The group supports the inmates by listening to them and praying for them at chapel services, counselling them as they meet their victims on a restorative justice programme and more. Here two men serving life sentences describe how their lives have been transformed by Christ. Their names have been changed. John believes he has always been a Christian. ‘I just never really knew it but for as long as I can remember I have believed that there was something,’ he says. ‘My childhood was not a very good one as I was subjected to a lot of violence, both physical and mental and was raised by a single mother with six children who had a drink problem and many issues of her own.’

He turned to drugs and began a life of violence. ‘I started to enjoy violence and inflicting pain on others and committing crimes.’ He started praying when he became a father, and that’s when he says things began to happen.

But he turned away from God, until he was sentenced to life. ‘Since then amazing people have come into my life and helped me grow in faith and understanding and only since then have I really been a Christian.’

Another lifer, Dave has found himself praying for fellow inmates he describes as the ‘toughest, hardest men in prison.’
He says: ‘Staff too, have always come and asked me to pray for a wife, son or daughter. This is always a great moment but none better than when a Muslim friend asked me to pray for his parents.’

Like John, he had a difficult childhood, with a father who went to church on a Sunday morning but drank on a Sunday afternoon and beat up his family on a Sunday night. When his mother died when he was 13, he felt worthless.

‘It was around this time that I started a life of crime. Violence was now a daily part of who I had become,’ he says. ‘I went to church on and off for the next few years. Each sentence I got the more I was drawn to the people who ran churches.’

‘I never forgot those people, even when I was out of my face on drugs, I always felt them and warm memories often came flooding back.’ In 2000 Dave found himself sentenced to life. Now I could have picked drugs up and felt sorry for myself, seeing this as the end,’ he says. ‘Instead I picked the Bible up, read about love, forgiveness and the stories came alive, I felt the pain of this man Jesus, he gave his life for me, why would he do that? Why did he care when no-one else had?’

He says it didn’t all get better overnight. ‘Where once I didn’t care now I did, feelings of guilt, shame and regret washed over me, now I could not just hit someone to solve a problem, I had to forgive them, this blew my mind, forgive someone who hurt me, that was asking way too much.

‘Asking God into my life gave me, for the first time ever, a feeling of freedom, yes here I am in jail but free, I feel that my life is the best it has ever been.’

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