DIRECT REENTRY | SKAGIT COUNTY

OUR LOCAL ROOTS

Underground Ministries’ statewide organizing—our One Parish One Prisoner and Underground Employment models—all springs from our historical and ongoing work of relationship and reentry among gang-impacted families here in Washington State’s Skagit Valley.

Since 2005, relationships that began in Skagit County Jail Bible studies have grown—through streets, jails, late night gang meetings, migrant camps, prisons, solitary confinement, deeper regions of the heart and the trust won or lost there, then out of the underground through release planning, recovery, employment, parental custody, and even fly-fishing.

Many of these stories reached far beyond our little valley with the publication of Chris Hoke’s book, WANTED.

That led to the wider engagement of communities beyond our valley, the One Parish One Prisoner model to help people enter these stories in their own cities, and eventually the formation of Underground Ministries as a new nonprofit.

But our roots keep going deeper here in the Skagit Valley.

Here’s some of them:

REENTRY NAVIGATORS

Some of the men whose own journey of healing and transformation out of jail, gangs, prison, addiction, and reentry—like Alex here—are now “credible messengers” to guide others out of the underground life.

Alex Sanchez, Eric Flores, Genaro Sanchez, Ramon Luna and Tony Cienfuegos are now leading our growing Skagit County work as Reentry Navigators.

They know the way out of the hells of prison, gang violence, addiction and despair.

They’ve found that path within themselves, through the system, and into the community with new relationships around them.

These Navigators are now carrying out our holistic work of DEEP CHAPLAINCY and REENTRY ACCOMPANIMENT with a growing roster of dozens and dozens of gang-affected men now reaching out, asking for help to change their own lives.

We’re happy to outline what that looks like:

DEEP CHAPLAINCY

What do we mean by that?

BOTTOM OF THE SYSTEM

We seek to know and commune with those at the bottom of the American prison system: violent offenders, gang members (active and former), those in solitary confinement, undocumented immigrant children, those hidden behind facial tattoos and buried in hopelessness, addiction, even Satanism.

That is, not ones sitting front row in every prison chapel and program.

Rather, we have learned through relationship with the men and women who assume God wants nothing to do with them, and they've accepted this dark story.

GANG FOCUS

While we seek to love and support opportunities for all incarcerated people through our One Parish One Prisoner program, our local Direct Reentry work embraces our unique history and strength to serve the most rejected and over punished population in our state: gang members.

Mexican gangs are at the intersection of mass incarceration and immigration issues in America today. This is the "double-underground" where we began as a ministry.

We have found those affected by gangs to be uniquely marginalized before, during, and after incarceration. We are usually working with migrant children who grew up—like thousands of others—in extreme poverty, racially isolated in rural communities, exploited by industry, and afraid of the law. They were traunatized, afraid, looking for any community that would say, “We got you.”

DEEP RELATIONSHIP

By "deep chaplaincy," we mean not only going to those at the bottom, but going beyond spiritual programming into deeper relationship with individuals. We seek to incarnate in relationship, not just proclaim, the Good News incarnated in Christ: that God delights in us and descends from heaven to earth, then from earth into hell itself, to embrace us and so dissolve the walls between us.

This is a relationship-focused approach more than a program.

As one former prisoner once said, "I lived in a world where each night I wasn't sure if the man sleeping in my cell would stab me. So I had to learn how to trust my pastor and friend, a real person, before I could trust a God I couldn't see." We believe faith (trust) is learned or lost through flesh-and-blood relationships. 

OVER TIME

As incarcerated men move from facility to facility, we stay in touch through letters, prison emails, expensive private-company collect calls, books, assistance with their families when possible, and one-on-one visits in facilities across Washington State. This is not common in chaplaincy.

BENEATH OLD ROLES

When we truly connect, when God is with us, it is not clear who is redeeming whom. The feeling is mutual.

Sometimes we meet men through our regular dialogical Bible studies and visits in Skagit County Jail and Juvenile Detention. Sometimes through our years of gang outreach on the streets. And sometimes through deep relational channels from one prisoner to another. 

We seek to know these individuals' stories, to hear the depths of their buried cries and trauma, and to witness their beauty, healing, and resurrection over time. 

We believe the light shines most clearly in the dark. And that the love of God is made most manifest to a society when it transforms those we despise and fear, from our demons into our unexpected friends.

REENTRY ACCOMPANIMENT

We focus on helping those we love in prison, in gangs, develop hope and individualized release plans leading up to their release dates.

We pick them up at the prison gate, celebrate them. We accompany them through the gauntlet of legal and social barriers that keep most returning citizens in a kind of civic underworld: no driver's license, crushing legal debt, felony record, barred from many legal employment and housing options. Most reluctantly embrace the underground lifestyle, defiant to a society that clearly does not want them, and so quickly re-offend and go back to prison.

But given a new network of support and open doors, many men we accompany can timidly step into a new life of fatherhood, legitimate employment, and community belonging that is entirely new to them.

We believe this is where the greatest potential for transformation lies—not only for gang members and prisoners to begin an entirely new life, but for the wider community of churches, employers, and families to learn anew how to love and share life with our neighbors we formerly relegated to ghettos and lockdown human landfills. 

REENTRY AS RESURRECTION

Much jail and prison ministry sadly stops with the spiritual renewal of prisoners still trapped in prison.

Lazarus is our model, the patron saint of dead men whom Jesus loves and so raises from the realm of the dead. Jesus doesn't leave the newly-awakened Lazarus still sealed in the tomb.

He goes further and calls the community to get involved. It takes a community to roll away the stones, the massive barrier between the living and the dead. Building webs of relationships in our communities, we together can handle things like legal debt down payments, transportation, childcare, employment connections, landlords, and more.

And Jesus also tells the community to help "unbind" Lazarus—from all those death wrappings that protected him underground. And so the protective "layers" of anger, distrust, addiction, violence, gang mentality, and identity masks are slowly removed in new experiences of healing relationship, second chances, and community belonging. 

We also have been removing gang tattoos with partnering laser clinics for years.

Along with our reentry accompaniment of individuals, we are increasingly involved with city, county, state, and national organizing around this work.

Resurrection and reentry are holistic endeavors—both spiritual and socioeconomic, deeply personal and frustratingly practical. We need grants and grandmas and community gardens alike. It requires a balance of broad community organizing and delicate trauma counseling and care. 

We believe this reduces recidivism, affects generational change as returning prisoners become healthy dads, and ultimately reintegrates—resurrects—our fragmented communities into a new wholeness.

We maintain a long roster of gang-affected prisoners we know from our first 18 years of pastoral work, and we continue to practice deep chaplaincy through letters, calls, release planning, and reentry accompaniment into Skagit County and nearby towns.

Our One Parish One Prisoner and Underground Employment models have become the heart of our work to mobilize your community to try what we’ve learned here at home.