Parolee shows power of faith

The Lake County sheriff's office was a revival tent Tuesday for a demonstration on how the power of faith can transform men and institutions.

The focus was Eugene Tanniehill, who in 1956 beat a man to death with a lead pipe while robbing him of $1.63 in Grant Parrish, La. He was sentenced to life plus 25 years at Angola State Penitentiary -- the nation's most violent penal institution at the time.

Nearly five decades later, Tanniehill is free and ready to become a youth minister in New York City. Angola is a peaceful model for correctional facilities with a four-year theological seminary inside its walls.

The reason for the reformations, officials said, is the introduction of God into the moral emptiness that was Tanniehill and Angola.

"I was worse than bad, but it took that to bring me from where I was," said Tanniehill, 73, who became a born-again Christian in 1963 and studied for the ministry.

Faith also helped Louisiana officials comply with a 1972 court order to clean up Angola. Education and faith-based counseling are so common warden Burl Cain boasts 75 percent of inmates refer to themselves as Christians.

The approach has caught the attention of Lake County Sheriff Mark Curran, Circuit Judge John Phillips and other officials who visited Angola this spring and met Tanniehill and Cain.

"There is no question that the faith-based programs work; they are statistically successful," Phillips said. "They create a safer environment inside the prisons and create better individuals who will ultimately be released."

Curran said several churches and church-based groups work with his office to mentor people coming out of the jail.

"We probably have a dozen or more churches and groups who want to come in with the idea of giving these guys a second chance," he said. "They fund these programs themselves, and they are concerned about creating a safer community and better citizens."

Redirecting inmates is important, Curran said, because more than 95 percent at any given time will ultimately be released.

"We here in Illinois could learn a lot from what they are doing in Angola," he said. "We need to stop treating prisoners like caged individuals and start concentrating on rehabilitation."

At Angola, officials solicited private donations to build four chapels since 1995. Prisoners to operate a radio station and publish a magazine.

More than 100 Angola inmates are enrolled at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary branch, Curran said. More than 400 have received degrees in ministry in the past 10 years.

Key to the changes at Angola and in himself, Tanniehill said, was people from outside the prison coming in to help. Ministers of all major faiths have access and several church-based groups provide counseling and assistance to inmates as they prepare to re-enter society.

"The different people who tried to make it a better place and embraced the conditions showed us the way," he said. "Any person who calls himself a Christian has an obligation to the outcast."

Tanniehill was known as the "Bishop of Angola" by providing spiritual guidance for 5,100 inmates. He said he found real peace in religion, and worked piously to spread it among his peers.

"A transgressor should not be allowed to leave the gates of prison until he has been fully reformed," he said. "And it is only through God and his love that any of us can be reformed."

His sentence was commuted last week by Gov. Kathleen Blanco. Being free for the first time since Dwight Eisenhower was president is "more than a dream, than reality right now," he said.

He is looking forward to his new assignment with the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir.

"I want it to be said that I helped somebody," Tanniehill said.

Curran said he and other officials plan a second trip to Angola to study integration of prisoners and faith.

"We have to take a leadership role in this area," he said. "We have to break the cycle of people returning to prison again and again, and we have to use whatever means we have to change people's lives."