Blog

He walked toward the cellblock in Riverside Correctional Facility, pulling a cart of books behind him.

For a moment, it was quiet. The only sounds that echoed off the jail’s cinder block walls were the squeaks of his cart’s wheels.

But as a heavy door to a busy unit swung open, Seth Williams’ work was set to begin.

“Chaplain up!” one of the inmates inside yelled.

Williams smiled at the crowd of prisoners who began walking toward him and his squeaky cart, which was filled with Bibles, Qurans, and other religious texts.

“Step into my office,” he said, placing his hand on an inmate’s shoulder.

Nearly a decade after Williams went through one of Philadelphia’s most spectacular and public falls from grace, the former district attorney — whose tenure imploded as he was prosecuted on federal corruption charges — is now serving as a chaplain in the city’s jails.

The role’s expectations are modest. He offers spiritual counseling and religious programming to the 600 or so prisoners held at Riverside. It is part-time and pays about $21 per hour.

Still, for Williams, the position was uniquely appealing. After putting people in jail as the city’s top prosecutor, then spending five years in federal prison as an inmate himself, he believes he can use what he learned from that journey to help young men avoid committing crimes in the future.

“I can be a better advocate, a better vessel, to help prevent crime and reduce recidivism … by helping people learn the skills they need to keep jobs and de-escalate conflict,” Williams said. “The best use of my experience … is helping people who are incarcerated the way I was.”

It is a long way from the halls of power that Williams once inhabited as the city’s first Black district attorney — and from his standing as a politician who was viewed as a possible future mayor.

Still, Williams says, he is fulfilled by this more humble form of service. And becoming chaplain is not the only role he has taken up behind bars: For the last two years, he has also volunteered at Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility, teaching weekly classes on career preparedness and poetry, and at State Correctional Institute Phoenix, where he directs a volunteer program about Christianity.

Last month, Williams agreed to allow an Inquirer reporter to join him inside the city’s jails as he counseled inmates. He shared stories about his time in prison, delivered socks and toothpaste to indigent inmates, gathered a group to recite the rosary, and gave books to men who expressed interest in spiritual counseling.

He was energetic, open, and passionate. He spoke openly about his past misdeeds, but remained defiant about his federal prosecution — saying he was wrong for not reporting gifts he received as DA, but insisting that he did not sell his office to his benefactors, as the U.S. Attorney’s Office alleged.

Williams acknowledged that his path to becoming a jailhouse chaplain and volunteer has been unusual. He pointed out, for instance, that the room where he teaches his Career Keepers course is just down the hall from the jail’s print shop — which once printed the DA’s letterhead with his name at the top.

Prisons Commissioner Michael Resnick said Williams’ transformation is one of the key attributes he brings to the job.

“He just has a passion for this work, to get people on the right path,” Resnick said.

And Williams said he feels as if he is doing more to help people now than he ever has.

“What if the worst thing that happens in your life,” he said, “could be used for good?”

From rising star to ‘criminal’

To understand where Williams is now, it helps to recall where he came from.

After he was elected district attorney in 2009, Williams, then 42, promised to reform the office where he had spent a decade working as a line prosecutor. He said he would assign lawyers to handle cases by neighborhood, place greater emphasis on charging crimes correctly at the outset, and divert minor offenses into community-based treatment programs.

His policy positions were part of his appeal, but he also leaned into a compelling personal story: Abandoned in an orphanage at birth, Williams was adopted at age 2 and raised in Cobbs Creek. He went on to graduate from Central High School, Pennsylvania State University, and Georgetown University’s law school before returning to his hometown to work as an assistant district attorney.

When he ran to become the city’s top prosecutor in 2009 — his second attempt after a narrow loss four years earlier — he had a campaign slogan that matched his aspirations: “A new day, a new D.A.”

And for a while, some political observers said, he was living up to that mantra. In addition to engineering an ambitious restructuring of the office, he made headlines during his first term by charging West Philadelphia doctor Kermit Gosnell with killing babies during illegal late-term abortions, and by charging Msgr. William Lynn, a top official in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, with shielding sexually abusive Catholic priests.

Charismatic and camera-friendly, Williams was easily reelected to a second term in 2013, and homicides began falling to their lowest levels in decades. Some began wondering if he might leverage his success as DA into a run for City Hall.

Beneath the surface, though, challenges in Williams’ personal life began to mount.

Several years after he and his wife divorced, creditors pursued him for unpaid bills. Yet he still made frequent stops to smoke cigars and hobnob with the city’s elite at the Union League — expenses he sometimes paid for using campaign funds.

He now admits he was also drinking too much, “numbing myself from the daily trauma with too much Jack Daniel’s and martinis and Yuenglings.”

By 2015, the FBI was investigating whether he had been misusing campaign funds to live beyond his means. And two years after that, he was indicted on charges of wire fraud, honest services fraud, and bribery-related crimes.

Federal prosecutors said he not only misspent political money but also sold the influence of his office to wealthy allies who showered him with vacations, clothing, and a used Jaguar convertible.

Williams insisted he was not guilty and took his case to trial. But midway through the proceedings, he accepted an offer from prosecutors to plead guilty to a single count of violating the Travel Act.

U.S. District Judge Paul Diamond showed no mercy — jailing Williams immediately, then imposing a five-year prison term, the maximum allowed by law. The judge called Williams a “criminal” who surrounded himself with “parasites” and “fed his face at the trough” of public money.

A mentor in solitary

During the first five months of Williams’ incarceration, he was held in solitary confinement at Philadelphia’s Federal Detention Center. That was intended to protect him — former law enforcement officers can become targets behind bars — but it left him confined to a cell for 23 hours a day.

Beyond the once-monthly 15-minute phone call he was allowed to make to his daughters, Williams said, there was one thing that helped him endure isolation: Friar Ben Regotti.

Regotti, then a resident at Center City’s St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church, served as the detention center’s chaplain. And when Williams was in solitary, he said, Regotti came to his cell every day and offered an escape: praying with him through a slit in the thick steel door, hearing his confession, and offering him books, including the Bible, which Williams — who was raised Catholic — said he finally read cover-to-cover for the first time.

“I’d lost everything,” Williams recalled. “But Father Regotti was the kindest person to me.”

When he was transferred to a prison camp in Morgantown, W.Va., Williams continued his spiritual journey by attending weekly Masses, Bible studies, and services for other religions. He also completed substance abuse classes, taught classes to help prisoners get high school diplomas, and learned how to play the saxophone.

He made some unlikely friends while he was locked up, including Michael Vandergrift of Delaware County, who is serving a life sentence plus 20 years for killing a rival drug dealer as part of a hired hit; and Bright Ogodo of Brooklyn, N.Y., who was sentenced to more than six years in prison for running a sophisticated identity-theft ring out of TD Bank branches.

Williams said Ogodo later told him he was considering taking his own life — he had even written a letter to his family, convinced they would be better off without him. But when Ogodo saw that Philadelphia’s former DA was in jail, too, Williams said, Ogodo changed his mind.

“He said, ‘I saw you walking with your head up, and [thought], if you can survive, so shall I,’” Williams said.

Finding his footing

Williams was released from prison in 2020, but said almost no one was willing to help him get back on his feet. Before he was incarcerated, he said, he had visited the governor’s mansion and taken his daughters to the Easter egg roll on the White House lawn. But afterward, few people would even take his calls.

“Nobody would hire me,” he said, describing people’s default position toward him as “the Heisman,” the college football statue with an arm extended to keep opponents away.

So Williams — whose law license was suspended when he was convicted — found work at a Lowe’s Home Improvement store in Havertown, unloading trucks and fulfilling online orders from 7 p.m. until 5:30 a.m.

Most of his coworkers, he said, had also recently been released from prison. And while working, he said, he was “kind of providing pastoral care [to them] daily,” similar to his teaching of GED courses in prison, or participating in Bible studies.

In time, he said, he began developing his ideas about self-improvement into formal programs for nonprofits, providing ways for recently incarcerated people to learn the skills needed to maintain consistent employment — developing a resumé, for instance, but also focusing on topics like conflict de-escalation.

Much of his motivation for doing that work, he said, came from research showing that recidivism is greatly reduced among people who receive substance abuse counseling, career coaching, and regular spiritual practice.

“What all three have in common,” Williams said, “is changing the hearts and minds of people.”

In 2023, he ran into Terrell Bagby, then a deputy commissioner in Philadelphia’s jail system, and the two discussed the possibility of bringing Williams’ teachings into the jails. That’s how he ended up bringing his volunteer courses — Career Keepers and Prison Poets — into Curran-Fromhold, the city’s largest jail, he said.

In a recent session of Career Keepers, Williams was at the head of the class as nine prisoners sat at a U-shaped table around the room. They took turns practicing public speaking by delivering updates on the weather, sports, and news, then discussed topics including how to reward positive behavior — rather than linger on bad choices — and how to display gratitude.

In the moments after the prisoners were escorted back to their blocks, Williams said the men he has taught over the years have often been more open and vulnerable than he expected. Some have shared stories about traumatic experiences — such as being shot or sexually abused — and then discussed how those experiences affected their lives.

“I spent all this time trying to get out of prison,” he said, “and then I found myself loving being there, trying to help the inmates themselves.”

Becoming a presence

Inside his spare chaplain’s office at the jail, Williams has a desk, a few shelves, and scores of religious books. He keeps packs of white T-shirts, socks, and toothpaste to put into care packages for prisoners and, before making his rounds, keeps a list of people he wants to see.

His time on the cellblocks can be brief. During his rounds on a recent day, his presence did not always seem to have much of an impact. As he passed through each unit’s main expanse, where dozens of prisoners have cells overlooking a bustling common area, some prisoners were more interested in getting their lunch or hanging out by the phones than in checking out what Williams had to offer.

But other times, during several different stops, Williams sat and prayed with prisoners. And the care packages he hands out have become a frequent request, he said.

He wound down his shift in a room near the law library, reciting the rosary with a half-dozen men who had expressed interest in praying with him.

Regotti, the chaplain Williams had encountered in solitary, said in an interview that even though they first met while the former DA was behind a thick steel door, Regotti could immediately sense his curiosity, intellect, and desire to better himself.

“Going from feeling absolutely desperate to finding ways to cope, it was kind of a mark of his own personal resilience,” Regotti said. “He really developed into somebody that was in touch with God’s grace.”

Williams said he now aspires to be for people what Regotti was for him — a comforting presence in a dark place, and someone who, he hopes, can help provide guidance that can last well beyond someone’s time in confinement.

“The cheapest way to do that is by spreading the gospel,” he said. “People don’t want you to preach to them. They just want your presence — they want you to be there.”