Arthur's Story

post-launch and what made it really significant is that it was intensive and extensive. We spent five days a week for almost four months with these 12 to 15 men and that's certainly a solid amount. of time to challenge and change people's thought patterns, we had 60 volunteers, which was notable because it alone sets this program apart, it was not run by doctors and professionals doing a job, these people cared about prisoners and that in itself is transformative, that is Rehabilitation and on top of that, when the prisoner was released, we provided them with a place to live, we got them a job they could afford and we provided them with a mentor, a foreign Catholic priest who was a chaplain in this prison for 30 years.

Father John Brosnan many years ago I made a famous statement now as a criminologist who studied reintegration is my forte I know a lot about this he more or less summed it up in these few sentences that I am about to share he said that someone who gets out of prison needs three things essentially They need a decent place to live at least equivalent to being in prison. I have a friend who is 53 years old and has spent 36 years locked up and the other day he told me when I came out the last time they took Arthur.

They took me to a place in the back of the house, it had windows, there was no glass in the windows and they expected me to live in that place. The second thing that someone coming out of prison needs is a job that he can do, not just any job. A lot of these people like my friend, he's never filed a tax return in his life, the reason he's never had a job, he actually needs to learn how to work, so you can't just put him on a nine to five. five days a week. and he says, well, this is how you do it, you have to find a suitable job that fits their personality and you need to gradually bring them closer so that they need a job, they need to be productively busy and the third thing he said what they need is a friend and then he qualified that and said and friendship is the hardest thing to provide and he was absolutely right when we ran that lives in transition program, we gave every graduate those three things and I always knew that the weak link in that chain was the friend. because a mentor, a good man was not enough to deal with the needs of this prisoner, we say you need to know a tribe to raise a child, a community, that's what you need a community and I think that's where unfortunately the system falls because it is one thing to have programs and provide them with work and even a place to live, but if you do not provide the community with how they intended to function, they need friendship, they need support, they need to belong and to someone. you have to provide that that's the challenge, that's what was so transformative about the show that we told just one little anecdote to illustrate that it was a famous prisoner called Peter Gibb.

Peter Gibb escaped from Melbourne Assessment Prison with a lit gel. It is a long

story

. he was on the run with another inmate, he was finally arrested and I met him in Barwon prison where we had lives in transition, he wanted to do our program and the officer who came and said to me, but you don't want it, and I told him why. oh well that's pretty cool, the notorious Crim has been a Crim all his life and I said no, on the contrary, I would be honored if he would like to join our program, so I went and talked to Peter and realized that it was genuine and that it was Well, you couldn't keep it quiet.

He had a thousand questions. A very intelligent man, not a polite, formally educated man, like many prisoners I have met over the years, and one day he came up to me at the end of the session and said Arthur, that old man who spoke today, apparently he came from I bless Geelong for making this presentation. I said yes and then he said how much did you pay him and I told him I didn't pay him anything. He said really. He said well I offered him money for gas but he didn't want it and then he looked at me curiously and said why would I do that.

You see in his coin in his world. You don't do something like that. There has to be something. on this for you and then I said why do you think he did it? You probably looked at me and said because he cares. I told him it's true. You see, he got something out of it. Peter and Peter scratched his head and said, wow, you see! This is what I'm talking about. This is what changes lives. We assigned that old man as Peter's mentor when Peter came out, but we need more people like him. We need people to roll up their sleeves and get involved abroad about six months after me.

I became a Christian and was transferred to a prison called One Run. One morning they called me into the office because a couple of people had come to visit me and they were complete strangers. There was a guy called Reg Worth and his wife Muriel. I didn't know these people and the governor introduced them to me and told me they were from the prison community and I said what is that and Ridgeworthy, who was a really interesting man, said, well, it's a Christian prison ministry and it just started in Victory in this country. too and we just wanted to know if he was interested in having someone from the prison visit him, he said, "Oh, yeah, I guess," so the next week they called me for a visit on Saturday and there was a little gray-haired woman and a man grey-haired and I thought who are these people, they were from the prison community, they were among the first volunteers and they were a farming couple from a small town called yina in South Gippsland, now the most lasting memory I have of these people . she came to visit me for quite a long period of time, she was sitting there with dib Bloom and she took my hand and just stroked it gently.

I remember it very vividly and the reason I think I remember it is because I was being loved and I really needed to be loved, I mean, it's one thing to say that God is love, but you know, it's a statement. She needed to feel it in my heart and in my body, and Bloom provided that for me, bless her heart, so this was the beginning. from a trip with an organization that, of course, was founded by Charles Coulson and I had the wonderful privilege of meeting Charles Coulson in 1986. We traveled by small plane with Reg and a few others to Ararat Prison, where I was a prisoner.

I shared my

story

. with the inmates and Chuck Colson stood up and spoke and I remember Chuck Colson, this imposing figure, this very intelligent man, what impressed me most about him is what impressed me about Ron and Deb Bloom and people like that was their incredible humility, his humility. man who had actually had an experience of incarceration, so he understood that he not only sympathized, but he sympathized with us and I was very grateful for him and for people like him who over the years invested in my life. I remember a fellowship in prison in the um in the first office they had in Ivanhoe um opening the door and there was an old lady who was about to come out and she craned her neck and looked at me and said who are you and I said my name is Arthur Balkus and She gave me a smile and said oh, that's lovely.

I've been praying for you for the last few years and now I have a mental image to pray for and it was gone and I stood there, impressed, um, that this person had been praying for me so faithfully, to me, this is what it comes down to. deals with camaraderie in prison, you know, without the support of good people. I know there is no doubt in my mind that I couldn't have done it. I couldn't have done it. I have achieved this only by faith in the sense of a belief system that needed, as I said before, to be embraced, loved and helped.

That is vitally important. My research for my thesis, the importance of Christianity and reforming prisoners, affirmed what I knew. be true and that is that people who embrace faith in prison and come to the community have many problems assimilating the church because the Christianity of the church in this country is middle class and almost all of these people do not come from a class environment half. They come from backgrounds that are really difficult and different, broken and need support. They can't magically fit together. They need to learn to fit in when we talk about rehabilitation. I think what we often say is that we love you criminal.

Criminal. become like us think like us live like us be like us but for that to happen these people need to be embraced and they need to be modeled what that means that's the best way to learn and that's why prison ministry is so incredibly important, I think it's one of the hardest ministries you can do, but I think it's also one of the most rewarding, and I think it's for good reason that Jesus, the Jesus that I fell in love with that night in that cell from the prison, Jesus, who holds me together today and is the only reason I call myself a Christian, there is no doubt that that same Jesus, if you look at his life, seems to care the most about these broken people, the last and the most little ones of these my brothers, he said when you minister to them when you help them when you visit them in prison you do it for me Matthew 25 when I read Matthew 25 it was incredible I thought wow Jesus is elevating the people we reject and despise the most, he elevates them to a status holy and I think there is no way around it.

If we are going to be true to our faith and our calling, if we are truly going to model the lifestyle of Jesus in our lives, we have to do these things that we have. In order to care, we have to try to put in the effort and I have always said that by being involved in a Ministry like this you will ultimately get more out of it than you ever put into it and I certainly believe that. I encourage you to support Prison Fellowship. Prison Fellowship is the largest organization on the entire planet Earth that supports prisoners and needs help, so in any way you can, as a volunteer, as a financial supporter, as a prayer supporter, get involved and you will be blessed.

I can guarantee that to you foreigner