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ego and Orange County,
don’t pay jail chaplains. But
others, like San Bernardino,
Riverside, Santa Clara and
Fresno, may invest up to sev-
eral hundred thousand dol-
lars to have a few chaplains
on staff. About 150 chaplains
are paid to work in the
state’s 35 prisons.
In the L.A. County jails,
which contain approxi-
mately 17,600 inmates, Jew-
ish and Muslim chaplains re-
port a shortage of volunteers
and institutional support
from their communities,
which affects the range of
services they can provide.
Several chaplains from
Christian faiths, like the
Protestant church, say that
they have a sufficient num-
ber of volunteers.
“Certain communities
are not as well-represented,”
said Sheriff ’s Sgt. Alex Gam-
boa, who works in the office
of Religious and Volunteer
Services for the L.A. County
jails. “Eventually, somebody,
your family or your friend, is
going to come to jail and
you’re going to want the sup-
port for them.... All these
people everyone turns their
back on are the ones that
need the most help.”
Federal law protects the
right of inmates to observe
their faith. In certain cases,
like if an inmate requests a
chaplain from a minority
faith, a jail might argue
there’s no feasible way to
provide that chaplain.
“The general rule is you
got to accommodate pris-
oners’ religious practices
unless you have a really pow-
erful reason not to,” said
Luke Goodrich, vice presi-
dent of the Becket Fund for
Religious Liberty, a non-
profit based in D.C.
Some aspects of religion
and chaplaincy in jails are
not tracked by officials.
Gamboa said the county
does not know the number of
inmates by religious faith
because prisoners are con-
stantly entering and leaving
custody. The county also
does not keep a centralized
count of the total number of
inmate requests to meet
chaplains, partly because in-
mates often make requests
orally when they see chap-
lains in the halls.
Although the jail has
more than 1,000 chaplains
and spiritual volunteers, of-
ficials have no effective way
to independently monitor
when they come in because
many do so using a paper
log-in system. About 20 peo-
ple are listed as Jewish vol-
unteers, Gamboa said, but
he acknowledged many
come in “every blue moon.”
Regardless, reports that
the various faiths send to
Gamboa’s office show a high
demand for chaplaincy. The
Archdiocese of Los Angeles,
for example, has conducted
more than 20,000 individual
visits since January in both
English and Spanish lan-
guage counseling sessions.
The Muslim and Jewish
chaplains will meet with
people who show an interest
in speaking to a chaplain
from their faith.
“A lot of inmates may
have information about Is-
lam but they don’t practice
or they don’t consider them-
selves Muslim,” said Maria
Khani, a Muslim chaplain.
“That’s between them and
God. I have nothing to do
with that.”
Gamboa said that while
the jails always have chap-
lains available to meet with
inmates, they don’t always
have certain faiths on hand.
For the most part, however,
he said that the current sys-
tem works and that his office
asks chaplains to let them
know if they are not able to
meet with an inmate.
Although it would be ide-
al for the county to fund full-
time chaplains, Gamboa
said, it’s a hard argument to
make when some religions —
like the Christian faiths —
have dozens or hundreds of
volunteers. Plus, he said in-
mates’ need for spiritual
guidance seems limitless, so
even having more chaplains
might not satisfy the de-
mand.
“Half our chaplains don’t
talk about religion,” he said.
“The inmates just want to
talk about the pain and suf-
fering they’ve gone
through.”
On one visit, Erlick spent
the afternoon walking up
and down broken escalators
in Men’s Central Jail sport-
ing a purple-patterned kip-pah. She made her way in
and out of narrow cell rows
where TVs blared and in-
mates called out to her from
under bright fluorescent
lights.
Jail staff pulled inmates
out of their cells so that she
could talk to them in the hall
— discussions that lasted
anywhere from two to 20
minutes. With a smile, she
often started by gently ask-
ing how they were and if they
wanted to talk, later offering
them a prayer book with Re-
form, Conservative and Or-
thodox Jewish adaptations
that she had proudly made
herself.
During one stop, Erlick
sat on a metal bench with
two inmates from the gay
and transgender unit. One
said she had just had
surgery and Erlick offered to
recite the mi sheberach, a
prayer for healing.
“Mi sheberach avoteinu:
Avraham, Yitzhak,
v’Yaakov, Sarah, Rivka,
Rachel v’Leah...” Erlick be-
gan, while the inmate bowed
her head, listening.
Another inmate, who
said he was a Jew from Iran,
asked if Erlick could bring
him tefillin, a ritual object
worn around one’s arm dur-
ing prayer. He explained
that he had been wrapping
his arm with toilet paper.
“It keeps me in my place,with my people,” he said.
The inmate told Erlick
that their sessions make a
difference.
“It really means a lot to
me that the religious leader
of my belief wants to visit
me,” he said.
To rise above the loneli-
ness of everyday life, many
inmates seek out spirituality
any way they can. As Erlick
sat with an inmate in the hall
outside his cell, he told her
that all he tries to do is read
and stay out of people’s way
since trouble can erupt at
any time. The inmate, who is
Jewish, said he attends
Christian classes as an es-
cape.
“You do anything to get
out,” he said. “It feels very se-
cluded and isolated in there.
Anything that inspires
learning, wisdom.”
Keeping up with requests
became much more difficult,
Erlick said, after the Jewish
Federation decided not to
renew an approximately
$40,000 yearly grant. In 2016
and 2017, it had funded 50
hours of work a month for
two chaplains to visit three
facilities.
Now, Erlick said, “I’m so
massively behind you can’t
even call it behind.” Erlick
only regularly follows up
with a couple of inmates
when she’s at the jails, but
when she updated her list ofinmates at Men’s Central in
October, she had 46 people
to visit. She does not know
whether other volunteers
are visiting the same in-
mates.
Rabbi Yankee Raichik,
who receives a monthly
stipend from the Aleph In-
stitute, an Orthodox Jewish
organization, to work as a
jail chaplain, agreed that
“there’s always a backlog.”
“It’s a terrible shame,”
said Joel Kushner, who had
applied for the grant as the
director of the Hebrew
Union College-Jewish Insti-
tute of Religion’s Kalsman
Institute on Judaism and
Health and said the Federa-
tion had told him it had com-
peting priorities. The Fed-
eration did not respond to
requests for comment.
The Muslim community
has seen similar challenges
with obtaining outside sup-
port. Khani, the Muslim
chaplain who since 2008 has
driven from her home in Or-
ange County to volunteer in
the Los Angeles jails, said re-
cruiting volunteers is diffi-
cult.
Khani works with several
other volunteers who pro-
vide services at the county
jails on a weekly basis, in-
cluding a Friday prayer serv-
ice. She’s always rushing to
see inmates within a week or
so of their requests.
“I’m not super woman,”
she said. “I love my job. I love
it so much, but I need help.
And we don’t have dedicated
people to do that yet.”
On a recent visit to Twin
Towers Correctional Facil-
ity, Khani started her
rounds shortly before dawn.
She wore a black hijab and
pushed a cart with religious
materials to hand out. As
she walked, some inmates
called out “Salaam
Alaikum.”
She met with an inmate
who pulled a Quran out of a
yellow bag attached to his
wheelchair. He began telling
her that lately there had
been a lot of turmoil in the
jail, so she encouraged him
to read the Quran.
“It gives you a sense of
peace so you will not be over-
whelmed by things happen-
ing around you,” she said,
before handing him a set of
white prayer beads.
Muslim inmates have
filed complaints about their
ability to practice their faith.
A 1st Amendment com-
plaint filed by three inmates
last August against the L.A.
County Sheriff ’s Depart-
ment alleged that the jail
had prevented inmates from
participating in the Friday
Jumu’ah prayers. After be-
ing provided with a copy of
the complaint by The Times,
the Sheriff ’s Department
said that it had not yet been
officially served the lawsuit
and was unaware of its con-
tents.
Patricia Shnell, an attor-
ney from the L.A. chapter of
the Council on American-Is-
lamic Relations, which filed
the lawsuit, said that beyond
the litigation, CAIR has
been working to recruit vol-
unteers by trying to have the
topic raised at sermons in
mosques. But she assertedthat the small number of vol-
unteers doesn’t excuse the
jail from its responsibility to
accommodate.
“Even if there is a lack of
Muslim volunteers, they still
have an obligation to allow
people to practice their reli-
gions freely,” she said, hold-
ing that jail staff, for exam-
ple, could allow inmates to
lead their own services.
Some of the Christian
faiths have much larger
pools of volunteers. Frank
Mastrolonardo, a Protes-
tant chaplain and founder of
a nonprofit prison ministry,
oversees more than 600 vol-
unteers. He said most come
in multiple times a week and
that there’s no need to ac-
tively recruit.
The Catholic Church’s
archdiocese funds six full-
time chaplains and has
about 100 volunteers who
come in regularly, according
to Gonzalo De Vivero, direc-
tor of its Office of Restora-
tive Justice.
Thousands participate in
the church’s Communion
services and Masses, as well
as its jail-based rehabilita-
tion program.
But he aspires to do
more. One of his dreams, he
said, is to create a reentry
program where parishes
would adopt an inmate ev-
ery year or six months to
help them do things like rent
an apartment and find a job.
“They are paying the
price, they are paying the
consequences, but that
doesn’t mean we have to la-
bel them as dangerous, un-
wanted and unreachable,”
he said. “They are regular
people that can turn
around.”
Some religious volun-
teers’ compassion for in-
mates comes from their own
experience with incarcera-
tion.
Michael Cherry, who has
worked in the L.A. County
jails for more than seven
years as an evangelical vol-
unteer, found religion when
he was an inmate about
three decades ago. A chap-
lain had offered him some
biblical scriptures to read,
and Cherry was moved by
passages that touched on
forgiveness and account-
ability. One from Corin-
thians read, “When I was a
child, I spoke as a child, I
understood as a child, I
thought as a child; but when
I became a man, I put away
childish things.”
“I would have to grow up,
it was time to man up,”
Cherry recalled thinking.
Jesus Lopez was one of
the inmates that Cherry
counseled years later.
Lopez, who lives in Los An-
geles, was discharged from
Men’s Central in 2018 after
more than three years in the
jail.
He attended Cherry’s
weekly Bible sessions and
credits chaplains like him
with giving him hope that he
could live a better life.
“Hope of somebody car-
ing, somebody loving,” he
said. “There’s a lot of people
that don’t have that, and to
be given that of all cases in
there ... it’s a beautiful
thing.”CHAPLAIN AVIVAH Erlick visits inmates at Men’s Central Jail. The lockup has more than 1,000 chaplains and spiritual volunteers; about 20 are listed as Jewish.
Liz MoughonLos Angeles TimesSome jail chaplains in high demand
[Chaplains,from B1]
ON ONE VISIT to Men’s Central Jail, inmates were pulled out of their cells so
that Avivah Erlick could talk to them — discussions that lasted two to 20 minutes.Liz MoughonLos Angeles TimesAN INMATE at Twin Towers holds prayer beads from Maria Khani. “A lot of
inmates may have information about Islam but they don’t practice,” she says.Gary CoronadoLos Angeles Times