The ACCA will be sponsoring a timely workshop on Professional Correctional Chaplains during the ACA Summer Conference in Kansas City, Missouri in August, 2007.  The reality is that very few of our four hundred plus professional ACCA members will be able to be present in Kansas City to support the workshop by being in the audience.

This President’s Message is intended to provide some basic information regarding the workshop to all ACCA members and other interested persons who access our website.

 Chaplain Vance Drum, our ACCA Treasurer and a Chaplain with more than 30 years experience in the Texas correctional system and Art Leonardo, Executive Director of the North American Association of Wardens and Superintendents, will be the two principal presenters.  Helen Corrothers, past President of ACA, will be the moderator.  The workshop will explore the realities and myths of the professional correctional chaplain, who is often seen as “the conscience of the institution”.  While community volunteers supplement the work of the professional chaplain and even provide excellent services, it is the professional institutional chaplain who has a unique, ongoing relationship with both correctional staff and all those behind bars.  Just as licensed medical personnel address physical and mental health needs, the professional chaplain addresses the spiritual and religious needs of those under his care.  An institution without a professional chaplain is missing a person vital to the facility’s mission.

The workshop will remind and demonstrate by example to those in attendance that the professional staff chaplain is an essential part of the inmate management team who serves the spiritual needs of all inmates, regardless of their religion or lack thereof.  Chaplains are clearly instrumental in helping maintain a safe and secure environment for both inmates and staff.  Professional chaplains are also cost effective, reducing recidivism by changing lives with quality religious counseling and other forms of pastoral care.  The religious services unit, in the personage of the professional chaplain, is an essential component in the rehabilitative process.  Quite simply, volunteers are not equipped to do what the professional chaplain does.  Just as inmates are not entrusted to volunteer doctors for essential care, they should not be entrusted to volunteer chaplains for essential spiritual care.

The bottom line is: Professional Chaplains, Now and Always

Anything less is short changing our respective correction agencies and the persons incarcerated by these agencies.