When God Is The Warden

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Corrections officials also insist that inmates have to raise their hand to be at Lawtey and that more than 100 prisoners at the facility who wanted out of the experiment were moved to other institutions in December. Those places were quickly filled by inmates from other facilities who, like Newton, say they're looking for a more meaningful way to spend their prison time than lifting weights. The religious alternative seems to be working. Assistant warden John Hancock says Lawtey's confinement wing for inmates with discipline problems usually held close to its capacity of 28 prisoners, but now rarely has more than six at a time. "We're not forcing this change on anybody," Hancock says in response to criticism that Lawtey is a thinly veiled tool of Christian proselytism. "They choose it."

During a tightly controlled press tour of Lawtey last week, inmates told TIME that it's easier to contemplate the straight and narrow when your cellblock feels like an episode of Touched by an Angel instead of Oz. "The difference between this and my last prison, where I was mixed in with violent criminals, is heaven and hell," says Dana Chaison, 51, a convicted drug offender and Roman Catholic. "It's kind of hard to focus on your rehab when you're always watching your back." Bossard Shawn, 32, says he saw his Muslim chaplain so infrequently at his former prison that he felt adrift. Now, under the regular tutelage of local imam Zaid Malik, "I have far more knowledge of Islam and myself," says Shawn. "It's going to make a great amount of difference when I leave here in six months." Notes Lawtey senior chaplain William Wright: "You can teach a man new skills in prison, but you also have to work on his heart. I think this more holistic approach is the future."

But Howard Simon, the A.C.L.U.'S Florida executive director, argues that it is important to draw a line between prisons that make chaplains available to inmates and prisons that make faith their core corrections criterion. "We're glad the Governor wants to improve Florida's brutal prison conditions," says Simon, "but not under the condition that religious indoctrination has to be involved." A.C.L.U. lawyers are studying the extent of direct or even indirect government funding for Lawtey's religion-based activities before deciding whether to file suit against the program. Simon and other critics also complain that Bush unveiled the faith-based-prison concept last year at the same time the state was slashing more than $20 million from secular prison-rehabilitation programs.

Still, religion-based rehab programs seem to inspire a loyal following. After Ken Cooper, 66, was paroled in 1987 from a life sentence for a string of armed bank robberies, he "received a new life sentence" to minister to inmates, he says, and is now a Christian volunteer at Lawtey. "For the criminal type," says Cooper, "getting him to relate to an authority higher than himself is often the only way."