ARNET HALES is no starry-eyed idealist with his head in the clouds.

The 60 year old cook has maintained long-term friendships with murderers ­– and with  more ordinarily tragic drunks and drug addicts. He knows it takes more than an instantaneous conversion experience to change lives.

He also knows the system that dumps offenders and abusers into his community of Port Hardy, and after a few months takes them back into one form of institutional care or another. Having observed this revolving door first hand, he’s ready to do something about it.

Hales and his wife Gina have started Hope Builders Christian Restorative Ministries. It will operate out of Providence Place, a down-and-out hotel recently purchased by Port Hardy Christian Fellowship for its new home.

Hope Builders will minister to ex-convicts and rehab graduates. Each individual will  be offered a ‘Circle of Support and Accountability’ (CoSA). Started in 1994 by a Mennonite pastor responding to a call for help from a soon-to-be-released convict, CoSA initiatives have spread to the United States, the U.K. and all major Canadian cities – and have cut the reoffending rate of sexual offenders by more than half.

Hales is a believer in the grace of God – especially as in “There but for the grace of God go I.” Like many of the offenders he plans to find support for, he was sexually assaulted as a child in Swift Current, Saskatchewan.

The abuser, he said, was “a frequent user of the Avenue Hotel, in the company of the many who drank in the bar, then slept it off in one of the rooms.” The hotel, he said, was “a prime location for the abuser and the abused.”

He is now able to apply a positive perspective to the trauma.

“Nothing happens by accident,” said Hales. “If I hadn’t been abused, my mother wouldn’t have sent me to live with my aunt and uncle. They wouldn’t have sent me every summer to camp. So if I hadn’t been abused, I would never have found Jesus.”

On the final day of his first camp experience, during what they called “the Hallelujah Windup,” he experienced “a welling up, a bursting out. I spoke in tongues.” His path then clearly became one of grace and faith.

While studying in a seminary in Elkhart, Indiana in 1983, he discovered a Mennonite community recovery project a church had started to deal with the manufacturing town’s sudden economic decline. Called Hope Industries, the project trained out-of-work factory workers as carpenters and other tradesmen, and rebuilt or renovated abandoned Elkhart homes in the process.

“Many of them fell in love with the houses they’d repaired, and bought them,” he recalled.

The idea of building hope in people has stayed with Hales through several careers. For 14 years in the Okanagan, he worked with the One Way Adventure Foundation, helping “kids from all walks of life who’d given up on themselves.”

After moving to Port Hardy, he worked eight years for Rediscovery International, operating camps for Native children.

“I saw the devastation worked on the Native people by residential schools and community relocation,” he said. He got to deal with the human consequences of communities being uprooted, and people’s homes burned behind them by government agents ­– as they were packed together into poorly built houses outside Port Hardy.

Hales has retained his connection with the local Native community, and in particular a friendship with a Native man – a chronic alcoholic who goes in and out of jail. “I’m his only friend. His sister has given up on him.”

Hales offers him support when he falls, but also accountability: in other words, Hales isn’t afraid to tell his friend when his behaviour is harmful to himself or others.

“I need support; I don’t need accountability,” is his friend’s response – but he gets both.

People like his friend have next to no chance of staying out of jail without some help, said Hales. They are drawn naturally back to their familiar haunts, associates and behaviours. If they have alienated their family and former friends, their only hope is in a support group like a CoSA.

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Conventionally, CoSAs help only sex offenders; but Hales would like to widen the scope of the ones he sets up in Port Hardy – to include other offenders with a strong likelihood of reoffending.

As a rule, CoSAs only work with offenders whose “warrant has expired,” said Hales; they have served all their time, and the prison/legal systems have no leverage over them. This, he said, means they must really want help to stay out of jail. They meet regularly with their circles, who offer help – sometimes emotional, sometimes professional – as the offender copes with families, the courts and social services.

 In Abbotsford,  where a Christian prison ministry called M2/W2 (Man to Man, Woman to Woman) operates several CoSAs in co-operation the Catholic Charities, the success rate is impressive. According to M2/W2 executive director Wayne Northey; there have been no re-offences in six years.

A southern Ontario study recently reported CoSA members sexually reoffending at a rate 70 percent lower than other sex offenders released from jail, and reoffending 57 percent less than the others in all forms of violent crime.

Why does it work? “In one word, community,” said Northey. Elaborating theologically, he added: “We are made in the image of a trinitarian God, so we are meant to be persons in community.”

CoSAs refer to the repentant offender as the ‘core member’ of the circle. The circle offers a community that the core member wants to do his best for, said Northey. But the circle is also quite prepared to “turn him into the police if he reoffends. We’ve done it – and we tell them that.”

M2/W2 circle volunteer Pascal Adam described the work “sometimes very difficult, sometimes easy.”

The hard part, he said, is restraining oneself from becoming a nag with the core member, and overwhelming him with warnings about dangerous behaviours and the choices that could lead him back to offending: “Things that could weaken his common sense like drinking” – or, in the case of sex offenders, “hanging out in swimming pools or playgrounds.

“It’s case-specific,” said Adam. “And the more honest the core member is about his criminal behaviour, the better it is for him.” His own core member has been “on the street” for nine months without reoffending, after 20 years behind bars.

Most CoSA volunteers across Canada come from churches, Northey said. Hales noted that some Christians find it pretty hard to befriend sexual offenders and other recidivists; but he’s still put out the word that he’s looking for volunteers.

“I don’t believe in giving up on people,” he said. “I want to convince people that people in jail aren’t bad.” And the results of CoSAs bear him out.

Arnet Hales can be reached at arnet.hopebuilders@gmail.com and 250.949.9542.

– Steve Weatherbe

July 2009