Part 1 of a 3-part series exploring a prison ministry at Bibb County Correctional Facility
Like many seminarians, Manuel is brimming with gratitude and joy for what God has taught him through his coursework.
“Covenant theology has taught me to see the whole plan of God from Genesis to Revelation,” he says. “The Lord is weaving together everything as he is building his kingdom—and we’re a part of that here.”
Unlike most seminary students, Manuel spends his waking hours in a khaki jumpsuit issued by the Alabama Department of Corrections, serving out his sentence at Bibb County Correctional Facility in Brent, Alabama. But with his Certificate in Biblical Studies from Birmingham Theological Seminary, Manuel is part of a remarkable story of gospel transformation in a place where sin and violence often reign.
The Story of Unbound
Bibb County’s violent reputation dates back to the late 1800s when the county earned the nickname “Bloody Bibb.” The Bibb County Correctional Facility opened in 1998 and has been one of Alabama’s most violent prisons.
Seeking to curb prison unrest, the Alabama Department of Corrections approached Birmingham Theological Seminary (BTS) in 2015 to ask if they would pilot a theological education program implemented in other Southern states. Dr. Thaddeus James, Jr., stepped forward to serve as the ministry’s director, recruiting other BTS faculty and Mitch Haubert—a military veteran and ordained PCA pastor—as the inside coordinator for BTS.
“From the very first time that I entered Bibb County Correctional Facility,” James recalled recently, “I knew that this was what God called me to do. At every step from the launching of BTS to our current growth is all by the sovereignty and providence of God.”
In 2016, BTS began offering full-credit seminary courses in biblical studies, offering a master’s degree to students with an undergraduate degree and a graduate certificate to students with a high school diploma. The first cohort of inmates enrolled in the program began its coursework in 2016, and about 10 students graduated in 2018. Shortly after the first cohort graduated, program leaders also pioneered Jumpstart, a prison recidivism program which grew into the current program, called Unbound 216.
BTS and Unbound 216 operate under different charters, but they frequently overlap in their participants and their mission. Today, Unbound 216 teaches a 46-week curriculum on the basics of Reformed theology, including the doctrines of grace, salvation by faith, and other topics such as the vision of biblical manhood.
Following its strong start, a second cohort of BTS students graduated in 2022, despite an interruption from COVID, and a third cohort graduated in September 2024, bringing the total number of graduates to around 30. As of this writing, a fourth cohort just finished its first full semester.
The master’s degree offered on the inside is nearly identical to the one BTS offers to online and in-person students, except the prison degree track requires a few more credit hours for completion. The curriculum also undergoes more frequent updates to provide for the specific and unique ministry needs of the students on the inside.
Apart from those differences, the classrooms inside the prison feature the same things a visitor would find on any seminary campus in the free world: a worn podium, a whiteboard with notes on justification and sanctification, and a dog-eared hymnal waiting for someone to take it up and sing.
Novel Structure, Novel Participants
In December 2024, I entered the prison and met some of these men in both the BTS and Unbound 216 programs. Over three days with them — attending classes, sharing meals, and worshiping in the prison chapel — I learned about their journeys through the correctional system, and their journeys with the Lord as he has worked in their lives.
Two aspects of Unbound216’s structure separate it from other prison ministries. First, unlike many other nonprofits, Unbound 216 and BTS take no money from the Alabama Department of Corrections. They rely heavily on a dedicated volunteer community from the Birmingham area, including PCA pastors who teach classes inside the prison. Their funding is provided by local partners, area churches, and BTS itself.
Another distinctive of Unbound 216 is that the program is now entirely inmate-led. BTS graduates are in charge of teaching, ministering, and course management for the Unbound 216 participants, creating a high degree of sustainability. During the pandemic, for example, when visitors were prohibited from entering the facility (putting a two-year pause on BTS courses), Unbound 216 was able to continue its classes uninterrupted.
Unbound 216’s program is so effective that graduates are far less likely than the average released inmate to be rearrested. According to the Department of Justice statistics, 82% of state prisoners will be rearrested within 10 years of release. Unbound 216 boasts a recidivism rate of just 5%.
Bibb County Correctional Facility organizes its prison cells into groupings called “bays,” with 106 prisoners in each bay. BTS students live in the same bay; members of the original cohort took shifts watching over each other every night to prevent any violence. Eight years later, BTS and Unbound 216 have now expanded to three bays, and most of the 318 men in those bays are now Christians.
Who are these inmates? To the outside world, they are hardened criminals, men convicted of murder, drug dealing, and theft. Their exposed skin is covered in tattoos. Some are missing teeth or limbs from drug use or fights. To walk through a crowded bay is to walk among men whom the world has ground down with violence, who may have once lashed back out with the same, and who bear the scars to prove it.
“We all carry this ID number,” a program participant named Melvin told me, patting the stitching on his jumpsuit. “Some sin, some past deed or experience brought you here and makes you want to believe God has forgotten about you.”
Speak to them, however, and you find that they are also men from all walks of life: landscapers, veterans, and even neurosurgeons, who remember who they were before they arrived in prison. More than that still, in Christ they are—by their own account—new creations, transformed from the inside out.
Whatever crimes they have committed, they are also teachers, mentors, intercessors, preachers, mediators, encouragers, and scholars. One BTS graduate named Russell (ADOC prohibits the use of inmate last names in media coverage) recently completed a Doctor of Ministry degree, defending his dissertation on Greek linguistics in Ephesians from a cinderblock classroom behind barbed wire.
“But our job,” Melvin says, “is to encourage men here that there is no limitation put on them by God, that the gospel brings new meaning to their lives.”
Culture Change
As God changes hearts through Unbound 216, the residents are in turn changing the culture of the prison on a wider scale. Most prisons (informally called “camps”) harbor a dog-eat-dog mentality, and other parts of Bibb continue to be plagued by reports of abuse and inmate violence. But the presence of BTS and Unbound is also ushering in an entirely new dynamic.
“I came here from Ventress, a dangerous camp,” Daniel recalled. “There, nobody cared about anybody else. I didn’t believe what I saw at Bibb at first—people not just talking about faith but living it out. I saw guys living with greater purpose than themselves.”
Teaching, counseling, and serving other inmates, program graduates now form a core collective within their three bays, fulfilling a biblical vision of discipleship night and day.
“We go straight from the classroom to the harvest,” Steven said, pointing through the glass window to the bay where men milled about in the dorm. “We have fellowship and accountability 24/7, which means you are constantly growing and adapting in Christlikeness.”
Tyler agrees: “You’re not just studying theology,” he says. “You use it immediately.”
The effects have been dramatic. In Unbound 216 cell bays, theft, assault, and sexual violence have been eliminated, with zero violations since 2018. In fact, the wardens have at times placed new or at-risk inmates in the Unbound 216 bays to ensure their safety. Regular head counts and dormitory searches are a demeaning, though necessary, part of life in prison, but here residents respond with meekness and obedience rather than the defiance and outrage demonstrated elsewhere in the prison.
Addiction in the bays has also diminished, with inmates seeking to help their struggling brothers through relapse rather than enticing them into it. And where once those dormitory searches would have turned up contraband such as weapons, drugs, or cell phones, guards have become accustomed to finding less dangerous items such as spare bedsheets or misplaced shoes in Unbound 216 dormitories.
“And Bibles,” Chaplain Haubert laughs. “They find a lot of Bibles.”
Playing a central role in this transformation is the gift that knows no walls: prayer. Participants in both programs regularly gather for corporate prayer, offering pastoral care to any inmate on the spot. For personal prayer, residents will sit on their bunks with bedsheets over their heads, which Carlos told me he considered “his inner closet” (Matthew 6:6), granting a measure of privacy in a crowded dorm.
And they see God answering their prayers. Normally patient and thoughtful in speech, BTS graduates rush to describe the countless petitions that God has granted—for healing, provision, better relationships, news of family members from the outside—and give thanks for God’s goodness and mercy to them. In all our discussions during my visit, it was the only time when these men interrupted each other, so eager were they to speak.
Another sign of culture change in the Unbound 216 bays is the reversal of the notorious jailhouse slogan “snitches get stitches.” In prison culture, inmates mete out punishments for various infractions and reporting issues to prison guards is considered the ultimate betrayal. Within the Unbound 216 dorms, however, if someone is struggling with sin or sees someone else struggling, he is urged to come to his mentors and receive forgiveness, biblical counseling, and a redemption plan. Accountability is shared by everyone in the bays, from the oldest to the newest. No one is exempt.
“Prison is the honor/shame culture par excellence, where honor consists of having power over others,” Russell observes. “If someone here feels that you’re shaming them in any way, you lose all potential to reach them. We’ve moved away from that to a grace-based culture.”
Cornell wholeheartedly agrees. “God gives you the chance to work with someone else to help you avoid being caught up in your own cares,” he says. “You both come out ahead. Ain’t that a gift?”
As People Who Are Free
The logic of Christ’s kingdom subverts the logic of the world. It is the same logic that underpins the verse in Unbound 216’s namesake, 1 Peter 2:16: “Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God.”
By their own admission, the Unbound 216 participants are more equipped to serve, minister, and teach wearing a prison jumpsuit than they ever were on the outside, enslaved to violence, addiction, and sin. Some of them face life sentences and may never walk outside prison walls again. But, in the light of the gospel, their very definition of freedom has changed.
Nearly a decade into the program, to transform the prison system from within—to transform Bloody Bibb into Blessed Bibb, these brothers say—is not their work but the work of the One they serve. Asked where their inspiration comes from, the participants shake their heads and swiftly cite Romans 1:16 and the power of the gospel, refusing credit for what has been accomplished.
“It’s not what we’re doing,” Ty, a current BTS student, says, “It’s God’s power, it’s God’s word. That’s what we stand on.”