“I don’t know about the state,” said Stacy Shaffer, chaplain at the Warren County Prison, “but I’m definitely the only person in Warren and Forest County that’s been paroled to a church.”

Shaffer, a native of Brackenridge, Pa., was a county parishioner his preferred term for what most would call inmates at Warren County Prison before he was the chaplain.

The Warren County Prison Ministry is a non-profit organization supported by a network of approximately 20 area churches, and the ministry is what provides for Shaffer to act as a liaison between county parishioners and the community, as he is a “nonpaid county employee.”

Started in 1987 by then-Sheriff Don Allen, Shaffer said, the ministry was the realization of Allen’s vision. “He saw a need for faith-based voluntary help then,” said Shaffer.

John Nelson, the chaplain at the time that Shaffer found himself in the jail, “took me under his wing,” Shaffer said.

A member of the U.S. Navy and an Operation Desert Shield and Operation Just Cause veteran, Shaffer said he was wounded in Panama and found himself afterward addicted to drugs and turning to a life of crime. Burglary, of his own camp, Shaffer said, as well as assault on an officer with a vehicle, landed him in the Warren County Jail.

But upon his release, Shaffer said, “It was God’s divine will for me to stay here.”

Nelson, Shaffer said, “showed me care and concern.”

That care and concern is what he says is his greatest motivation now.

“There was no judgment,” he said. By the time he was released, he said, “I knew I had a changed life.” He wanted to come back into the jail after being paroled to Nelson’s care, as an aide to him in his ministry.

It wasn’t easy. The sheriff at the time said no way. Nelson spoke up for him, Shaffer said, and eventually a deal was struck that he could come back to help Nelson but if anything untoward happened, Nelson and Shaffer would both be barred from the facility. Nelson, he said, accepted the challenge, saying that Shaffer would be more help than hurt to the prison and its population.

“I could better relate to an inmate,” said Shaffer, “than a squeaky clean minister. I had the experience to understand them.”

Shaffer was Nelson’s assistant from 2006 to 2010, when he became the chaplain.

Shaffer, who works full time at Ellwood National Crankshaft, said that one of the things he understands well is that in a community like Warren, coming out of prison with a record attached to one’s name isn’t easy.

He said he filled out his application for Ellwood at the unemployment office, and it asked him whether he’d been convicted of a crime in the last four years. Since it had been five years, he said, he answered no. When he got to his interview, however, a second application asked the same question but wanted to know about the past three to five years. He said that he was told he’d lied on his application, and that he shouldn’t be there.

Eventually that same day the misunderstanding was corrected. But this, he said, is what people coming out of jail are faced with. It’s hard to get a job, he said. It’s hard to keep up on fines and stay out of jail when you’ve got a record.

Recidivism, he said, is one of the hardest things he has to deal with as the chaplain. “It’s so hard to see people keep coming back,” he said. “I want to see a changed life. I want to see that I’ve helped.”

He tries to accomplish this, he said, through showing that same lack of judgment, care, and compassion that was shown to him.

The Warren County Prison Ministry, he said, takes on the role of doing what it can to facilitate all religious needs of all inmates. Shaffer, a Protestant, said he doesn’t find that flexibility in facilitating beliefs other than his own difficult. “I’m the bishop,” he said. “I’m the apostle. I’m the pastor. I’m the imam.” His role, he said, is to “guide and direct” an inmate’s religious beliefs. “I’m their religious representative.”

While the prison is not required to provide for any inmate’s religious needs, said Shaffer, it can’t prevent them. So in addition to providing Sunday worship service and Wednesday evening Bible study, all of which he does in addition to fulfilling his roles as husband, father, and full-time employee, he provides Bibles and, he said, when he can get them, Qur’ans.

But it’s not just inmates he’s there for, he said. He’s counseled with corrections officers, too.

People coming into the Warren County Prison, said Shaffer, are often dealing with health, mental health, and drug and alcohol problems, as well as simply “just getting their bearings with where they are and what’s happening” in their lives. Shaffer said he aims to be an open ear, someone to listen and help show them how their own choices can make or break them, and often had.

If someone doesn’t want to take responsibility for their own choices, he said, he often sees them back in jail. But if someone really wants to change their life, often being provided with an unbiased, ready ear can help them start working through better choices, and better actions.

“I want to break that cycle,” Shaffer said, that he sees of assigning blame often as far away from oneself as possible. Diagnosed with PTSD after his military service, he said he feels that it’s become a cultural norm to find culprits for our own consequences anywhere but within ourselves. An inmate, he said, is “already in a place of being beat down,” by the title, the circumstances, and the judgment often assumed to be accurate when, he said, he’s seen someone serve four years in prison under his ministry and be found innocent in the end.

“By the time he left,” he said of that particular individual, who’d come in unable to read or write, “he told me, ‘thanks to you I’ve read thousands of books while I was in there, and I can write.'” And this man, who’d come into prison falsely accused and sentenced only to lose his retirement and other benefits, drove up to Shaffer to tell him this news in a new car.

Ninety percent of people in prison, Shaffer said, are at the inevitable end of a campaign of “looking for love in the wrong places.” And even with the limited time he has with county inmates, who are often headed to serve lengthy sentences at state correctional institutions, “I’ll do whatever I can to see a changed life. That you have a captive audience,” he said, “is a fallacy.” Inmates, he said, can choose whether or not to take part in his services. On average, he said, around a hundred do every Sunday in a common room turned into chapel that has a maximum occupancy of 150.

The biggest gap, he said, “is outside that door.” On the day he was released, he said, he sat in the jail lobby waiting for John Nelson. “When I looked down the road I knew BiLo was down there. When I looked up the road,” he said, “I knew there was a mall. That was all I knew about the area.” Even though he was officially a free man, he said, the freedom was overwhelming. And that’s not, said Shaffer, an uncommon feeling. People recidivate, he said, “because they go back to the same people, places, and things.”

He was lucky to have been sentenced to Nelson’s care, he said, adding, “I was sentenced for six months and I stayed 18.”

Shaffer will be presenting a talk on his experience at the Youngsville First United Methodist Church during its Fall Mission Festival on Friday, Sept. 30 to Sunday, Oct. 2. For more information on the festival call Stella Walton at 563-5325.