Most Wednesday nights, Josh Riggs puts on sweatpants and a t-shirt, packs his holy water and his bible, and heads to prison.
It might not be what one would expect a pastor to wear. But for Riggs, it’s an intentional choice. His congregation at the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility women’s prison in South Burlington, wears prison-issued sweats.
So he wears sweats, too.
“I want to make sure they know I’m not above them,” he said.
Riggs described how each week, a correctional officer signs him in and leads him to an institutional-looking room, its walls adorned with murals painted by the women incarcerated there. Before starting his service, he sets the scene.
“I remind people that this is not a multipurpose room,” he said. “This is a sanctuary. This is a cathedral.”
Then, he says, the room-turned-cathedral fills with the sounds of prayer and hymns. At the women’s prison, Riggs says Amazing Grace is the long-running favorite. How sweet the sound.
Riggs leads weekly Christian services at the women’s prison in South Burlington and Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans. He is one of more than 70 people who provide religious support for people incarcerated in Vermont prisons, according to Department of Corrections spokesperson Haley Sommer. Those volunteers come from a wide array of faith groups, among them Protestant, Catholic, Buddhist, Muslim and Jehovah’s Witnesses, Sommer said.
Unlike some other states, Vermont’s Department of Corrections does not hire chaplains. That leaves it up to volunteers and outside organizations to provide religious and spiritual support for the people incarcerated in the state’s prisons.
Church at Prison, where Riggs serves as senior pastor and president, is one of those organizations. Riggs has been ministering with Church at Prison since 2016. While he is paid a modest salary, supported by donations, much of the religious programming inside is led by unpaid volunteers.
Not everyone has equal access, though. While all six of Vermont’s prisons have Christian volunteers, only one currently has a Muslim volunteer, according to Department of Corrections spokesperson Haley Sommer. One facility is currently onboarding a Muslim volunteer, and another is seeking a volunteer to provide Muslim services, Sommer said. Because religious services are all volunteer-provided, access often depends on the resources in the surrounding communities, she said.
Church at Prison has been running services in Vermont’s prisons for over three decades, since it was founded by Pastor Peter Fiske. A sixth-generation Vermonter with “maple syrup in my DNA,” Fiske said he became a born-again Christian at the age of 33. In 1993, when he was 48, he retired early to become a full-time prison minister.
Fiske, now 81, is retired from ministering inside prisons. But that hasn’t stopped him from continuing his work on the outside. He continues to support people who’ve been released, and he helps run New Life Crew, a construction company that employs formerly incarcerated people, who often have trouble finding a job because of their record. Joanne Fiske, his wife, is also recently retired from prison ministry.
Now Riggs has taken up the torch. He came to God later in life: at 36 years old he was agnostic, working as a window and door salesperson, and had no desire to get involved in church. But one night after watching The Rite, an exorcism movie about a seminary student grappling with his faith, Riggs picked up a bible and started reading.
“It was a bad movie,” he said.
Nonetheless, it got him thinking about faith.
“My heart got flipped inside out,” he said.
Riggs became a born-again Christian, and within a few months got involved with prison ministry work. For him, it is a deep expression of his faith, one strongly shaped by the concept of unconditional love.
“Jesus has given us a mandate that if we want to be great in the eyes of God we need to be very least of all people and a servant to all people,” he wrote in an email. “Many inside of prison have come to the lowest moment in their life. I want to be a friend that helps pick them up, dust the dirt off them and walk with them [through] this life, pointing them in the direction of God’s love.”
As a pastor, Riggs gets to know people who are locked up. That includes Alexis Poulin, a 28-year-old woman who died in DOC custody from complications of a MRSA infection in mid-January of this year, according to her death certificate. Riggs calls her Lexie.
She came regularly to his services, he says, and he baptized her at the Chittenden prison. He also helped officiate a memorial for her inside the prison.
“She had very deep and caring relationships with other inmates in that prison,” he said. “There was a lot of love for her, and a lot of pain when she passed away.”
For Fiske and Riggs, the work of ministry doesn’t stop at the prison gate. Riggs spends much of his time supporting people coming out of prison, shepherding them through the emotional and logistical challenges of reentry. And although Fiske is nominally retired, he maintains connections with and provides support for many former prisoners.
In addition to providing a listening ear, Riggs helps set people up with cell phones, buys them food and winter clothing, and drives them to appointments. Donations to Church at Prison are sometimes used to pay for a few nights at a motel for people being released, bridging the gap until they can find something more permanent.
Darline Chamberland met Riggs at the South Burlington women’s prison while she was serving a 14-month sentence there. His Wednesday night services became a highlight of her week. “I’ll be honest, I started going to get out of my cell for a while,” she said. “I ended up keeping going because I liked the way he preached. He doesn’t so-called preach to you, he talks to you.”
When she got out of prison about a year ago, she says he helped connect her with resources on the outside. Since then, they’ve stayed in touch.
“He’s helped me tremendously, inside and out,” she said.
Chamberland said she hasn’t found a church on the outside that makes her feel comfortable the way that Pastor Josh’s services did, but sometimes she wishes she could still attend his church, in that multipurpose-room-turned-cathedral inside the prison.
