Justice Dept. drops 'single-faith' prison plan after AU complaint.

The U.S. Justice Department has cancelled a proposal for "single-faith" prison programs in the wake of an Americans United complaint that the scheme was unconstitutional.

Earlier this year, the Justice Department said it was seeking prison rehabilitation programs for six federal prisons intended to "facilitate personal transformation of the participating inmates through their own spirituality and faith." The Federal Bureau of Prisons' solicitation also asked potential bidders how their approach would "foster growth" of inmates' "spiritual development."

In an April 19 letter, Americans United urged the federal government to scuttle the constitutionally flawed plan.

On Oct. 26, the Justice Department announced it was canceling the solicitation. However, a Bureau of Prisons spokesperson later insisted that the proposal has only been temporarily withdrawn for fine tuning.

AU lauded the cancellation and urged the Justice Department to come up with a proposal that does not violate church-state separation.

"Publicly funded rehabilitation programs should be open to all inmates, not just those of one particular faith," said Barry W. Lynn, Americans United executive director. "I'm frankly amazed that the Justice Department ever thought they could get away with such a patently unconstitutional scheme.

"The government," Lynn continued, "should protect the free exercise rights of inmates, but it should never try to coerce prisoners on matters of faith. The separation of church and state forbids the use of public funds for religious indoctrination or proselytism."

AU's letter argued that the solicitation for single-faith prison ministries would violate the First Amendment because it promoted religious programs over secular ones, created preferences for instruction in single-faith over multi-faith programming, appeared to be tailored to elicit a solicitation from a specific prison ministry program and contained no safeguards to ensure that government funds would not be used to support religious activity.

Americans United Senior Litigation Counsel Alex Luchenitser wrote that the federal government solicitation seemed tailored to a program offered by InnerChange, a fundamentalist Christian prison ministry program run by Prison Fellowship Ministries. A federal judge ruled earlier this year that InnerChange could not be supported by public funds because of its pervasively sectarian nature.

Traci Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons, told the Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy that the solicitation is not being dropped entirely.

The proposal, Billingsley said. "is going through revisions" and will be reissued. She would not say why the original proposal was withdrawn.