain accomplishes much at his few services. He
effects even more in his daily visiting of the prison cells. But perhaps he can do still more as the representative of Christ on the prison staff. I shall always remember visiting a large overcrowded prison in the North of England and being told by the senior chief officer, an old and experienced member of the service, that the dis- cipline of the prison was much better " since you seri, that new chaplain to us, sir." I knew what he meant. Someone had breathed a new spirit of devotion, love and sacrifice into the whole place, so that prison officers and prisoners alike had risen to the challenge and the hope of the Christian Gospel. In this field as well as in the visitation of cells and the holding of services does the chaplain give his services and reap his reward. We have had some wonderful prison chaplains, and I am sure we shall have more, for the call of the prison and its custodians for spiritual refreshment never ceases and cannot be disregarded. Man will always be found to minister to the least of them.
In literature and drama, justice is rarely done to the prison chaplain. I have always regretted that Mr. Galsworthy, in his great play of justice, gave only a simple phrase to the chaplain who, when, with his colleagues, he was considering the sad case of young Felder, made just one negative contribution, "Not Church of England, I think." There may have been times when our chaplains were a little formal and stereotyped in the presentation of their message— the times when every day started in every prison with the com- pulsory attendance of every prisoner at a five-minute service in the chapel. Those were also the times when a married chaplain was compelled for the sake of his wife and children to stay for forty years or more to reap a full pension. These days will assuredly never return.
Previous page
