
                         THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
                 Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, June 6, 1994                    TAG: 9406060200 
SECTION: LOCAL                     PAGE: D2    EDITION: FINAL  
SOURCE: BY FRANK GREEN, Richmond Times-Dispatch 
DATELINE: 940606                                 LENGTH: BOYDTON, VA.

FUNDING HAS RUN OUT FOR DEATH ROW CHAPLAINCY

{LEAD} His parish is a spiritual black hole, his flock the living dead. Nineteen times he has shared the last steps of his condemned sheep.

The Rev. Russell A. Ford's pasture for the past decade has been the Mecklenburg Correctional Center, home of Virginia's death row, where he offers hope, compassion and peace to the murderous and merciless.

{REST} On July 1, Ford's professional stewardship on death row comes to an end because of a lack of funds.

``We always say we have enough chaplains, we just have too many prisons,'' he joked. His work will be taken over largely by volunteers, but a void will remain, a product of a rapidly growing corrections system.

It's not easy to explain why anyone chooses to work with killers waiting to be killed. Ford says this:

``Death is the most sacred experience of conscious human life. The condemned are certainly the outcasts that Jesus wanted the Christian community to go and work with.''

Ford is supervisor of adult services chaplains for Chaplain Services of the Churches of Virginia, and his duties have included ministering to those on death row. The nonprofit group is financed by Virginia's mainline Protestant and Greek Orthodox churches. It provides professional chaplain services to prison inmates. State law forbids the state to pay for chaplains.

The executive director, the Rev. George F. Ricketts, said, ``The problem is, the denominational budgets are shrinking at a time when the prison population is growing.'' Three prisons opened this year, he said.

The service has just three full-time positions and 26 part-time positions. ``Our income now runs around $400,000 a year. We would need to triple that to even begin to meet the needs,'' he said.

Ford's work on death row over the years has made him a familiar presence at the Mecklenburg Correctional Center. He worked closely with Marie Deans, head of the Virginia Coalition on Jails and Prisons, who also has abandoned death row work because of a shortage of funds.

Ford sees death row ``as a parish, with people on a journey of death and dying who need restoration and reconciliation.''

While he says that ``volunteers have done very good work with the men,'' more work is needed.

{KEYWORDS} PRISON DEATH ROW CHAPLAIN by CNB