COLUMN ONE : Inmates Demanding Their Rites : Prisons struggle to cope with explosion in religions, from Christianity to voodoo. Officials say a law allowing access to worship triggers security and legal headaches.

The tiny chapel in the federal prison on Terminal Island is a charmless, no-frills place that has become a Grand Central Station of religious worship.

All week long, a dozen religions come and go: On Friday mornings the chapel--deep inside the Long Beach prison--is reserved for a Jewish prayer service, immediately followed by several dozen shoeless Muslims celebrating Jumah, or Friday prayer.

At sundown, the Hare Krishnas, led by a visiting Brahmin priest, engage in their rhythmic chants, syncopated by the steady beat of a double-headed drum and hand cymbals. Then come the Buddhists for an evening of silent worship before a homemade altar.

That leaves the rest of the week for Catholics and Protestants, Christian Scientists, Mormons, Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and followers of Native American beliefs.

The hectic schedule makes prison Chaplain Abuishaq Abdul Hafiz a bit breathless: “I’ve never seen anything like it. Every day, there’s a new denomination looking for prayer time. I didn’t know the world had so many religions.”

A religious renaissance is sweeping prisons across the land. And wary officials are weighing security concerns while scrambling to meet increased demand for everything from worship time to prayer beads to kosher food.

The size and diversity of congregations behind bars have followed the dramatic rise of the nation’s prison population--from 300,000 in 1980 to more than 1 million.

Prison chaplains and others say religion provides a healthy alternative for restless inmates who compete for dwindling vocational and recreational funds while coping with the loneliness of a life confined.

Officials say this new religious energy also reflects the more pious society at large.

“More and more, we’re hearing prisoners say, ‘I want to adhere to my religious persuasion,’ whatever it is,’ ” said Barry J. Smith, state Department of Corrections religious programs coordinator. “One reason is the more diverse population in prison.

“But let’s not dismiss the increased spiritualism of society in general. As one writer said, ‘If you want to know what society looks like, look inside prisons.’ The religious movement is taking place out there. And in here.”

The ways in which inmates worship are increasing as well: conventional religions such as Christianity and Judaism are being joined by faiths such as Wicca--a form of white witchcraft--and Santeria, which involves voodoo, candles and animal sacrifices.

One powerful springboard for inmates’ diverse religious expression has come from an unlikely source: federal legislators.

In a move to loosen the ties some say have bound religious rights nationwide, Congress in 1993 passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to guarantee the right to worship in school, the workplace--and prison.

Corrections officials say the new religious fervor has forced them to walk a precarious tightrope--balancing a demand for flexibility on inmate rights with security concerns: accommodating anything from a large Catholic Mass to a request to dine on steak and wine, a sacred rite for the tiny Church of the New Song.

And they worry that a flurry of inmate lawsuits inspired by the law will not only overrun the nation’s courts, but invite judges to dictate prison policy.

Officials say they have bent over backward to work with inmates--law or no law. In California--which leads the nation with 125,000 inmates--officials have 150 full- and part-time staff chaplains and 15,000 volunteer clergy.

This spring, state corrections officials formed a steering committee of attorneys, bureaucrats and chaplains to shape policies on inmate spiritual practices.

In recent years, they have introduced kosher food at several prisons and have eased security regulations to allow Native Americans to wear four-inch bands around their braided hair as part of their religious practice.

“Now we’re talking about how to accommodate Sikhs behind bars,” Smith said. “Their faith requires them to carry [a small knife] as a religious expression. Will we allow that? I don’t think so. But we may be able to let them carry some metal attachment to their body; we haven’t determined.”

Critics say there is little proof that religion changes a convert for the good and there is no way to determine sincerity about an inmate’s new self-proclaimed faith.

Furthermore, a 1984 Florida study showed no difference in conduct between inmates who claimed to have had some kind of religious experience behind bars and those who didn’t.

“Those results were a real blow to those who believe that faith was critical in staying out of trouble in prison,” said the study’s author, Byron Johnson, a scholar specializing in religion and crime at Moorehead State University in North Carolina. He is completing a study on religion’s effect on prison recidivism rates.

“Some men make conversions behind bars,” he said. “It’s a story as old as the Bible itself. But just as many play con games, tuck a Bible under their arm and hope to win some points with the parole board.”

Still, the Religious Freedom Act places tougher standards on prison officials, requiring them to use the least restrictive means in regulating any rite or practice.

In its debate over the bill--championed by such unlikely allies as liberal Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and conservative Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), as well as a consortium of 68 sometimes-warring religious and civil rights groups--the Senate defeated an amendment that would have exempted prisons from the reach of the new law.

Led by California Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren, prosecutors and prison officials complained that the law would inspire inmates to file frivolous lawsuits challenging all manner of regulations on religious grounds.

According to Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), lead proponent to exempt prisons, lawsuits filed by inmates are the fastest-growing type of litigation in the country. In a speech to the Senate during debate over the law, Reid said there were 1,000 more civil lawsuits filed by inmates in 1992 than the 48,500 criminal cases filed nationwide in federal court. In 1994, inmates filed a record 53,000 lawsuits.

Last year, Reid unsuccessfully sponsored a bill to exempt prisons from the law and a number of politicians--including Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)--have pledged to support the measure if introduced again this year.

“When you go to prison, your civil liberties are curtailed by definition,” said Steve Telliano, Lungren’s press secretary. “These people have been removed from society at large due to the commission of criminal acts. To grant them additional civil rights under this law not only creates an opportunity for abuse but also for a serious breakdown in the safety of the state prison system.”

However, backers of the law see this as a new era of inmates’ religious rights.

“What this means is prison officials have to take religion seriously,” said Oliver Thomas, a lawyer, Baptist minister and chairman of the Coalition for Free Exercise of Religion, the law’s chief lobbyist group. “They can’t say, ‘Oh, we don’t like that one, forget it.’ Unjustified fears or trumped-up charges will no longer suffice.

“If these bureaucrats cry foul over security reasons, they have to have evidence it will indeed jeopardize security. From now on, religion is going to get a fair hearing in prison.”

Both sides acknowledge that prison lawsuits citing religious practices have increased since the law’s passage in November, 1993. Since then, inmates have prevailed in nine of the 22 religious-based lawsuits decided by the courts nationwide--including a New York inmate who won the right to wear Santeria beads and another who argued that a strip search by two female guards violated his privacy and religious liberty as a Muslim.

Inmates in California’s 31 prisons have filed at least a dozen lawsuits concerning religious rights since late 1993.

In one, a rabbi serving time for money laundering said that officials did not allow him to pursue his religious rights at the federal prison camp at Boron. Among his demands was a kitchen with locked cabinets that only he and guards could open so he could follow a strict Hasidic diet. In April, a judge dismissed his lawsuit.

Inmates and religious volunteers at prisons say such suits are first skirmishes in a prison Holy War.

“Men behind bars realize the law is on their side, they know they can assert themselves,” said Hugh Joseph, a Hare Krishna priest who visits Terminal Island.

Hare Krishna inmates have complained that pork placed on their plates in chow lines contaminates the rest of their food. “The essence of our philosophy is contained in our food intake,” Joseph said. “The time is coming when men in prison have the full benefit of the law. We won’t hesitate to sue to protect our rights.”

John Funmaker agrees.

Although Native Americans won the right to practice their religion in prison in 1979, the 49-year-old former inmate, who helps conduct sweat lodge rites at several prisons, does not believe that the prison bureaucracy takes his religion seriously.

Native Americans believe their souls can be cleansed by sweating in tiny, dome-shaped lodges covered with a tarp or buffalo hides and heated by steam from scalding water poured over hot rocks.

Although many prisons allow sweat lodges, he said, too many have no Native American spiritual adviser.

“For Native Americans, items such as eagle feathers and personal medicines are just as important as crucifixes and Bibles are to mainstream religions like the Catholics,” he said.

“Many of these prison people still haven’t learned that just because you’re incarcerated, you do not lose the right to worship. It’s worth going to court for because too many inmates, including my own people, are losing out.”

*

Most Fridays, when Jan Mohammed Diwan leaves his job as a graveyard-shift security guard, he does not go home to bed.

Instead, the 68-year-old Van Nuys imam--or Islamic religious leader--makes a pilgrimage of sorts to a place far from Mecca:

Federal prison.

Diwan spends a few hours in prayer each week with about 50 inmates in the chapel at the Terminal Island Federal Correctional Institution. He calls them his boys.

Diwan takes a traditional approach to teaching religion behind bars. He does not preach lawsuits or unrest and is respectful of security concerns voiced by the prison.

Still, his religious agenda is as strong as the iron bars through which he passes: He believes every prison should contain a mosque and has embarked on a campaign at a Ventura County reform school to build a $400,000 place of worship in the hope the idea will catch on elsewhere.

When he is not donating time at the prison or a local Islamic community center, Diwan is raising funds to see his dream come true. “I made a pact with God to let me live long enough to see this mosque built,” he said. “He owes me something. And I hope he will deliver it.”

Unlike Diwan, some Muslims have pursued their cases in court.

Inmates in San Diego and Imperial counties recently filed separate lawsuits citing religious discrimination. Their claims included not being allowed to bring food into the prison for a holy day and a complaint that work schedules violated their right to pray on Fridays. Judges dismissed both cases.

Barbara Spiegel, a deputy state attorney general who handled the Muslim inmate lawsuits, says the law’s inclusion of prisons leaves the door open for courts to try to dictate prison policy.

“Think about what this could mean--these suits could be taken to outrageous extremes,” she said. “What if an inmate filed suit over his need to burn 16 candles draped by a black robe for a religious rite and the prison disallowed it as a fire hazard?

“A judge could order us to provide this guy with candles and matches that could hurt other inmates. The court’s solution might be for us to hire more guards to see the prison doesn’t burn down. The problem is we don’t know what a court could say. There’s a lot of room for the courts to tie the hands of prison administrators.”

Proponents say a few bogus lawsuits won’t blunt the law’s finer points. “Everyone knew from the outset there would be kooky claims brought. You can’t underestimate the unfathomable creativity of people in prison to bring spurious lawsuits,” said Thomas, the law’s architect.

“But judges can weed out the kooks and cretins. I mean, I’m not for satanism either. But better to allow one satanist to worship if that helps hundreds and thousands of healthy inmates to practice their faiths as well.”

By his own account, Lemonde Goodlove is one successful prison conversion story. The 38-year-old Oakland man, serving five years for bank robbery, became a Muslim while at Terminal Island. He says that once steered off the drugs and nonsense of the street, it was easy to see the right path.

“The consistency of behavior Islam offers, like praying five times a day, develops character,” he said. “You come in a place like this looking for answers. In a cell at night, you ask questions like, ‘Why the hell am I in here?’ Islam has helped me address that.”

Terminal Island chaplain Hafiz acknowledges that religious inmates have faced brick walls erected by some guards and bureaucrats.

“It’s ignorant,” he said. “Some people think anything that isn’t punishment behind bars should not be allowed.”

The greatest respect, he says, is given among inmates themselves.

“There’s respect for a man’s religion here, even more than in the outside world, because these men know this is all they have,” he said. “Jews help prepare food for Muslim ceremonies. They get along.”

One recent Friday, as imam Diwan arrived at the Terminal Island chapel, the door swung open and a rabbi emerged with a dozen inmates after their service.

“Shalom, shalom,” the rabbi said, raising his arms.

Replied Diwan with a smile: “Allah be with you.”