Ten years ago, Bill Smith thought there was no way he’d get a job working with jail inmates.
“I said, ‘Once they see my record, I don’t think they’ll want me,'” he recalled.
On Thursday, Mr. Smith retired after serving nearly 10 years as chaplain of the Hamilton County Jail.
A much younger Mr. Smith found God while serving a sentence on an armed robbery conviction in Indiana in 1967.
Shortly after arriving at the Pendleton Reformatory as an angry young man — as he calls himself — he punched another inmate and threatened to cut him. He was thrown into an isolation cell, where he had some time to think, he said.