MY LIFE BETWEEN THE CROSS AND THE BARS, by George R. Castillo, G&M Publications, 1996, 294 pages, $21.95.

The first time chaplain George R. Castillo called a prisoner’s mother to break the news of her son’s murder behind bars, one word nearly cost him the respect of the inmates.

Castillo, a Belize native and Bangor Theological Seminary graduate, was a federal Bureau of Prisons chaplain in Kentucky in the 1970s when he used the phrase unfortunate “incident” during his phone call to the distraught family.

Other inmates that day were moving furniture in and out of the chaplain’s office and misheard him. Soon word spread that Castillo had soft-pedaled the calculated killing of a man in federal custody by using the words unfortunate “accident.”

Only when Castillo found his scribbled notes and showed some angry inmates the word “incident” did tempers cool.

It’s a telling anecdote in this autobiography, which could just as well have been titled “My Job Between a Rock and a Hard Place.” While the book, like most autobiographies, is a self-justification, it also presents Castillo candidly, as a well-meaning clergyman who could be conned and who struggled as much with prison staffers and other ministers as with the inmates.

Despite the tendency of many ministerial memoirs to sugarcoat controversy, Castillo usually avoids that pitfall. He is able to be blunt at times because he changes the names of some of his characters. While that would be unacceptable in a politician’s memoir, it’s forgivable for a clergyman writing about people still living, some of whom he counseled privately.

Born in 1931 in what is now Belize, on the east coast of Central America, Castillo grew up poor, partly Catholic and mostly Methodist. He immigrated to New York when he was 21, joined the U.S. Air Force and became an aircraft mechanic. He achieved citizenship in 1953.

Castillo is black, and his arrival in 1950s America introduced him to a new and more pernicious form of racism than he had grown up with. Sometimes it was overt, as when he had to stand for eight hours on a bus ride across Texas despite empty seats.

Sometimes the racism was subtler, as when Castillo and his wife, Muriel, arrived at Bangor’s Dow Air Force Base in April 1960. They couldn’t find an apartment in the area. Finally, a Christian landlady in Brewer required Castillo to ask a white neighbor’s permission for the couple to live next door.

He had long felt a call to the Christian ministry, so the Bangor seminary’s famed “Bangor plan” appealed to him. It allows students who don’t yet have a bachelor’s degree to begin studies, leading eventually to a divinity degree.

Both George and Muriel earned degrees at the University of Maine, and George pursued coursework at the seminary. He was ordained in 1967 at the First Congregational Church of Brewer, where he later served as interim pastor. He also served as a minister in Sangerville, Abbot and Monson as well as in churches in Michigan and Ohio.

But this book spends most of its energy on the period after June 15, 1973, when Castillo walked into the maximum-security federal penitentiary in Atlanta known as the “Big A.” He was the nation’s second black federal prison chaplain.

It’s important to point out that Castillo, as a federal prison chaplain for 20 years, was a government employee, not a visiting clergyman from nearby churches. In that role, he was at the beck and call of the wardens and others in the hierarchy.

While Castillo’s book is filled with stories about his relationships with inmates, it is its depiction of the Bureau of Prisons staff that is most striking. There were many capable managers, but at least one of the wardens he worked for appears to have just stepped out of “The Shawshank Redemption.”

In fact, it is the seeming pettiness of so many of Castillo’s prison controversies that illustrates the paradoxical role played by a prison chaplain. As a staff member, he or she must follow rules designed to inhibit an inmate’s freedom. As a minister, the chaplain needs to gain the trust of the inmate — and respect the inmate’s spiritual freedom.

His mailing of an inmate’s letter to a former inmate nearly got him fired from the federal prison system in the late 1970s, but Castillo prevailed and went on to serve in two other prisons in Florida before retiring in 1993.

Throughout the text, Castillo emerges as a feisty, well-meaning man, eager to serve his God and exhibiting a faith in the possibility of change in the prisoners around him — a faith not always held by his fellow chaplains.

The book is an easy read, arranged with numerous subheadings, and his prose is clear. A fascinating sidelight is Castillo’s reproduction of various letters connected with stories in the text. A 1960 letter from Maine Gov. John H. Reed, referring to the Castillos’ troubles in finding housing near Dow, is a marvelous example of political correspondence that says absolutely nothing in 150 words.

Ultimately, Castillo’s story is about how one man, resting his faith in God, the essential decency of people and the Protestant work ethic, managed to minister successfully to a captive and angry congregation.

Castillo will be at Borders in Bangor for an autograph session from 5:30 to 7 p.m. on June 27.