Five Sworn Gang Enemies Are Baptized Together in Texas Maximum-Security Prison

Five sworn gang enemies have risked their lives to get baptized together at a Texas prison. 

Members of the rival factions housed at Coffield Prison made public declarations of faith just six months after Dallas megachurch Gateway opened up a campus within the walls of the penitentiary.

“Yesterday at our Coffield campus, we were able to do something that no church has ever been able to do in the history of this prison,” said Niles Holsinger, Gateway Coffield Prison campus pastor, in a Facebook video. “And that is water baptize men from what’s called administrative segregation, a section of the prison that has the most violent felons, violent inmates of the whole prison.”

Over 4,000 extremely dangerous inmates are housed at Coffield, with a proportion of them spending 23 hours a day confined to their cells. “These guys cannot be around other people, Holsinger explained. “They cannot be around friends, they cannot be around family.”

But on Sunday, it was a very different atmosphere to usual. Instead of violence and hate, there was joy and freedom at Coffield, as a group of these hardened criminals came to be baptized.

“Five men were escorted into the gymnasium, each one shackled hand and foot and around the waist, and escorted by a guard that would not remove their hands from their arm until they were placed, picked up and put shackled in…