It is interesting to see how the political winds blow different ways in times.

An increasing problem we face in Iowa is prisoner recidivism — former inmates returning to prison. With an ever-increasing prison population in Iowa, the phenomenon of released prisoners returning to old ways and habits that send them back to prison is a good place to start in trying to lower the prison population.

In 2003, the Iowa Board of Parole freed 3,600 prisoners, a 7 percent decrease from 2002. This fall, the Iowa prison system held 8,600 inmates in a system that is designed for only 7,000.

State reports have estimated by the year 2013, the Iowa prison system will need to hold as many as 12,000 inmates because of strict mandatory sentencing laws and an increasing amount of arrests for drug violations.

Nationwide, about two-thirds of prisoners will be re-arrested within three years of their release from prison, adding to the overpopulation problem.

The InnerChange Freedom Initiative is a unique faith-based program that seeks to reduce recidivism rates at the Newton Correctional Facility. The program is an initiative of Prison Fellowship Ministries, an organization that seeks to help prisoners throughout the United States. The Detroit Transition of Prisoners, another Prison Fellowship Ministries program, was highly successful in reducing recidivism, with program graduates 10 times less likely to return to prison in the three years following their release.

During the 1980s and even through part of the 1990s, it seemed that political winds were blowing in the direction of harsher punishment and mandatory sentencing laws. Prisons became places of punishment and not rehabilitation, leading to our current problem with higher-arrest rates of former inmates. With a lack of funds available to build new prisons, new innovations like the InnerChange Freedom Initiative are in high demand.

It’s based on the Association for Protection and Assistance of the Condemned, a program started in 1973 in Brazil. Mario Ottoboni began this program, which is rooted in the idea of Christian love, and has expanded it to more than 80 prisons throughout Brazil. The association reports a recidivism rate of less than 5 percent. This model has been carried to the United States through InnerChange Freedom Initiative prison programs in four states: Minnesota, Kansas, Iowa and Texas.

Rehabilitative prison programs have met with varying success over the years. InnerChange Freedom Initiative is unique in the way it attempts to shape and change prisoners’ lives. A model helps prisoners to change their entire lives by identifying the cause of their problems as sinfulness.

The program encourages inmates to turn away from their pasts and see how Christianity can rehabilitate them.

This holistic approach to rehabilitation includes involvement with the families of inmates as well. It also encourages them to see the relationships in their lives based upon biblical concepts. The description of the program on its Web site sums up the entire basis of the transformational model. “The IFI model seeks to reconcile people through changing their relationship with God.”

Some have worried about the initiative infringing upon the separation of church and state, but it is a voluntary program. The individual prisoner must choose to enroll in the program. There is a high demand at the state level for programming that helps to reduce recidivism, and the courts have made it clear the state must be blind to the religious affiliation of a program if it meets the secular goal of the program, and is entirely voluntary.

The InnerChange Freedom Initiative’s unique approach to lowering recidivism rates may help shift the political winds back toward prison rehabilitation.