Ron and Carol Pierce reflect on service

The Pierces were leaving a hardware store in downtown Kalispell when a young man came running out after them yelling, “Chaplain! Chaplain!” eager to greet the couple that had helped change his life years before.

The man, a former convict, had graduated from the Treasure State Correctional Training Center, better known as “the boot camp,” at the Montana State Prison a few years prior and had begun a successful job at the store soon after his release.

Ron and Carol Pierce served the camp and its “booters” through their volunteer prison ministry for more than 20 years, but this past September they said a tearful goodbye when the state voted to close the 23-year-old program.

“Honestly, I think it was the best thing in corrections because it just made such a difference in individuals’ lives,” Ron said of the camp. “It made those guys own what they did. It not only was a very disciplined program, but it taught them self-respect, that ‘I don’t have to be a convict anymore.’”

The boot camp offered inmates who volunteered for the program an alternative to prison with the potential to shorten their sentences while rehabilitating their attitudes, physical stamina and behavioral conduct before their re-entry into society.

“Boot camp” ran as a military-style facility that required inmates to complete 120 days of intense physical training while also participating in any of their individually required courses, such as anger management, parenting classes, GED completion and more.

Booters’ days began at 5 a.m. and did not end until 10 p.m., day in and day out.

Often their single time of respite each week came at 2 p.m. on Sundays when the Pierces arrived, toting their musical instruments and song booklets for up to two hours of worship, prayer and biblical teaching.

“Those guys loved to sing,” Ron said. “They would have sang the whole hour and a half if we let them.”

WHEN THEIR ministry at the camp began in 1997, Ron and Carol were leading a small congregation in the Swan Lake area and had been for nearly 30 years.

Their time as pastors came to a screeching halt when disaster struck that year, nearly taking Carol’s life in its wake.

One Sunday, in between church and their scheduled trip to Deer Lodge, Ron was napping in his recliner in their living room when he felt a tap on his foot.

Carol lay at his feet on the floor and asked him for prayer, saying she couldn’t stand the pain.

Ron knelt and prayed with his wife and within five minutes, he said, her pain subsided.

Three days later, though, it returned, and the Pierces drove to the nearest emergency room where the on-duty doctor delivered a potentially fatal misdiagnosis and sent them home with no more than a bottle of muscle relaxers.

That night, Carol suffered in silence as the pain continued, not wanting to wake her husband.

By the following weekend, her pain had only gotten worse, so they contacted a church friend who doubled as their doctor’s head nurse.

After hearing her symptoms, the nurse urged the couple to get to the clinic immediately, and after an EKG and a blood test, they had their answer.

The tests concluded that Carol was having a heart attack, known at a “Widow Maker,” and had been having one for a week.

One of the main arteries to her heart was clogged with blood clots and one massive clot the size of a hen’s egg rested inside one of her heart’s chambers.

Their doctor decided the artery had to be cleaned out but feared the procedure would dislodge the egg in her heart.

So grave was her condition that he advised her children to say their goodbyes just in case.

Once Ron and Carol sat alone in the hospital room in the moments before she was to undergo surgery, Carol looked at her husband and said, “I don’t want to leave you.”

He replied, “Don’t.”

THE TWO began dating when Carol was 13 and Ron was 16, and were married four years later.

Even through the tears of what he thought might be their last moments together, however, Ron said they both felt a peace, that God was in control.

Hours later, Carol came through the surgery without complications, a miracle, Ron said, but their family held their breath over the next few weeks for fear that the bigger clot might still be dislodged before it fully dissolved.

Ron said the second miracle came when the doctor scanned Carol’s heart three weeks later to find the massive clot completely gone and that part of her heart pumping full force once again with no signs of damage.

“I tell everybody if you don’t believe in miracles you look right there,” Ron said, pointing to his wife. “And there’s no other answer for that, for someone to have a continual heart attack for a week and live through it with no damage.”

After Carol’s heart attack, the couple decided to resign from their positions at the church, devoting most of their attention to the 380-mile weekly drive to and from the boot camp.

The first Sunday they made the drive, Ron said they thought they were just filling in until the program found a full-time chaplain.

Upon their arrival, one of the inmates raised his hand and asked for permission to speak.

When Ron gave it, the man stood and said, “We were out on our run this morning, and I prayed that somebody would come. It’s been a long time.”

Ron said the tears started rolling and he lost it.

At the end of the session, however, he said he looked at his wife and said, “We can’t make this drive every Sunday,” to which she replied, “Why not?”

Carol had suffered from severe carsickness from the time she was a child, but since that day, Ron said, she has never been carsick again.

Add to that the fact that over the 20 years and more than 350,000 total miles to and from the camp, the couple missed one Sunday due to bad road conditions, and Ron said he could only conclude that “God just wanted us to.”

OVER THE last two decades, the Pierces have served approximately 3,500 men and women at both ends of the spectrum, from parolees to repeat offenders with nowhere else to turn and have seen several turn their lives completely around.

One such instance occurred when a man who’d been attending their service for weeks spoke up to ask a question.

He’d been a Christian before he was convicted, Ron said, and had since convinced himself there was no hope left for him.

He attended the service each week to escape from the drill instructors for a while, according to Ron, but resigned himself to sitting in the back “looking miserable” until one Sunday when Ron read from 1 John 1:9.

The verse says, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”

His attention peaked, the man raised his hand and asked, “Does that mean me?”

“Yes, that means you,” Ron said, and he went back to kneel and pray over the man.

“And that man, it was a transformation like you’ve never seen,” Ron said. “All of a sudden he just lit up. He smiled, and from that point until he left there he was just beaming to think that even though he had known better and fallen away that God would forgive him.”

THOUGH SEVERAL people praised the program and its graduates and some state legislators fought to keep it, the legislature reached a verdict in April that the facility would be put to better use as a drug and alcohol treatment program to help veterans re-enter society.

The boot camp program, according to the Montana Department of Corrections, could accommodate up to 60 inmates in the program, but because of the voluntary nature of the program, on average, it only filled about 36 of those spaces.

The department’s records state that in 2016 the program cost approximately $161 per person per day and left spaces that could have been used to alleviate some of the state’s prison overcrowding unused.

The new drug and alcohol program will fill all 60 beds, turning control of the facility over to the prison instead of the Department of Corrections, and will cost approximately $109 a day per person to run.

Some details of the program are still under development and have not been finalized and the facility is not yet back up and running, according to Montana Department of Corrections Director of Communications Judy Beck.

Ron said he felt the boot camp’s termination was a mistake as was the process by which it occurred, but said he hoped its replacement program would be successful.

The “booters” still working through the boot camp at the end of September were pushed through and graduated a month early.

The Sunday after the program officially closed, Ron said he had to grip his car’s steering wheel hard to keep it from going to Deer Lodge after church.

Though both of the Pierces agreed they miss the program and consider the camp the highlight of their ministry, they said they felt a peace about it and were ready to move on.

The couple’s chapter at the prison ends as they approach their 60th wedding anniversary on Nov. 22, the day before Thanksgiving; and Ron smiled at his wife as he said they both have much to be thankful for.

Reporter Mary Cloud Taylor can be reached at 758-4459 or mtaylor@dailyinterlake.com.