This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

I went to prison in November. I'm probably not an ex-convict though. My "sentence" was only for a couple of hours, time enough for me to speak to a group of inmates at the Point of the Mountain facility.

JB Hendrickson, the LDS bishop for one of two inmate branches at the prison, invited me. I'm not sure exactly why. Maybe it's because he reads this column and thought I could relate to them better than the usual sacrament meeting speaker. If so, I consider it a compliment.

So, on a cold dark night in November I drove out to the prison and met with Bishop Hendrickson, his wife, and several other couples in the parking lot.

We went through the usual visitor screening: bag searches, coat removals, sign-ins and warrant checks. It was rather subduing.

The process seems designed to both remove potential threats to security and intentionally impress on prison visitors that they are no longer in whatever was previously regarded as Kansas.

It wasn't my first time in lockup. Sonny is a retired corrections officer. Back when he was working, I visited him a number of times. It's where I learned how to behave in an environment full of convicted criminals. Ironically, the basic rules in prison are the same ones in church.

1. Submit to authority.

2. Keep my hands to myself.

3. Mind my own damn business.

Even so, I didn't know what to expect this particular night. After all, I was speaking to Mormon inmates. What would they look like and how would they act?

When we arrived at the prison chapel (built by inmates in 1958), Bishop Hendrickson and I stood in a line of greeters as the inmates filed in. We shook their hands and thanked them for coming … just like regular church.

"Hey, Brother Kirby. Welcome."

"Hi, Kirb. I'm John. Thanks for coming."

"Kirby, I'm Brad. I've been looking forward to this."

We sang a hymn and said a prayer. Bishop "JB" conducted some branch business and then introduced me as if I were merely visiting from the Tribune 5th Ward.

When I got up to speak, I had no real idea of what to say. What could a former cop, a current scofflaw, and a go-to-church Mormon have to say that could possibly be of interest to such a group?

Standing at the lectern it hit me. With one or two exceptions, I could have been looking at priesthood meeting in my own Herriman ward, or just about any other LDS ward in Utah.

With the noticeable exception of inmate jumpsuits (and no neckties), the congregation could have passed for a group of former stake high councilors and recently returned missionaries. Probably because that's what a lot of them were.

It only passingly occurred to me that they were also a group of convicted embezzlers, rapists, drug dealers, pedophiles, thieves, and maybe even murderers.

Yeah, the vast majority of them probably deserved to be there but that didn't make them less human than the people I went to church with every Sunday. Hell, in some ways many of them were probably better.

I ended up giving the same talk that I would have given in regular church, that life was largely about coming to terms with the humbling nature of our own stupidity. And that only by doing that could we ever be of any real use to each other.

Did it go over well? I don't know. The ones who stayed after said I didn't cuss any more in church than Bishop Hendrickson, so maybe it did.

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