December 13, 2007 | Read Time: 2 minutes
The State of Iowa violated the Constitution by granting aid to an evangelical Christian rehabilitation program at a state prison, a federal appeals court ruled last week.
The ruling mostly affirmed a lower court’s view, but the appeals panel said the lower court had gone too far in directing the Christian group that runs the prison program to repay the roughly $1.5-million in state money it received, starting at the end of 1999.
The case is the latest in a battle over government support for sectarian organizations. The Bush administration has been pushing to allow religious groups greater access to social-services grants, but courts across the country have repeatedly cautioned that mixing too much religion into programs violates the First Amendment’s prohibition against the government’s promotion of religion.
Legal Challenges
The court challenge began in 2003, when Americans United for Separation of Church and State, in Washington, sued the State of Iowa and Prison Fellowship Ministries, in Lansdowne, Va., to protest grants to InnerChange Freedom Initiative, a subsidiary of Prison Fellowship that runs an evangelical prison ministry to rehabilitate inmates at prisons in Iowa and five other states.
A U.S. district court ruled last year that InnerChange’s program in a prison near Des Moines was unconstitutional because of its explicit reliance on Christian teachings and because it was paid for by the state Department of Corrections. The ruling also said that prisoners who joined the program were granted special privileges not available to other inmates, such as access to computers, and that the prison did not offer a secular alternative to the program.
The court ordered the Iowa corrections department to end the program, and ordered InnerChange to give back the $1.5-million the group had received for it.
Prison Fellowship and InnerChange appealed the decision.
A three-judge panel of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals said in its decision last week that the lower court was correct in ruling that the InnerChange program violated provisions of both the First Amendment and the Iowa constitution. But the appeals court clarified that the lower court’s banning of the program would apply only if it continued to operate using government aid.
The appeals court also said the lower court had erred in ordering InnerChange and Prison Fellowship to reimburse the state, saying the lower court did not take into consideration that state officials considered the program beneficial and had acted in good faith in giving money to it.
The Christian groups, however, will have to repay the state money it received after the June 2006 lower-court ruling. Mark Earley, Prison Fellowship’s president, said the money — about $160,000 — was put in escrow and will be returned immediately. He said the Iowa program has been operating without government money since June of this year, and will continue to do so. He said InnerChange’s eight other programs also operate entirely with private money.
Prison Fellowship is still deciding whether to appeal, Mr. Earley said.
