But the Rev. George Williams, a chaplain there, is flourishing. He leads Catholic masses for about 200 incarcerated men on Sundays in English and Spanish and offers pastoral support during the week. Sharing his faith with inmates has been a source of joy for the bespectacled and soft-spoken priest.
“I look forward to going to work every day,” Williams, who has served as a prison chaplain for 30 years (and at San Quentin for about half that time), told me. It’s like “drinking grace from a fire hose.”
Researchers have found a strong link between faith and happiness—a relationship Williams has experienced at San Quentin as he practices his faith by serving those behind bars. In recent years, social scientists have surveyed people around the world to ask how happy they are. In many cases, they’ve found meaningful correlations between people’s self-reported rankings of happiness and whether they take part in organized religious services.
It doesn’t matter which faith. Similar correlations are found among people practicing Christianity as well as Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism and other faiths—and for people living and working in and outside of prison walls.
