Abuse and Neglect in U.S.A. Residential Treatment Centers DOC. Copies over 40,000 were designated as religious (although the record does not reflect how many total copies were made each month). Building M, a modular building housing InnerChange‘s offices and classrooms, was built in 2000. Under lease-purchase contract, the Telephone Fund paid $294,017 for Building M. DOC payments to InnerChange for costs were deposited to the InnerChange bank account. InnerChange periodically transferred funds to Prison Fellowship‘s general accounts, to cover program operating costs. These general accounts also contain funds from private sources. This mixing of public taxpayer money with private funds (nonprofit charities) makes it difficult if not impossible to be certain that the money was used for secular purposes only and not for exclusively religious purposes. In addition, some of the charity funds were mixed with monies potentially implicated in certain kinds of affinity fraud and other types of fraud. Money was moved around from account to account. There was little accounting transparency to the state government as to who actually got the money eventually. The portion of InnerChange expenses paid by the Prison Fellowship came from these co-mingled funds from other NGO charities. A lawsuit was filed against the Prison Fellowship Ministries at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. The district court case, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State v. Prison Fellowship Ministries, resulted in the finding that the IFI program violated the Establishment Clause. The ruling expelled the program from the prison, and directed IFI to repay the Department of Corrections the $1.5 million that it had been paid by the state. Defendants appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in June 2006. Senior Litigation Counsel Alex J. Luchenitser argued the appeal in February 2007 before a panel that included former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O‘Connor. In December 2007, the Eighth Circuit largely upheld the district court‘s decision. The court held that Iowa‘s involvement with IFI violated the Establishment Clause by the indoctrination of inmates and IFI discrimination against non-Christian inmates. Ronald A. Lindsay, Esq. of the Council for Secular Humanism and Center for Inquiry, stated in their brief that ―No court has ever endorsed governmentfunded religious indoctrination and, as indicated, InnerChange was well aware that their government-funded activities very likely violated the Establishment Clause. Nonetheless, in their zeal to spread their religious message, InnerChange and PFM made a calculated decision to disregard the restrictions of the Establishment Clause in implementing their program.‖
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