Kevin P. Casey
Gary Friedman, chairman of Jewish Prisoner Services International.
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Jewish chaplain Gary Friedman wasn't surprised when he learned that incarcerated neo-Nazi gang members were claiming to be Jews at the Clallam Bay Corrections Center on the Olympic Peninsula. In fact, the chairman of the Seattle-based Jewish Prisoner Services International had been expecting the news. Nationwide, "There is this amazing phenomenon of non-Jews claiming to be Jewish," says Friedman.
Across the country, prisoners of every ethnicity, faith, and political viewpoint, including neo-Nazis, latch onto Judaism for a variety of reasons. Of the 120 prisoners in this state who are granted a kosher diet, only a dozen are Jewish, Friedman says. Seattle Weekly's interviews with Washington prisoners who have declared themselves Jewish and are receiving kosher food have yet to yield an actual Jew. Interviews with these prisoners and prison officials reveal a host of reasons for the fakery. Some like the prison kosher diet better than regular institutional chow—one prisoner says it tastes better, another claims it's more nutritious, and a third says it helped him lose weight. Others use the opportunity to write to Jewish organizations asking for money. "All us Jews are rich, right? We get deposit slips for inmate accounts!" says Friedman.
Some really want to convert to Orthodox Judaism—even though that is next to impossible from within prison. Prison gangs other than neo-Nazis have used Judaism as a cover for criminal activity, according to Washington prison officials. Friedman believes one prison manipulator was trying to receive conjugal visiting rights based on his interpretation of Jewish law.
Then there are the prisoners who are just exercising their religious rights in a place where there is very little freedom. "Some are trying to assert some control over their lives," says Friedman. Several prisoners told Seattle Weekly they were just interested in checking out Judaism, so they did the necessary paperwork and haven't done much else since.
In Washington, as in most states, a prisoner fills out a form declaring his or her religion, and the state accepts that declaration at face value. It doesn't matter if a prisoner was born a Baptist and has been a known member of a white supremacist organization for decades. If the prisoner now claims to be an Orthodox Jew, in the eyes of the state Department of Corrections, he is now an Orthodox Jew. He can get kosher meals and go to Shabbat services every Friday evening inside the prison. "It's insulting," says Friedman. Judaism, unlike Christianity, does not encourage conversion. In fact, it's very difficult to convert to Orthodox Judaism. It takes time and careful review by a local rabbinical board. One even must live within walking distance of an Orthodox temple, to experience life in the Jewish community, according to Friedman.
While the neo-Nazis' ruse galls Friedman, he is more concerned about the behavior of one of the state's most notorious murderers, Roland Pitre Jr., who was born Catholic, has never undergone formal conversion to Judaism, but is leading the Jewish services at Clallam Bay. "He is playing rabbi!" says Friedman.
So how did faith get so topsy-turvy in Washington's state prisons? Can or should anything be done about it?
The Washington State Reformatory at
Monroe.
Prisoners fought to ensure their right to religious freedom. In the 1960s, inmate devotees of the Nation of Islam, the African-American Islamic sect whose most famous adherents have been Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, won the first significant cases concerning religious freedom in prisons, according to Paul Wright, the editor of Prison Legal News. "The prisons have always been supportive of Christianity, but not of minority religions," says Wright. Since the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to freedom of religion, contemporary courts have been very protective of prisoners' constitutional rights to worship freely. The most recent and significant in this long line of court cases was 2005's Cutter v. Wilkinson, in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a federal law called the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. Under the act, prisons must accommodate religious practices by all faiths and cannot restrict religion unless there is a "compelling governmental interest" to do so. The Cutter decision affirmed what has been official policy for many years in Washington prisons.
Even Wright, who is a harsh critic of the Department of Corrections, says Washington is more progressive on religious issues than other states. Paul Rogers, president of the American Correctional Chaplain Association, echoes that evaluation: "The state of Washington Department of Corrections is a national leader."
Chaplain Art Morlin has been working at Clallam Bay for 36 years. He is a Protestant minister of the Assembly of God, and when he began ministering to prisoners, there were just three recognized religious groups: Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Native American. Over time, as religious liberty took hold in prisons and American society diversified, Morlin saw more and more religions. The Corrections Department's current Handbook of Religious Beliefs and Practices lists 26 recognized religions, including Bahai, four kinds of paganism (Asatru, Astara, Odinist, and Wicca), Rastafarian, International Society of Krishna Consciousness, three types of Islam (Muslim, Nation of Islam, and Moorish Science Temple of America), Hindu, and Sikh. "As the population has grown, so has the religious preference," says Morlin. "It takes time to know what people want and what they do. I saw it grow little by little." Of 887 inmates at Clallam Bay, about 400 participate in some kind of religious service on a weekly basis, says Morlin.
