He’s been in and out of jails for 25 years

Don Dickinson had it made.

At 49, he was retired from the Los Angeles Fire Department after 25 years on the job.

His pension was good. His wife was employed.

He could have cruised.

Instead, without a round of golf or a swing in a hammock, without a vacation and without passing Go, he went to jail.

As a volunteer chaplain.

Dickinson had spent several years in the Fire Department, training inmates from the Pitchess Detention Center in Castaic to fight wildfires, and he noticed that the same men kept getting locked up for the same crimes. Someone needed to talk some sense into them, and Dickinson, who grew up in a very religious family, wanted to be that guy.

The new job was full time, with crummy conditions and no pay. And Dickinson loved it, week after week, month after month, year after year.

“Oh, he’s in jail,” Dickinson’s wife, Sally, would say when friends asked where he was.

Dickinson has spent more time behind bars than many burglars and armed robbers. Twice in recent years, the Newhall resident became seriously ill with bone cancer and still didn’t miss a day of work. He’d get his morning radiation treatments and go straight to work when he was done.

Last month, Dickinson hit a milestone. July marked his 25th year as a chaplain. For most of that time, Dickinson has toiled for free, as he does now.

“He doesn’t miss an opportunity to help somebody,” Don Stanley, a retired police officer, was saying the other day while Dickinson straightened out the information rack in the family waiting room at Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles.

Dickinson supervises Stanley and 50 other volunteers in the Sheriff Department’s Family Outreach Services program, which he helped establish eight years ago with a volunteer named Dorothy Scharer. The volunteer staff includes an active-duty cop, five retired nurses and two active nurses.

They help family members figure out how to arrange meetings with inmates, they run a mini-day care and play area for children, and they offer counsel on social and religious organizations that can help with everything from alcohol and drug rehab to legal services.

Until eight years ago, Dickinson spent most of his time inside the jail with inmates. He listened, advised, preached and prayed for men dying of cancer and AIDS. “God loves them all,” he says.

But he felt it was a mistake to comfort only the inmates and not the loved ones they had left behind. Maybe he could have more of an impact, he thought, if he advised wives and girlfriends on how they could help break the cycles of crime and incarceration that had ripped their families apart and made the children good candidates to end up like their dads.

About 2,500 visitors arrive daily at Men’s Central, and Dickinson -- who spends half his time there and half at Pitchess -- moved into a cubbyhole that had been the diaper-changing room. There’s space for just his desk and two chairs.

“There’s a lot of people in jail with drug and alcohol problems who get out and continue that activity, as well as abusing their wives and kids,” Dickinson says. “Nobody was out here -- nobody -- to tell them this is not normal.”

Almost daily, he says, a woman comes to him and says she wants to marry an inmate.

Dickinson has a few questions for the women.

Does she know what a good marriage involves? Has she had counseling? Has her boyfriend been sentenced?

If he’s on his way to state prison, does he want to be married only so he can have conjugal visits?

Does the woman really want to raise children on her own while their father is locked up? Does she know that about 70% of the inmates end up back in jail after their release?

“Mostly I try to talk them out of it,” says Dickinson, who has been married 51 years.

Erica, 18, entered Dickinson’s office while we were talking, but she wasn’t looking to get married.

“I have a question,” she said. “I’m studying Christian ministry and I want to go into prison ministry.”

She said she’s a student at a Christian college and was visiting a gang member from her neighborhood who’s awaiting trial on murder charges. Dickinson encouraged her to continue her studies and to consider the need for more counseling of inmate families.

Dickinson would like to think his work can make a difference, although the endlessly exploding jail and prison population is discouraging. He can’t straighten out every family, or turn jails and prisons into rehab facilities rather than warehouses. (The old, medieval section of Men’s Central is “like a dog pound,” he says with appropriate horror.)

But a quote from Mother Teresa hangs on his office wall and serves as a guiding principle:

We can do no great things. Only small things with great love.

“That man is full of love,” says a former inmate named Bedros Hajian. Hajian, formerly convicted of burglary, was back in jail in the late 1980s when he attended a chapel service at the Pitchess jail and heard Dickinson preach.

“He talked about how we have to change our hearts, we have to accept our guilt and not fight back,” Hajian says. “He didn’t look at the circumstances. Whatever you were in for, he just loved you.”

When he got out, Hajian -- who runs drug rehab centers in Glendale and Palmdale -- went to theology school. Today he’s one of two former inmates who were inspired by Dickinson and became volunteer chaplains at L.A. County jails themselves.

“I don’t have any intention of giving this up,” Dickinson says a quarter of a century into his second career. “I’ll keep coming back as long as I’m able to.”

steve.lopez@latimes.com