From 2010 to 2015 I was incarcerated at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee, the site of death row for the men’s prison system. Though I wasn’t housed on death row, as the editor of the Maximum Times prison newspaper and, for a time, the chaplain’s clerk, I was on occasion able to visit. It was there that I was fortunate enough to meet author, prison volunteer and death row pastor Joseph B. Ingle.
Ingle, a reverend with the United Church of Christ, began ministering to the condemned in 1975. Prison volunteers don’t normally have access to all areas of a facility—certainly not death row—but Ingle could just walk in like staff. His experience, and something about his unassuming demeanor, makes governors and legislators seek him out.
Ingle’s gentleness was always in stark contrast to the harshness of the cold steel and concrete. He was a humble student of prison culture, and to speak with him you’d never guess he’s been twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He spends little time talking about himself. Compliment him and he’ll likely blush and change the subject. He prefers to focus his energies on the condemned and their families, and anyone who will help change the culture of killing in United States prisons.
Ingle’s book Too Close to the Flame: With the Condemned inside the Southern Killing Machine, published in May, chronicles the 45 years he’s spent ministering to people on death row. Not just at Riverbend, but across the South. He became friends with many of the condemned, and thus prayed with many friends in their final moments before they were killed by the state.
“If you don’t know a person, it’s easier to kill [them], so staying away from the flame keeps you safe,” Ingle told Filter when asked about the title. “Proximity brings compassion and humanity. We have empathy when we really see someone, up close and personal.”
So many years so close to the flame took their toll. One of the only sources of comfort he found, as he endured multiple sclerosis and his wife Becca was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, was laying with her listening to her heartbeat. To hear the sound of life still inside the person he loved soothed him and gave him hope.
Today, they live in an organic farming community where they grow around 200 blueberry bushes. But Ingle’s life’s work is with the people condemned to death. He wants people to understand that people don’t end up on death row because of any single decision. Many people he’s known who were executed were not the perpetrators of the violence for which they were condemned to death. All were poor. The vast majority of people tried in death penalty cases—around 90 percent—cannot afford a lawyer.
Ingle’s work led him to found the Southern Center for Human Rights to fight systemic “extermination, or obliteration through lengthy sentences.” The organization’s services include providing legal representation to people condemned to death in Georgia and Alabama.
Ingle thinks it absurd that mass incarceration or capital punishment prevent further violence. It’s self-evident that they are a cause, not a solution.
In 2007 Ingle sat vigil with Phillip Workman before his killing by lethal injection. As they waited for the execution to begin, they could hear the witnesses in the room next door laughing.
Instead of requesting a last meal for himself, Workman requested that the Tennessee Department of Correction give a vegetarian pizza to anyone in the area who was homeless. TDOC denied the request, prompting hundreds of pizzas to be donated to shelters around Nashville and across the US. In 2019, Workman’s friend Don Johnson made the same last-meal request before his own execution. TDOC denied that request, too.
“It’s interesting that the South is the most religious region of the country,” he told Filter, “while at the same time is [its] largest killing field and imprisoning machine.”
Governor Bill Lee (R) of Tennessee, who campaigned on Christian values and in 2019 said that as a man of faith, his death penalty decisions weigh heavily on him, would not come pray with Ingle and the condemned.
Lee, who took office in 2008, initially denied requests for stays of execution, including Johnson’s. But in 2022 he ordered a moratorium on all executions in Tennessee amid an investigation into improper lethal injection practices.
Ingle was present at the execution of Charles Brooks in 1982, the first in the US carried out by lethal injection. He has seen over the years that many of these deaths are not painless.
Tennessee’s investigation revealed that the drugs used in lethal injections were not tested for contaminants, and the state had not been following its own protocols since revising them in 2018. Between 2018 and 2022 the state executed seven people, two by lethal injection and five by the electric chair.
In May, Lee signed legislation that contradicts the Supreme Court in authorizing the death penalty for a conviction other than homicide. It took effect in July.
In October, TDOC Commissioner Frank Strada revealed that the department would be ready to unveil its new lethal injection process by the end of 2024 or early 2025.
