[StBernard] The warden and the minister

[Westley Annis]

The warden and the minister
John DeSantis City Editor 
Published: Saturday, May 30, 2009 at 6:01 a.m. 
Last Modified: Friday, May 29, 2009 at 10:09 p.m. 
There's been a lot of talk about Jesus lately at the Lafourche Parish jail.

It's a hell-hole of a lockup where one would more likely be looking for the
devil. Oh he's there, for sure, Old Scratch is - a lot easier to find than
Jesus in such a place. But Jesus is around, and it started with the new
warden, Alan Abadie. He's salty and irreverent and swears as well as a
sailor. 

Abadie looks and sounds like someone you'd meet at a Chalmette card game.
It's that accent, the St. Bernard Parish thing, that sounds like Brooklyn. 

Except he doesn't play cards.

"I've got a good poker face, though," he says.

It started with a prayer service with the help of some local ministers. On
Easter Sunday, there was the shipping of some trusties to Peltier Park for a
dawn service.

Nobody is forced to do any of this, of course, this being the U.S. and
separation of church and state and all of that. 

Now there is more talk of Jesus in the jail, and a lot of it is done by an
inmate who is sort of a jail minister. Live-in, if you get my drift.

Donovan King is his name, and he is 28 years old. Got sent up on a drug
charge and then got paroled. Then he got stupid again, Donovan King did, and
it was back in the slammer for him.

His crime was disgraceful. He snatched a purse.

These days, he freely talks about it.

"I've thought about it. I think of how that could have been my mom or my
sister and I really wish I had the opportunity to apologize to her.

"I still wake up and ask myself how could I do something like that. . I ask
God to forgive me, and I am now just obedient to God," King said during a
Friday conversation.

He knows he has hard time ahead of him, maybe as long as three years.

But this time around, he is certain that being straight with God will help.

There's no angle for him to play, he said. There will be no getting out of
his sentence.

"I feel like what I did, I got to pay the cost," he said.

But there will be a lot of having to get into the world once he is released,
and Donovan King has plans. So he talks about this to other inmates, and
Abadie the cussing warden has been letting it happen because he can see that
it makes things just that much more manageable. 

A visiting minister - one of Abadie's visiting ministers - gave the
fledgling jail minister his hook-up with Jesus.

"I found God inside of my life and I just got up and I read Luke 15, about
when you was lost and now you're found, and I read that and I gave my
testimony," King said. "I said I wanted to do the prison ministry. I decided
I just want to give up my life to God. It was something I prayed on, and my
prayers got answered. The warden and God gave me an opportunity to talk to
all the guys on the different blocks, where they used to have a lot of
fussing and fighting."

Once he is out on the streets again, Donovan King is convinced, he wants to
find the way to a ministry.

"I fully predict that one day I will be a minister with a church," he said.

As for the people he is ministering to on the cellblocks of this jail, he
also says that he knows some might talk a good game, maybe even more
interested in attacking boredom than the evil inside.

So, he was asked, if he talked to 20 people and out of the 20 only one
decided to turn his life around and do good things instead of bad things, is
that worth it? Is it worth Lafourche Parish taking a chance on this warden
from a strange place with strange ideas that people who believe in things
like routine caning say could be on the wrong track?

Donovan King, the self-appointed jail minister, has a ready answer.

"It's in Luke," he said. "If you have 99 sheep and they were lost but you
found one, and God said it would be more glory in the kingdom of God to save
that one. So if I could save one then I am doing a good thing."

The warden wasn't asked about scripture specifically.

Abadie isn't trying to win converts for Christ, Buddha or anyone else. He
knows his job is to protect society from people like Donovan King, not to
save souls. But if souls get saved in the process, and society is safer
because of that, so be it.

"I don't care to put a number of a ratio or a percentage or even a measure
of success. We make it available. If we can turn around one out of 1,000, we
have benefited society," Abadie said. "The minute you try to put numbers on
whether you have success then you are dooming yourself to failure. I am just
giving them tools to respect themselves and respect society, and that means
they have to look inwardly first."

John DeSantis can be reached at 448-7614 or by e-mail at

john.desantis at dailycomet.com.