“God loves them, too.”
The Rev. Billy Graham’s coffin was made by inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, who made sure he was laid to rest in a casket as prayer-filled as the life he led.
According to Graham’s website, in 2005, while preaching at the penitentiary, his son, Franklin, noticed inmates crafting caskets and, in 2006, selected a simple pine plywood one with a cross on top for his father.
The casket belonging to his father was created by inmate Richard “Grasshopper” Liggett, Clarence “Mr. Bud” Wilkerson, and David Bacon, whose names have been burned into the wood.
Along with being a notorious maximum-security prison, the Louisiana State Penitentiary also has a large prison ministry, and inmates made sure the level of prayer put into the coffin matched the level of craftsmanship.
“We, of course, prayed before we started and that’s something that does not happen every day when they are doing it in the regular work,” Clifford Bowman, who is in Bible college at the prison and worked on the coffin, told CBS News affiliate WAFB. “Where God is working the devil’s gonna’ be there working, so he’s gonna’ try and get his licks in, too.”
While working as the prison warden in 1995, Burl Cain, noticed inmates were being buried in cardboard boxes that often broke as the body was lowered into the ground. Then, he decided to start a new inmate program.
“I told them, ‘Men, you’re going to die here, and we’ve got to do this with dignity,’” Cain explained to the Catholic News Service (CNS). “’Y’all are going to build a coffin, and it’s going to be a nice coffin. When you die, you’ve served your sentence, and there’s no reason for anybody to kick your body.’”
Cain revealed that while working on Graham’s casket, inmate Grasshopper said, “Billy Graham is a simple man who preached a simple message. He must be buried in a simple casket.”
He added that although they knew Graham wasn’t God, he was “one of the godliest humans on the Earth,” and therefore, it was a “reverent operation.”
Cain is largely credited with taking the penitentiary from immense violence to a place of “moral rehabilitation” by bringing faith into the prison walls. However, he told CNS it wasn’t a completely selfless act.
“I realized this: Moral people don’t rape, pilfer and steal,” Cain explained. “So, if I could get these guys to become moral, I’d have a safer prison, I could survive.”
Franklin ordered a total of six coffins, including his father’s and mother’s, and Cain called it “symbolic” that Graham would be buried in this specific coffin.
He explained that even though the prisoners who created the coffin committed horrible crimes, “God loves them, too.”
