Robert Hale is a pastor at the People’s Baptist Church in Craigsville – home to the Augusta Correctional Center. His wife, son and daughter all work for the Virginia Department of Corrections, and he’s fundamentally on board with the concept of prisons.
“When you get in trouble, there has to be consequences,” he says.
In his opinion, people in prison are guilty, most are repeat offenders, and they shouldn’t be complaining about things like prison food on which the state spends just over two dollars a day per inmate.
“You may have white beans twice a week and rice with a little slice of cake or a piece of bread or whatever. Okay. I could live on that. Is that my choice? No, but my choice is not to get in trouble to start with, and that’s what I’m trying to help you do is never to make this choice again," he explains.
Since 2016 he’s been doing that through a series of classes on addiction, anger and anxiety, debt, depression and deception, rejection, relationships, parenting, temptation, communication, work ethics and punctuation.
“The fourteen punctuation marks of English grammar. We’re not talking about diction. We’re not talking about what part of the country you’re from, but we are talking about punctuation," Hale says.
That might seem an odd choice, but he argues these guys need to follow rules, and that’s what grammar is all about.
Hale believes he’s honest with his students.
“I tell them the truth. I’m just like their daddy to them.“
He claims to know the truth first hand – having grown up on the streets in Tennessee and done time there. He won’t share details but says he got tired of living the life of a criminal and learned to think things through.
“Think about the consequences before you suffer the consequences. The problem that we have is we’ve got a lot of people who are reacting instead of thinking, and that’s what causes most people to do anything they do.”
But he also has compassion and believes tough love is what most prisoners need.
“These men really want somebody that cares, somebody that will hold them accountable, and that’s what they didn’t get when they were growing up. They were let loose on the streets, and the thing is there has to be accountability.”
He treats his students with respect.
“I call them all by their last name – Mr. Brown, Mr. Jones, whatever their name is. They’re not a number. They’re a human being.”
And he shows them how much he cares by showing up.
“Knowing the men, seeing their appetite for somebody to care about them, I’m there, regardless of whether it’s a holiday. It doesn’t matter if it’s Christmas Day. I go.”
He’s not afraid of the prisoners he meets at medium security facilities, and he showed no fear when COVID swept through state prisons. One of the men he had met and befriended caught the disease and was on a ventilator.
*He was in the hospital – nobody to see him, nobody, and I begged and begged. ‘I have a state ID. I can go in any prison. Why can’t I go into the hospital? If I could just look through the glass and let him know somebody cares about him.’ It was denied, and he died in the hospital with nobody. It broke my heart.”
He provides his students with free notebooks, coffee and – if he can get them – Bibles. His message is not religious, but if men ask he will pray with them.
His organization – The Moving Forward Re-entry Program – has, by his count, touched thousands of prisoners, and he plans to keep helping. In addition to offering classes, he hopes to provide much-needed housing and transportation for the men he’s met inside if and when they’re released.
For more information, e-mail movingforwardreentry@gmail.com or call 540-466-5280.
