After spending decades in pro-life activism and working as a traveling Christian evangelist, 63-year-old Calvin Zastrow will enter an entirely new mission field Tuesday: one of the most notoriously violent federal prisons in the country.
Zastrow will report to Federal Correctional Institute Thomson in Illinois at 2:00 p.m. today for a six-month prison sentence after he was convicted earlier this year on charges brought by the Biden-Harris administration over a peaceful protest at a Tennessee abortion facility in March 2021. During the protest, Zastrow and others sang hymns, urged women not to have abortions, and sat in front of the entrance into the abortion facility’s entrance.
Before turning himself in to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Zastrow told The Daily Wire that he will sing and pray with friends and family outside the prison, which has made headlines in recent years with reports of rampant violence and abuse. From 2019 until February 2023, the prison’s special management unit had five suspected homicides and two suspected suicides. In 2022, there were 275 reports of sexual misconduct against prison employees.
“I’m praying to be able to be able to witness for Christ. If I’m miserable there and can’t sleep well then I’ll just suffer with honor for Jesus,” Zastrow told The Daily Wire. “But if I’m able to get sleep and be healthy, I’m just going to see who the Lord wants me to minister to and be ministered to by.”
Zastrow was convicted by a Nashville jury in January of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act and conspiring against rights.
The Biden-Harris administration has used the conspiracy charge, originally intended to prosecute members of the Ku Klux Klan, to go after pro-lifers protesting at abortion facilities across the country from Michigan to Tennessee to Washington, D.C.
Zastrow said he was hopeful that one of the appeals efforts challenging the government’s application of the FACE Act and the conspiracy statute might be successful. He said a decision from a judge “would stop this freight train from hell from persecuting all these peaceful pro-life Christians around the county.”
Efforts to repeal the FACE Act and overturn the conspiracy charges brought against pro-lifers are being led by the Thomas More Society, which has filed several appeals to convictions of pro-lifers that are currently making their way through the courts.
Zastrow said he was disappointed to see the government promoting abortion and prosecuting pro-life Christians instead of securing the border and punishing violent criminals.
“They don’t have enough federal agents protecting former presidents from getting shot in the head,” he said. “But they’ve got plenty of Marshals to go hunt down and find pro-lifers and put them in prison.”
One of Zastrow’s co-defendants, Chet Gallagher, was sentenced last month to a 16-month prison sentence. He was ordered to report to prison in February, but that may be postponed due to upcoming sentencing on similar convictions in Detroit.
Zastrow said that he expects to be singing the song “All Hail the Power of Jesus’s Name” as he enters prison.
“I’m here to declare the glories of Christ and his kingdom,” he said. “I’m just here to do that. I’m just going let all the demons in hell know that they’re on notice.”
