The Rev J. Allison Defoor gives his blessing to Ralph Matthews. Defoor, 53, who spent a lifetime as a judge and lawman in Monroe County, is now an Episcopal priest and spends his days inside a barbed-wire prison hoping to save lost souls.BY AUDRA D.S. BURCH
J. Allison DeFoor II had been meditative all morning -- prayerful on his way to the Wakulla Correctional Institution, where he worships most Sundays; as he delivered communion; as he placed his right hand atop snowy-haired Ralph Matthews, a sex offender who would be freed in four days.
DeFoor uttered the blessing and challenge to Matthews, hopeful that the words would have legs, would become a shield against temptation and sin and bad decisions.
Gracious God, we thank you for the work and witness of your servant Ralph who has enriched this community and brought gladness to friends; now bless and preserve him at this time of transition.
For more than 20 years, DeFoor was a soldier for justice in South Florida, putting more people than he can count behind bars before he found a higher calling -- to offer the word of God to prisoners.
''You just hope that in some way they leave different than when they arrived,'' DeFoor says the next day over tea at his law office, 17 miles away in Tallahassee.
Over the years, DeFoor has served as an assistant public defender, prosecutor, county and circuit judge, maverick sheriff, reelection running mate of Gov. Bob Martinez. For a time, he was Gov. Jeb Bush's Everglades czar.
DeFoor played gamely throughout his public career, all the while struggling to decipher where, precisely, God fit into his life.
He found his answer in the Episcopalian priesthood, as a volunteer ministering at a state prison almost 700 miles from Key West, where he had built a storied career.
''For years, the feeling would hit me, and I would stuff it right back down in my gut,'' says DeFoor, 54, who is also state coordinator for an environmental-restoration consulting firm. ``I finally stopped running.''
Now, he is among the most fervent supporters of the faith- and character-based prison movement stirring across the country. Followers of the religious and secular initiative work to reduce disciplinary infractions among inmates and recidivism among parolees.
SPREADING FAITH
At least 10 states now offer faith-based prison dorms. Already, the Florida Department of Corrections has converted three prisons into faith-based institutions -- two for men, one for women. And if the well-connected DeFoor has his way, a $75 million annex under construction at Wakulla would become the fourth.
Supporters of faith programming say inmates at the three prisons committed almost a third fewer infractions than those in nonfaith institutions. At Wakulla, where the program was launched in 2005, the recidivism rate hovers at 7 percent, compared with 33 percent at other prisons.
Skeptics argue that participants in these programs are already primed to succeed, that their rehabilitation is mostly a function of character and maturity.
''There's also a concern that if you have all the good eggs in one facility, you diminish the positive influence they could have on other inmates if they were in another prison,'' says Daniel Mears, a Florida State University professor of criminology.
A year ago this month, DeFoor was ordained where he now prays and preaches. He committed to the priesthood in front of 100 family members and friends and felons in a squat cinder-block building on the sprawling prison campus.
''Allison was open enough to allow himself to grow in his faith,'' Bishop Leo Frade of the Episcopal Diocese of Southeast Florida, who ordained DeFoor, said in an interview from Honduras. ``We have a gift in Allison, someone committed to our prison populations.''
Today, DeFoor ministers inside the medium-security complex cut off from the world by rolling barbed wire, dense patches of wood and a single winding road. Here, where 1,333 men serve time for crimes ranging from traffic offenses to murder, DeFoor is Father Allison, the soft-spoken, quick-witted guy who comes to prison in Tommy Bahama collared shirts.
At today's service, 16 men of various faiths gather in the honey-colored pews of a chapel adjacent to the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.
''This is the Holy Ground. . . . We're Standing on Holy Ground,'' bellow these men who have done wrong.
Because no one has money for tithes, the inmates are given Post-it notes. Before services are over, they will write down something they want to offer to God -- sometimes admission of an addiction, sometimes a promise, often a fear.
''Father Allison spends a lot of time encouraging us, which is probably not easy,'' says Henry Clifton, 56, serving a life sentence for armed robbery.
`ALLISON'S JOURNEY'
In the back of the room, Terry DeFoor, a warm, petite librarian and a wife for 31 years, helps prepare for services. She, too, is here many Sundays for what she describes as ``Allison's journey.''
''Allison was ordained here, which says something about how special this place is,'' she says. ``He has slowed down, and he is at peace.''
Before donning the robe and collar, DeFoor was roaring through life, pushing, grinding his way through in the public sector, almost always in a bow tie, blazer and tasseled loafers or shorts and flip-flops.
A year out of law school, DeFoor was an assistant public defender on a murder case that would make headlines and stay with him for years. He defended a man who was accused of killing a prominent Key West museum keeper. The defendant had one teardrop on his face -- a prison tattoo that symbolizes killing a person.
DeFoor saw him a few years later. He had two tears.
''That case really weighed on me because another person was dead, somebody had paid the price,'' he says. ``Factually I never knew if he killed that man, but I was afraid he was guilty of something. It was the state's responsibility, but I always wondered if he had been put away if someone's life could have been saved.''
DeFoor became a Monroe County judge at 28, Monroe sheriff at 34, and a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor well before his 40th birthday. ''Ambitious'' became the word most used to describe him.
''We like to joke that Allison can't keep a job,'' says State Attorney Mark Kohl, whom DeFoor hired into his private practice in 1995.
Born in Coral Gables, raised in Tampa, DeFoor landed in Key West in 1978, five-feet-five, driven and full of ideals. He believed that he could tame the characters and unhinge the notorious drug-smuggling trade that beset the city.
As a judge in the mid-1980s, he became famous, perhaps infamous, for banishing lowlifes from the county, sometimes literally ordering them to catch one-way rides north.
''I was in a very unique place where you could do as much as you had the guts to try,'' says DeFoor, a proud seventh-generation Floridian, member of a citrus family that farmed near Tampa, now a father of three. ``The place was a bit backwater, with a transient population. We had a Conch cracker way of doing business.''
As county judge, he was publicly reprimanded by the Florida Supreme Court for campaigning on behalf of candidates for judgeships and public-defender posts and promoting an electronic monitor for convicts while he owned stock in the company that made it.
''The whole thing was crushing,'' DeFoor says, his voice trailing off. ``In some ways, it was helpful in that it took a bit of the polyanna shine off me.''
But it didn't keep DeFoor from becoming sheriff in 1988, and 18 months later, he resigned to join Bob Martinez in his unsuccessful reelection bid.
''The thing about Allison is he wasn't afraid to make changes,'' says Anne Leonard, who has worked in the Monroe sheriff's office for 28 years. ``A lot of times in the government sector, things move slowly, but he just kept pushing to get things done.''
DeFoor returned home and built a law practice in the Upper Keys. He helped revitalize the Republican Party, taught and lectured at the university level (including the University of Miami), studied history and wrote books, including one about Odet Philippe, his 20th-century ancestor who introduced grapefruit to the state.
In 2002, he began to contemplate a run for Florida attorney general. But when confronted with the most daunting task of the job -- handling death-penalty appeals -- DeFoor was forced to face the dilemma that had quietly gnawed at him for years.
PULPIT AND POLITICS
DeFoor attended Episcopal church and denominational schools and was attracted by the service of both pulpit and politics.
He talks about his childhood from his Tallahassee office, where the bookshelves seem to perfectly marry the two Allisons. Among the titles: The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius;Wealth and Democracy.
Eventually, DeFoor would serve on the boards of seminaries in South Florida -- an unwitting first step in his spiritual journey. He became a student at the South Florida Center for Theological Studies, where he earned his divinity degree in 1999, even though he wasn't sure what he would do with it.
But eventually, everything began to make sense, not so much an epiphany as a gradual realization. Ministering, saving souls, is what DeFoor believes he was meant to do. And maybe he was supposed to send people to jail before he could minister to those in jail.
DeFoor wipes away tears. ''I finally gave up,'' he says.
It was DeFoor who persuaded Gov. Bush, a longtime friend, to offer religious teaching, academics and life-skills training at Wakulla. The faith is multi; the character is secular.
Horizons Communities in Prisons, a nonprofit whose mission is ''to prepare prisoners to live responsibly with others,'' runs the program at Wakulla. Subjects include family relations, improving credit history and financial literacy.
BUSINESS 101
One Monday afternoon, a dozen inmates attend a small business class, where they learn about equipment leasing vs. purchasing, niche marketing, networking and copyright laws. They learn in Classroom 123, under large banners that read: ``I AM A SUCCESS!''
''I have been to jail a few times and have never had the opportunity to learn stuff like this,'' says Ernest Gordon, serving time for burglary.
Gordon, 38, plans to open a tree-cutting business in Ocala after he is released. ''This whole program is great, because it makes you feel as if you are finally doing something right,'' he says.
DeFoor's second Sunday service, held across campus, is smaller, less formal, with 16 gray plastic chairs instead of pews.
James Takacs, 54, who says he was a Pentecostal street preacher before he began to serve 10 years for manslaughter, asks DeFoor if he can play a song. Takacs learned to play the piano 40 years ago as a Catholic altar boy. He selects Amazing Grace, beautifully delivering the Christian hymn.
Allison DeFoor stands with his eyes closed as the verses float through the room.
Aaaahmazing Graaaaaace, how sweet this sound / That sav'd a wretch like me! / I once was lost, but now am found / Was blind, but now I see.
In his sermon, DeFoor had stuck to his earlier theme of transformation. He assured the felons that he, too, had struggled.
''Perhaps, if I hadn't been so bullheaded, it wouldn't have been so slow,'' he says. ``We all must ask God to forgive us for whatever got us here and for the things that didn't.''
J. Allison DeFoor II had been meditative all morning -- prayerful on his way to the Wakulla Correctional Institution, where he worships most Sundays; as he delivered communion; as he placed his right hand atop snowy-haired Ralph Matthews, a sex offender who would be freed in four days.
DeFoor uttered the blessing and challenge to Matthews, hopeful that the words would have legs, would become a shield against temptation and sin and bad decisions.
Gracious God, we thank you for the work and witness of your servant Ralph who has enriched this community and brought gladness to friends; now bless and preserve him at this time of transition.
For more than 20 years, DeFoor was a soldier for justice in South Florida, putting more people than he can count behind bars before he found a higher calling -- to offer the word of God to prisoners.
''You just hope that in some way they leave different than when they arrived,'' DeFoor says the next day over tea at his law office, 17 miles away in Tallahassee.
Over the years, DeFoor has served as an assistant public defender, prosecutor, county and circuit judge, maverick sheriff, reelection running mate of Gov. Bob Martinez. For a time, he was Gov. Jeb Bush's Everglades czar.
DeFoor played gamely throughout his public career, all the while struggling to decipher where, precisely, God fit into his life.
He found his answer in the Episcopalian priesthood, as a volunteer ministering at a state prison almost 700 miles from Key West, where he had built a storied career.
''For years, the feeling would hit me, and I would stuff it right back down in my gut,'' says DeFoor, 54, who is also state coordinator for an environmental-restoration consulting firm. ``I finally stopped running.''
Now, he is among the most fervent supporters of the faith- and character-based prison movement stirring across the country. Followers of the religious and secular initiative work to reduce disciplinary infractions among inmates and recidivism among parolees.
SPREADING FAITH
At least 10 states now offer faith-based prison dorms. Already, the Florida Department of Corrections has converted three prisons into faith-based institutions -- two for men, one for women. And if the well-connected DeFoor has his way, a $75 million annex under construction at Wakulla would become the fourth.
Supporters of faith programming say inmates at the three prisons committed almost a third fewer infractions than those in nonfaith institutions. At Wakulla, where the program was launched in 2005, the recidivism rate hovers at 7 percent, compared with 33 percent at other prisons.
Skeptics argue that participants in these programs are already primed to succeed, that their rehabilitation is mostly a function of character and maturity.
''There's also a concern that if you have all the good eggs in one facility, you diminish the positive influence they could have on other inmates if they were in another prison,'' says Daniel Mears, a Florida State University professor of criminology.
A year ago this month, DeFoor was ordained where he now prays and preaches. He committed to the priesthood in front of 100 family members and friends and felons in a squat cinder-block building on the sprawling prison campus.
''Allison was open enough to allow himself to grow in his faith,'' Bishop Leo Frade of the Episcopal Diocese of Southeast Florida, who ordained DeFoor, said in an interview from Honduras. ``We have a gift in Allison, someone committed to our prison populations.''
Today, DeFoor ministers inside the medium-security complex cut off from the world by rolling barbed wire, dense patches of wood and a single winding road. Here, where 1,333 men serve time for crimes ranging from traffic offenses to murder, DeFoor is Father Allison, the soft-spoken, quick-witted guy who comes to prison in Tommy Bahama collared shirts.
At today's service, 16 men of various faiths gather in the honey-colored pews of a chapel adjacent to the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.
''This is the Holy Ground. . . . We're Standing on Holy Ground,'' bellow these men who have done wrong.
Because no one has money for tithes, the inmates are given Post-it notes. Before services are over, they will write down something they want to offer to God -- sometimes admission of an addiction, sometimes a promise, often a fear.
''Father Allison spends a lot of time encouraging us, which is probably not easy,'' says Henry Clifton, 56, serving a life sentence for armed robbery.
`ALLISON'S JOURNEY'
In the back of the room, Terry DeFoor, a warm, petite librarian and a wife for 31 years, helps prepare for services. She, too, is here many Sundays for what she describes as ``Allison's journey.''
''Allison was ordained here, which says something about how special this place is,'' she says. ``He has slowed down, and he is at peace.''
Before donning the robe and collar, DeFoor was roaring through life, pushing, grinding his way through in the public sector, almost always in a bow tie, blazer and tasseled loafers or shorts and flip-flops.
A year out of law school, DeFoor was an assistant public defender on a murder case that would make headlines and stay with him for years. He defended a man who was accused of killing a prominent Key West museum keeper. The defendant had one teardrop on his face -- a prison tattoo that symbolizes killing a person.
DeFoor saw him a few years later. He had two tears.
''That case really weighed on me because another person was dead, somebody had paid the price,'' he says. ``Factually I never knew if he killed that man, but I was afraid he was guilty of something. It was the state's responsibility, but I always wondered if he had been put away if someone's life could have been saved.''
DeFoor became a Monroe County judge at 28, Monroe sheriff at 34, and a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor well before his 40th birthday. ''Ambitious'' became the word most used to describe him.
''We like to joke that Allison can't keep a job,'' says State Attorney Mark Kohl, whom DeFoor hired into his private practice in 1995.
Born in Coral Gables, raised in Tampa, DeFoor landed in Key West in 1978, five-feet-five, driven and full of ideals. He believed that he could tame the characters and unhinge the notorious drug-smuggling trade that beset the city.
As a judge in the mid-1980s, he became famous, perhaps infamous, for banishing lowlifes from the county, sometimes literally ordering them to catch one-way rides north.
''I was in a very unique place where you could do as much as you had the guts to try,'' says DeFoor, a proud seventh-generation Floridian, member of a citrus family that farmed near Tampa, now a father of three. ``The place was a bit backwater, with a transient population. We had a Conch cracker way of doing business.''
As county judge, he was publicly reprimanded by the Florida Supreme Court for campaigning on behalf of candidates for judgeships and public-defender posts and promoting an electronic monitor for convicts while he owned stock in the company that made it.
''The whole thing was crushing,'' DeFoor says, his voice trailing off. ``In some ways, it was helpful in that it took a bit of the polyanna shine off me.''
But it didn't keep DeFoor from becoming sheriff in 1988, and 18 months later, he resigned to join Bob Martinez in his unsuccessful reelection bid.
''The thing about Allison is he wasn't afraid to make changes,'' says Anne Leonard, who has worked in the Monroe sheriff's office for 28 years. ``A lot of times in the government sector, things move slowly, but he just kept pushing to get things done.''
DeFoor returned home and built a law practice in the Upper Keys. He helped revitalize the Republican Party, taught and lectured at the university level (including the University of Miami), studied history and wrote books, including one about Odet Philippe, his 20th-century ancestor who introduced grapefruit to the state.
In 2002, he began to contemplate a run for Florida attorney general. But when confronted with the most daunting task of the job -- handling death-penalty appeals -- DeFoor was forced to face the dilemma that had quietly gnawed at him for years.
PULPIT AND POLITICS
DeFoor attended Episcopal church and denominational schools and was attracted by the service of both pulpit and politics.
He talks about his childhood from his Tallahassee office, where the bookshelves seem to perfectly marry the two Allisons. Among the titles: The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius;Wealth and Democracy.
Eventually, DeFoor would serve on the boards of seminaries in South Florida -- an unwitting first step in his spiritual journey. He became a student at the South Florida Center for Theological Studies, where he earned his divinity degree in 1999, even though he wasn't sure what he would do with it.
But eventually, everything began to make sense, not so much an epiphany as a gradual realization. Ministering, saving souls, is what DeFoor believes he was meant to do. And maybe he was supposed to send people to jail before he could minister to those in jail.
DeFoor wipes away tears. ''I finally gave up,'' he says.
It was DeFoor who persuaded Gov. Bush, a longtime friend, to offer religious teaching, academics and life-skills training at Wakulla. The faith is multi; the character is secular.
Horizons Communities in Prisons, a nonprofit whose mission is ''to prepare prisoners to live responsibly with others,'' runs the program at Wakulla. Subjects include family relations, improving credit history and financial literacy.
BUSINESS 101
One Monday afternoon, a dozen inmates attend a small business class, where they learn about equipment leasing vs. purchasing, niche marketing, networking and copyright laws. They learn in Classroom 123, under large banners that read: ``I AM A SUCCESS!''
''I have been to jail a few times and have never had the opportunity to learn stuff like this,'' says Ernest Gordon, serving time for burglary.
Gordon, 38, plans to open a tree-cutting business in Ocala after he is released. ''This whole program is great, because it makes you feel as if you are finally doing something right,'' he says.
DeFoor's second Sunday service, held across campus, is smaller, less formal, with 16 gray plastic chairs instead of pews.
James Takacs, 54, who says he was a Pentecostal street preacher before he began to serve 10 years for manslaughter, asks DeFoor if he can play a song. Takacs learned to play the piano 40 years ago as a Catholic altar boy. He selects Amazing Grace, beautifully delivering the Christian hymn.
Allison DeFoor stands with his eyes closed as the verses float through the room.
Aaaahmazing Graaaaaace, how sweet this sound / That sav'd a wretch like me! / I once was lost, but now am found / Was blind, but now I see.
In his sermon, DeFoor had stuck to his earlier theme of transformation. He assured the felons that he, too, had struggled.
''Perhaps, if I hadn't been so bullheaded, it wouldn't have been so slow,'' he says. ``We all must ask God to forgive us for whatever got us here and for the things that didn't.''
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