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WHAT A PRISON CHAPEL TAUGHT ME ABOUT PUBLIC SPEAKING

By P.G. Sittenfeld

I was a politician. I never expected my next speech would be in prison.

After my fall from public office, I lost the privilege of public speaking. At the prison chapel pulpit, I found it again.

When I was an elected City Council member in my hometown of Cincinnati for nearly a decade, public speaking was part of my everyday life. One day I was speaking about potholes to three people in a dreary community center basement; the next, I was introducing John Legend to an overflow crowd. I loved all of it.

Politicians, of course, are the atypical creatures who don’t need encouragement to grab the mic. Part of my own enjoyment of public speaking was undoubtedly driven by ego. 

But what I liked best was that it was a chance to change — at least for a moment — how people were feeling: to try to elicit at least one smile or laugh or jolt of optimism. Whether I was speaking to two or 2,000 people, I saw it, first and foremost, as an opportunity to boost morale.

Then, in November 2020, I was indicted on public corruption charges. For the next 3½ years, I went from having 10 to 20 speaking invitations a week to zero. And even if the invitations hadn’t come to an abrupt halt, my lawyers would have told me to cease public speaking anyway, heeding the Miranda warning: Anything you say can and will be used against you.

Of course, this was hardly the biggest problem in my life: I also faced the prospect of being separated from my wife and our young sons by a lengthy prison sentence.

Maintaining my innocence, I turned down a plea deal and went to trial. At the beginning of 2024, after being acquitted on four counts and convicted on two, I reported to a federal prison camp in Ashland, Kentucky, to begin serving a 16-month sentence. 

Though prison is full of indignities and deprivations, I encountered one unexpected grace there: Since everyone — rightly or wrongly, fairly or unfairly — had been convicted, the stigma of being a felon was less significant inside prison than outside prison.

On my second day in Ashland, I joined a daily Bible study and never missed a single session during the remainder of my incarceration. One day, an inmate named Doug encouraged me to deliver the sermon for one of our church services.

With the two exceptions of delivering my father’s eulogy four months after I’d been indicted and serving as an occasional reader at Mass in my home parish, it was my first speech since 2020.

The prospect of delivering my first prison sermon kicked into gear old public speaking habits and disciplines. The day before the service, I went by myself into the small prison chapel and placed the chairs in a more compact arrangement so that attendees would feel closer together.

I knew exactly what I wanted to say: Despite our circumstance of confinement, we were still free in the way that mattered most. We were free to love, as God designed us to do. Our bodies weren’t free, but our spirits still could be, if we let them.