Discovering Community behind Bars
In August 2020, Ken Coatsworth took a 90-minute bus ride from Lakeland Correctional Facility in Coldwater, Mich., to Handlon Correctional Facility in Ionia, Mich.
“My first day there, this guy shows up at my door,” said Coatsworth with a smile, referring to James Hammett, who is seated next to him. “He was like ‘Hey, man, what’s up? Remember me?’”
While Coatsworth recognized Hammett’s face, he had forgotten his name.
“When I saw that they had posted the names of the new students in the sixth cohort of the Calvin Prison Initiative (CPI) program, and his was on it, I was blown away,” said Hammett.
Hammett, a member of CPI’s fourth cohort, said he was amazed because he had been remembering Coatsworth in his prayers every night for the past decade. “I would always go to the Lord in prayer for Ken,” said Hammett, asking that “God would bless him and help him figure out his walk.”
Coatsworth and Hammett are now both students in the CPI program—a far cry from where they were when their paths first crossed more than 12 years ago in the Jackson County Jail.
In July 2010, both Coatsworth and Hammett committed home invasions and serious assaults. While the incidents were separate and unrelated, the two men were sentenced to the same fate—20-40 years behind bars.
Hammet said this reality brought him straight to his knees. “I cried out to God, telling him, ‘I want to do something different with my life,’” said Hammett. And as he lay on the floor of a holding area of the county jail, he said, he gave his life over to God.
Soon after that, said Hammett, he was moved upstairs, where he met Coatsworth.
“Prison is a warehouse of grief. You’re struggling with the loss of freedom, family, friends, connections—struggling with the decisions you’ve made, the harm it has caused other people. So when you come into prison, there’s this loneliness that consumes your heart, and you live and wallow in this grief and misery. It becomes the way you see everything,” said Hammett. “When I came to jail, I longed to have someone to express these things to, and that started with Ken. We had a similar story and background, and we were experiencing the same emotions, leaning on each other to get through darkness.”
“He’d sit on his bunk, waiting for me to wake up so that we could read the Bible,” said Coatsworth. “My heart wasn’t there yet,” he added.
But Coatsworth said he would sit with Hammett, and seeds were planted.
Before long, the two were transferred to different facilities, with paths that looked quite different. Hammett received training for ministerial leadership through the urban ministry institute TUMI, and he sought out fellow Christians to find community. He said his path wasn’t without major bumps and tragedies, but it was clearly on an upward trajectory.
For Coatsworth, however, his journey was a “downward spiral,” he said.
After spending six months in a pit for using and selling drugs, his substance-abuse issues inside prison eventually cost him his visiting rights for a year. “I had to call my son and tell him he couldn’t come visit,” said Coatsworth. “His first response was ‘Dang, Dad, I can’t see you because you were bad?’ That cut me deep.”
Coatsworth said that led him to further abusing drugs and alcohol. He admitted he was probably trying to kill himself. “I was unhappy, miserable, hated God, believed in him but hated his people. I had a lot to drink one night and a lot of drugs and went to sleep,” recalled Coatsworth.
The next morning was February 16, 2016.
“I turned my TV on, and I was flipping through the channels, and I ended up getting stuck on TBN (Trinity Broadcasting Network). My channels wouldn’t change; up or down wasn’t working anymore; volume buttons didn’t work. I didn’t try the power button or unplugging my TV, but I truly believe that if I would have unplugged my TV, it would have stayed on,” said Coatsworth. “But it was Joel Osteen, of all people, preaching, and I was angry, and I called God every name under the sun you could think of that was derogatory and hateful. . . . I was so mad that I was sweating, and he said something about the love of God. I can’t remember exactly what it was, but it was about just how much God loves you, and it calmed my spirit—and it was the strangest thing I had ever experienced in my life because I had never felt complete rage, hate, and anger [turn] to a peace.”
Coatsworth sat back and listened to the message, he said, “And I handed my life over to Christ.”
His path changed. Coatsworth said God took away his drug and alcohol addiction, and he soon started to seek out elders in the faith inside the prison walls.
While Coatsworth and Hammett were finding pockets of community among Christians, the realities of the darkness of prison were ever-present.
“Almost everyone in prison is pitted against one another, and it’s either because it’s a power struggle—that one person is trying to show they’re stronger, or better, or smarter than the next individual—or it’s because we’ve got these different groups in here who are pitting themselves against other people; or we have the administration. So there’s this great divide, this chasm of chaos that goes on in prison. There’s no unity; there’s no community,” said Coatsworth.
But Hammett and Coatsworth said they have seen a glimpse of what could be. In 2018, Hammett applied and was accepted into the Calvin Prison Initiative program, and two years later Coatsworth transferred in as well.
“When I first got here, and I was able to meet Professor Cioffi and Kary Bosma, and Christina Haven, the love that they showed was completely different from [what I had received] from any superior in administration or officers that it blew my mind,” said Coatsworth. “I actually felt like a human being. . . . It opened up a whole new perception of what community really is. . . . We are all family; they don’t look at us as inmates or prisoners; they look at us as their brothers, and we look at them as our brothers and our sisters. Not only are they teaching us, but they tell us we are teaching them as well. Everyone shares wisdom and knowledge, and we grow together.”
“The humanity that Calvin poured into me has given me inspiration to help other people whom I would consider the least of these,” said Hammett. “Jesus had heart for what he considered the least of these—to help those marginalized and outcast in society. Calvin has given me keys to the future.”
Coatsworth and Hammett said they aren’t waiting for their sentences to end to use those keys. They are committed to unlocking a brighter vision for their peers inside prison.
“I don’t know how it started, but during COVID, Tony Kerr and Mark Urban (now two CPI graduates) were praying on the yard, and James and I joined them—and it turned into four of us preaching to eight people, then 15, then 34 on the yard because we couldn’t have services. Every night it would rotate, and we would give 15- to 20-minute sermons.”
Then Easter came around, and James and Ken decided to feed the unit. This came at a cost—the men joined with others in the CPI community and pooled together $1,000 to feed 240 inmates. They did the same the following Christmas.
“The stories we’ve heard from nonbelievers, posting notes on the microwave, saying, ‘We appreciate you; we’ve seen nothing like this before,’” were amazing, recalled Coatsworth, who said that inside prison, outside the Christian body, if you help someone else, “there’s always a cost.”
“You see in Acts 2 that the body of believers sold everything they had to make sure everyone was on equal ground. Everyone could rely on one another, and we see that in the body of Christ here at Handlon,” Coatsworth added.
A new reality of what community can look like is slowly but surely forming inside Handlon.
“It blows my mind, even to this day, three years later. It’s just amazing how much of a human being we can feel like here just in Calvin,” said Coatsworth. “It’s a drop of humanity that lets us know that we are not what people say we are, what we’ve been labeled as, and I think that’s a community. Community doesn’t talk down, doesn’t let you know what other people think of you; it lets you know what you can be. They see it in you.”
“This has been the greatest experience of my entire life. Crazily enough, it happened in prison,” said Hammett.
And their work won’t end with their sentences, they said.
“Men here are hopeless, don’t have a vision, and are constantly being talked down to. I want to help other men know they are worth something and can play an integral role in their family,” said Coatsworth, who intends to become a chaplain to prisoners after his release. “I would have never thought about coming back into prison to work. I’ve spent a majority of my life here already. But I want to come back as a chaplain and to hopefully do that through CPI. Who does that? Christians do.”
Because Jesus did. He said, “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me” (Matt. 25:35-36).
