The Victorian justice department spent more than $250,000 on a religious chaplaincy program that prison staff feared would put volunteers at risk, an internal report has found.
The report raised concerns that improperly trained volunteers were collecting inmates from prisons on their day of release and using the car trip to the prisoner’s accommodation to speak to them about Christianity.
It also found the program seemingly breached the department’s own funding guidelines, which prevented it from employing faith-based chaplains.
“I wouldn’t put a volunteer in a car for four hours with some of these guys while they’re trying to torment them to join a faith,” one staff member from Beechworth prison said in the report.
“That is a very dangerous move with some of them ... and, I must admit, I detect a degree of frustration and anger [from ex-prisoners about the program].”
The review of the Transition 24 project is contained in 1,200 pages of Victorian justice department documents released late last year to a parliamentary inquiry.
It found that the $264,000 provided by the department over three years to Prison Fellowship Victoria and Friends of Dismas, the Christian organisations that delivered the program, appeared to breach the commissioner of corrections guidelines on spirituality and religion in prisons.
Those guidelines state that chaplains are to be employees of their faith communities, not the prison provider. But the report found that much of the work conducted under the publicly funded program was religiously based, and recommended the department ensure the guidelines and terms of the contract were not being breached.
There was no indication Prison Fellowship Victoria had willingly breached the contract or that the organisation had committed any wrongdoing. All the “deliverables” under the contract were met, the review found.
The July 2019 evaluation found that the project was designed to provide specialist transitional support to older prisoners immediately before and after their release from prison.
The number of elderly prisoners (defined as aged 50 and older) had increased from 479 prisoners in 2007 to 1,027 in 2017, the report found.
Under the program, the most common support provided was volunteers who would pick up prisoners on their day of release, often from prisons in regional Victoria, and transport them to accommodation.
Further support could be provided in terms of counselling and release packages, the report found, though it had not been clear to prison staff that much of this would be religiously based.
“If it was something like social support, social contact, that is great,” a worker at the Marngoneet women’s prison said in the report.
“If it’s about, ‘hey, come along to church with me’... that’s not so great.”
A worker from the same prison also said: “With the recent royal commission into institutional child sexual abuse, we have a lot of victims of religious-based organisations here.
“So … that [could] be quite traumatic, someone here not aware that that’s actually where their counselling and mentoring is coming from.”
The report, which was completed by the department, also found that the program had planned to give participants a book called Out!: You’ll Get Through – I’ve Been There, which contained a “collection of stories from ex-prisoners describing their journey in ‘staying out of prison’”.
“A closer look [at] the stories found that the majority of the stories in this book credited their faith in God as being important to them staying out of prison,” the report found.
Richard Boonstra, the Victorian state manager for Prison Fellowship Australia, confirmed that the state government was no longer funding the program.
But he told Guardian Australia that volunteers still collected inmates from Victorian prisons on their day of release, though he estimated it was fewer than 20 a year.
Although Boonstra was not employed in the position at the time of the review or at any time while the program was funded by the state government, he said he was confident volunteers were properly trained in how to protect themselves and to respect ex-prisoners.
“It’s not that ‘you have a captive audience now, it’s an opportunity to catch them’,” he said.
“[In volunteer training] we talk about boundaries and developing a mentor rather than a friendship relationship.
“There’s no pushing or proselytising or anything … Our volunteers are very careful about things like that.”
The justice department confirmed the program was not funded again after the completion of the review but declined to comment further.
