“I was naked, and you gave me clothing. I was sick, and you cared for me. I was in prison, you visited me.” Matthew 25:36.
With those few words hanging on its wall, Jail Ministry tells a lot about its mission.
“We wanted to be a jail ministry available to everybody in the jail and serve the need of the inmate population,” said Bill Cuddy, founder of Jail Ministry. Cuddy was a catholic priest until 1995. Since the early 1970s, he has been part of the Catholic Worker movement working with those, like the poor and imprisoned, who live on society’s margins. In 1974, Cuddy launched the Jail Ministry.
Today, the Ministry is a watchdog for inmates, a communication service between them and the outside world and, of course, a source of visitors from among its 70-plus volunteers.
Until 2009, Onondaga County partly funded the ministry with $120,000 from the county budget. But the county cut the funding last year. Now, the Jail Ministry counts on private donations and on Catholic Charities.
The county’s money had gone to help those charged with minor offenses make bail to stay out of jail until their cases were heard in court, according to Bill Cawley, the coordinator and spiritual minister at the county Justice Center. Bail had to be $500 or lower. The goal was to help lower the inmate population. Now, that number is growing again, says Cawley.
“The population in the jail is about 50 more since they took away the funding for that. We are going to start again on a small basis with our own money,” said Cawley.
About 40 volunteers serve as visitors to inmates in the jail. They help inmates from getting a Bible to contacting their attorneys. Others just need to talk, Cawley said. “It is the residents in jail that decide what the visitors will do with them,” he said.
Private donations are Jail Ministry’s biggest source of money, officials said. Catholic Charities, for example, gives Jail Ministry $15,000 for a space at the Justice Center where inmates’ children can stay and be taken care of while their parents are visiting.
Another service is a call center to help the inmates communicate with their families or attorneys. At Jail Ministry’s headquarters in the 208 block of Slocum Avenue, volunteers get more than a hundred calls a day from inmates at the Justice Center, ministry workers say.
“Without us they don’t have access to absolutely nothing. They’d have no way to contact nobody,” Dave Burton, one of the volunteers, said.
If a case of police or human rights abuses is reported to a volunteer, Jail Ministry contacts the New York Civil Liberties Union in Syracuse. “Their role is essential because without their ability to listen, there would be a lot more tensions in the jail. In some way they are a safety valve,” Barrie Gewanter, director of the local ACLU chapter.
For his part, Jail Ministry founder Bill Cuddy is now 74 and semi-retired. Since last June, Cuddy works part-time with the ministry. He has cut his visiting schedule to four days a week. He goes to listen to the inmates, Cuddy said, and collect their personal requests.
He bemoans the budget cuts’ effect on the ministry and those it serves. “Inmates are people who have no political power in our society,” said Cuddy, “so it is to easy to cut.”
(Marie Claudet is a graduate student in broadcast and digital journalism.)
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