From inmate to leadership

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Thursday, August 28th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: From prison inmate to second-in-command at the federal Bureau of Prisons.

Deputy Director Josh Smith has made history as the first former inmate hired by the agency that oversees 122 federal prisons nationwide. Before taking on that role, he led a reentry nonprofit for inmates and built a multimillion-dollar construction company that hired ex-convicts.

BROWN: WORLD’s Addie Offereins interviewed Smith last month to hear how his years in prison ministry and his own time behind bars are shaping his vision for reform.

Smith says his early life experiences shaped his calling. By the time he was 16, he’d racked up 10 felony convictions.

JOSH SMITH: My father left my mother early on, and so my mother was that single mother working to survive. I was in trouble as a young kid, very early, without that fatherhood example. Then fast forward. I was a young man on the street, 16 years old, getting out, doing all kinds of things.

That lifestyle led to charges of cocaine and marijuana trafficking. And that landed Smith behind bars for five years in federal prison. He had just turned 21.

In prison, Smith met some highly educated older prisoners who mentored him. He started to read and challenged himself to become an avid learner.

SMITH: When I went into prison, I wasn't that way. I didn't read many books. I didn't try to study anything. I began to read books on real estate. I began to read books on the stock market and other things, including flying an airplane.

REICHARD: But even more importantly, Smith says he read God’s Word and found redemption in Christ.

SMITH: My conversion experience happened while I was in prison when I surrendered my life to the Lord. It was those lessons and those principles that I've learned throughout Scripture, through my relationship with God, and frankly, through the many volunteers coming in to help support and teach that is what helped me transition through prison a better person, someone who had a moral compass, somebody who looked to the Word of God and and to God for what that standard should be in my life.

But that didn’t make life outside prison any easier. Smith slammed into the harsh realities after his release. He and his wife couldn’t live in government housing because he was a felon, and he had to beg for his first job making 6 dollars an hour.

But all that reading—and a lot of hard work—eventually paid off.

SMITH: Fast forward, I am blessed by God to be extremely wealthy mostly because of real estate. I also achieved great success in business, but that's not because I'm just some smarter-than-average person. It's because I saw those challenges, and I read and I took on those challenges.

BROWN: He also jumped into prison ministry, working with corrections leaders across the country. President Donald Trump pardoned Smith during his first term.

Now, he’s excited to put all his experiences to work as second-in-command at the nation’s top corrections agency. He says the Bureau of Prisons is gearing up to make some big changes.

SMITH: One of those things are partnerships with our nonprofits and agencies throughout the country. You know, we just met with one of the largest prison ministry nonprofits that has been trying to work with this agency for a lot of years.

Prison Fellowship is one of the ministries that’s been working for years to get more of its programming into federal prisons.

HEATHER RICE-MINUS: Things like our Prison Fellowship Academy, which lasts over a year, about 500 hours worth of curriculum.

REICHARD: Heather Rice-Minus is the president and CEO of Prison Fellowship. The organization has decades of experience working in state prisons.

RICE-MINUS: We actually ask for people to live together in a unit. So it functions very much like a faith-based dorm. You don't have to be a Christian to be part of the program, but we are teaching from a Christian worldview.

During his first term, President Trump signed the bipartisan First Step Act, a prison reform bill that let certain federal inmates earn time off their sentences if they completed rehabilitation programs. But Rice-Minus told WORLD the outside agency hired to vet those programs repeatedly rejected Prison Fellowship’s Christian programming.

RICE-MINUS: The only programs that have been deemed evidence-based under the First Step Act by the BOP seem to be their internal programs, programs that they run themselves. And so I'm really excited about the new leadership there. I think that it's really a new day.

BROWN: Deputy Director Smith says the agency is committed to getting out of the way so nonprofits can do what they do best.

SMITH: This is work that's already being done all across the country. Great work whose results speak for themselves. I think really, my job in this role is to just say, “You’re welcome here.” That's it. And then make sure that we move through any bureaucratic obstacles that are going to stand in the way of these ministries operating the way that they should.

He also hopes to encourage churches to play a larger role in the re-entry process.

SMITH: We're talking about ways, through the White House faith office and others, of how we can really look at some major partnerships where churches might say, Hey, we're gonna sponsor this prison in a unique way.

While some prisoners have committed crimes that require them to be separated from society for the rest of their lives, most will return to their former homes. The Government Accountability Office says about 45 percent of people released from federal prison will be rearrested.

That’s why Smith says the work of reintegrating prisoners into society should not begin when they leave prison.

SMITH: If somebody's gonna see society again one day, and in our system, it's about 97% that will, then we need to begin them on programs day one. It's my hope and goal, frankly, to help Congress and our general society see the importance of the role of corrections in our society. It's not enough to just say, Hey, we're locking them up.

REICHARD: Smith says his Biblical beliefs have shaped how he understands the purpose of the prison system.

SMITH: I think that the Scriptures are very clear on discipline and the reason for that. It even talks about how we cast those away from us in the church in hopes to restore them. I think the Bible is the perfect picture that explains how restoration and accountability both happen.

If you’d like to read more from Addie’s interview with Deputy Director Smith you can find a longer version in the September issue of WORLD Magazine.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.