Some kids collect baseball cards. Some collect Barbie dolls. When Jessica Santiago was a kid, she collected felonies and misdemeanors. “My story, I started drinking when I was thirteen and getting high by the time I was fourteen,” she says. “By the time I was nineteen, I’d built up a pretty good criminal record.”
“Even my name—Jessica Santiago—in Spanish, ‘Santiago’ means ‘James.’ So, I guess you could say my name is really ‘Jesse James.’”
Most people who knew Jessica Santiago/Jessie James back in her wilder days would probably not be surprised to learn that now she spends most of her time behind bars. What would surprise them is the reason why: Jessica and her husband Scotty are endorsed Southern Baptist prison chaplains.
“We work in correctional facilities all over Florida, and every day we meet people who are just like I was,” she says. “Every one of them needs to know what Scotty and I discovered—that real prison is not walls and barbed wire.”
“Real prison is sin, and only Jesus can free you from that.”
Called to Serve
Jessica Santiago’s journey from felon to chaplain began at Idlewild Baptist Church in Lutz, Florida. “A coworker invited me,” she says, “and my first Sunday visiting there was actually the first time in my life I’d ever set foot inside a church.” Idlewild Baptist is where Jessica gave her life to Christ and, several years later, received a tap on the shoulder that changed her life.
“Right in the middle of the worship service, someone sitting behind me handed me a piece of paper,” she says. “I took it and asked what it was, and the guy who gave it to me said, ‘It’s an application for prison ministry. I think you’d be good at it.’”
Curiosity and an enthusiastic response to a recent Missions Week altar call— “When the pastor asked if anyone felt called to missions, I shot up like a jet fighter pilot in an ejection seat,” Jessica says—prompted her to kick the tires on an upcoming prison ministry event.
“I went and met all these people in prison who had my story,” she says. “I was able to tell them about how I discovered that Jesus is real. It was amazing. And so, next time I was in church, I told people, ‘I want to join our prison ministry,’ and they said, ‘Well, we don’t have one.’ “And so, I said, ‘Okay then, we need to start one.’”
“That’s how we ended up starting Passion for Prison.”
Enter Scotty
Jessica and Scotty can both recall the exact day and time they met—January 7, 2003, at 6:35 p.m. It was about the same time Jessica was launching Passion for Prison.
“When I first met Jessica, I knew she was the one God had for me,” Scotty says. “But she was doing prison ministry, and she told me, ‘If you’re going to be with me, you’ll have to come to prison with me.’”
“At first, I thought she must be out of her mind—I’d spent my whole life trying to stay out of prison. But I think pretty much everybody knows prison doesn’t usually change people for the better. The only thing I’ve seen genuinely change a person’s heart is Jesus, so after I prayed about it, I knew this is what God was calling us both to do.”
The calling as a couple came first. Southern Baptist endorsement came soon thereafter. “Our pastor came to us and said, ‘I think it’d really help your ministry if you were endorsed as Southern Baptist chaplains,’” Jessica says. “So, we got endorsed through the North American Mission Board, and that turned out to be such a beautiful thing. It gave us credentials and access, and even now, it helps us get into places we couldn’t otherwise go.”
“And it’s not just that,” Scotty says. “There are retreats, and there’s training, and not long ago we were even featured as part of WMU’s Christmas in August. We got all kinds of gifts to further our ministry, and people reached out to let us know they were praying for us.”
“It’s all been so amazing—without endorsement, we would’ve missed all that.”
Conversation Pieces
Being endorsed has also helped create another unique privilege for the Santiagos. Now, when they show up inside a prison, they can do so on two wheels.
“As often as we’re able, we ride our motorcycles into prison,” Jessica says, “because there might be 1,500 people there, and most of them don’t care about God or Jesus. But if you put a motorcycle in the prison yard, you’ll get 80% of the population out there. Everybody’s asking, ‘How did you get that motorcycle in here?’ and that’s how gospel conversations start.”
“When we show up on our motorcycles,” Scotty says, “we’re typically there from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. and we’re sharing Jesus pretty much the whole time, sometimes one-on-one, sometimes one-on-thirty, and after more than 20 years of doing that, we’ve now shared Jesus with more than 18,000 inmates.”
Evangelism conversations are at the heart of Scotty and Jessica’s ministry. However, they also lead worship services and Bible studies. They disciple, train, and encourage others, and they even help people adjust to life on the outside after their release.
“We say all the time, ‘Who do you want living next to you—a released criminal or a released Christian?’” Scotty says. “The recidivism rate here in Florida is over 80%. But the people in our database that we keep track of—when they get out, we mentor them one-on-one, we help them find a church and get plugged in—for them, the recidivism rate is less than 10%.”
“The gospel really does change lives.”
A New and Better Collection
Jessica Santiago used to collect felonies and misdemeanors. Now she and Scotty collect salvation stories.
“We don’t have any children of our own, but now we have spiritual children all over Florida,” she says. “There’s Freddie—he was 74 years old when we met him and serving a life sentence. Freddie ended up sending me a Mother’s Day card every year until he passed away.”
“There’s Sylvester,” Scotty says. “Jesus turned his life around, and now that he’s been released, he goes back into prisons with us to share the gospel.”
“We see these people everywhere,” Jessica says. “We’ll be at a restaurant, and the waitress will tell us, ‘Hey, I know you. I was in prison, and you visited me,’ or the cashier at the grocery store will hug us and say, ‘Thank you for coming and telling me about Jesus.’”
“Seeing these people again and again and again and again, and hearing how Jesus has changed their lives, there’s no greater joy than that.”
Learn more about the Santiago’s prison ministry.
Learn more about how you can become an SBC-endorsed chaplain.