Jesus Is in the Big House

A McDonald's near 85th Street perches atop a small hill parallel to U.S. Highway 71. To the east, a highway roils with lunchtime traffic. To the west, the hillside descends into a sprawling mass of industrial complexes hemmed in by single-family houses. Pulling away from the drive-through with a paper bag in his lap, a 53-year-old man peers over the steering wheel of his silver Grand Prix, surveying the land beneath him.

It's territory he used to rule.

Beneath his shirt are two scars, which look like large mosquito bites, earned twenty years ago when he was shot twice by a sales clerk after botching a diamond-store stickup.

The stereo pumps the crisp guitar notes and clarion lyrics of a Christian rock band. The man drives down from the hillside, heading back toward the John Deere plant. He pulls inside the chain-link and barbed-wire fence without flinching. He mentions that it is cold today. For a man who has spent more than half of his life behind bars, this fact holds significance: He's been in and out of prison so many times, he remembers only the weather -- and not the specific dates -- when he was released.

His name is Mike Smith. But names are not important. His cellmates called him "brother." He is a servant of the Lord.

In another life, he was a bully. He grew up six blocks east of Prospect Avenue, ripping off coin machines at neighborhood carwashes. In high school, he hung out in the Prospect pool halls, bought booze from liquor stores around Swope Park, and sneaked into clubs -- such as the Lakeside Ballroom in Wyandotte County or Inferno on 35th Street -- drinking and partying and picking fights until 2 a.m. At nineteen, Smith earned his first assault charge for pummeling another teen at a Johnson County Pizza Hut. Facing a prison sentence, the young offender had the option of joining the Army instead and shipped out to Virginia. He went AWOL twice, eventually stealing a car and returning to Kansas City.

From there, Smith made an unglamorous tour of the nation's prison system. He was busted for stealing cars, robbing supermarkets and shooting at a police officer during an air-supported high-speed chase that crossed the state line. He was stabbed twice during a prison riot in El Reno, Oklahoma. Warehoused with some of society's worst criminal minds, Smith spent his downtime fine-tuning his scams with other convicts.

On probation in 1989, he fathered a child with a woman he'd married from the confines of prison five years earlier. But he was free for less than two years before crashing his Cadillac while on a drug binge and earning an arrest for drug and weapon possession. By the mid-'90s, Smith had accumulated so many concurrent sentences that he was unsure of his next release date. With nothing left to lose, he started dealing meth and pot to fellow inmates. After authorities caught him dealing inside Lansing Correctional Facility, the state transferred him to El Dorado Correctional Facility, a supermaximum security prison, for 24-hour lockdown. Smith lived in a windowless concrete cell. Once a day for an hour, he exercised in a fenced-in cage the size of a dog run.

"I had absolutely no faith that anyone but me was going to take care of me," Smith says. "I lived my life then for myself."

He found God in 1996. He picked up the Book of Revelations at a court hearing, and the message -- that his personal hell might chase him from his cramped cell into the afterlife -- resonated.

And in March 1998, Smith heard about a new idea percolating at the Department of Corrections. An evangelical Christian group called InnerChange Freedom Initiative wanted to start a rehabilitation community at Winfield Correctional Facility, a minimum-security prison 40 miles southeast of Wichita. At Winfield, inmates would live in military-style barracks. There wouldn't even be a gate to keep them on the grounds, just a boundary at the edge of the field and an institutionalized trust that no man would cross it.

For Smith, the decision to join the InnerChange Freedom Initiative wasn't hard.

Six years later, in the John Deere parking lot, Smith kills the engine and bows his head, giving thanks for his Extra Value Meal No. 3.

Surrounded by chain-link fencing and concertina wire, the 70-acre campus of Ellsworth Correctional Facility resembles a community college. Concrete paths crisscross snow-covered quads, and wooden planters hedge the entrances to dormlike buildings. At night, floodlights illuminate the campus. Halfway across Kansas, a few miles south of Interstate 70, it is considered a showcase prison, a model for how the Kansas Department of Corrections wants things built and run.

In the general prison population, men sleep in cluttered cells stacked two-stories high in six round "pods" arranged around a central control station. When they wake, they shuffle across concrete floors to common areas, gathering in clusters to play dominoes and checkers, slamming their pieces on tabletops to emphasize their points. The air smells of disinfectant. Bolted TVs flicker absently in the corners of the room. Starting at a loud hum, the decibel level increases throughout the day as personal clear-plastic TVs and clear-plastic radios mix with catcalls to other convicts, visitors and guards.