Linking arms: How chaplains support staff and offenders in rehabilitation
In institutions across the country, chaplains work to facilitate the religious and spiritual needs of offenders.
Richard Rene, Pacific Regional Chaplain, plays a crucial role in overseeing the administration of chaplain services in the region.
Richard says chaplains have two major responsibilities. The first is a legislative duty to ensure the inmates are given the religious freedoms guaranteed under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to the best of Correctional Service Canada’s (CSC) ability, without jeopardising public safety.
The second responsibility, he says, is what is often overlooked.
“It's a little bit less tangible, but how is chaplaincy contributing to the rehabilitation or the reintegration of offenders?” he says.
For Richard, being directly involved in an interdisciplinary team is a crucial part of a chaplain’s work. Often, he says, there’s a misconception both inside the institutions and among the public that the role of a chaplain is to advocate on behalf of the offenders when, in actuality, they work alongside program delivery officers, correctional officers, healthcare staff and others. Their work also includes providing spiritual support for staff in times of bereavement and moral or spiritual distress.
“We want the chaplains to link arms with the rest of the team,” he says. “We want to make sure that, whatever we're doing for the inmates, that it's meeting the needs of safety and security.”
In his experience, Richard says chaplains can help provide stability, meaning and guidance to offenders. When complemented with other aspects of a correctional plan, this can significantly increase the chance of successfully reintegrating and not reoffending upon release by helping to restore a sense of personal dignity, identity, meaning, hope and healing. Beyond the institution, Chaplaincy’s faith community reintegration projects (FCRPs) assist offenders in sustaining the gains they made while incarcerated as they reintegrate into the broader community, including in their chosen places of worship.
Since he began as a chaplain at Kent Institution in 2014, Richard has noticed a shift in the way religion and spirituality are approached both within institutions and in the world at large.
“In the past, you would have people who are affiliated with specific, well-defined religious traditions and they would never cross over into other traditions,” he says. “Now what we've seen in more recent years is that that offenders who practice their faith are tending more and more to draw from various traditions to find meaning and address personal needs. They may be Christian, but they may be interested in some Jewish teachings, or they may be Muslim, but they enjoy Buddhist meditation, so there's much more fluidity and less kind of rigidity in terms of like the well-defined traditions.”
These shifts in offender spirituality and the need for interdisciplinary collaboration are lived out daily by front‑line chaplains.
Kate Hansen, a contracted Chaplain at Fraser Valley Institution, says an important part of her role is to be knowledgeable in many religious and spiritual traditions to properly meet offenders’ needs.
Volunteers are often brought in to provide the services that are beyond the capacity of the chaplain or chaplains on site, which is how Kate got her start at CSC.
Kate didn’t set out to be a chaplain. Having a Wicca spiritual background, she began to volunteer alongside the Wicca chaplain in the Pacific Region in 2005. In 2006, when that chaplain decided to go back to school, Kate became a full-time chaplain.
For over a decade, Richard Rene has worked with staff and offenders alike in supporting spiritual and healing needs.
“I just fell into it,” she recalls.
Being the only Wicca chaplain in the region, she would visit most institutions once or twice a month and run group teaching circles and one-on-one sessions. Kate would not only share her spiritual traditions, but help the offenders she worked with in practicing and learning about theirs.
“My tradition is Wicca, but that's under the umbrella of Paganism. So, because of my own life path, I'm very well grounded in a variety of pagan traditions,” she explains. “So I'm able to assist people gaining the resources necessary or support them in their path.”
This role as a facilitator continues today, as Kate has been a Chaplain at Fraser Valley Institution since 2018. In this role, she works with offenders with diverse spiritual backgrounds.
She also works closely with the rest of the staff. Each week, she attends an interdisciplinary team meeting with staff from across the institution to discuss correctional programming and any issues that may have come up during the week.
For Richard and Kate, chaplaincy is not about providing all the answers, but a part of CSC’s broader mission of public safety and rehabilitation.
“Chaplaincy is about people. It's about meeting people where they are,” Kate says. “It's about changing lives. It's about supporting positive change with a spiritual lens.”