RAND RAPIDS -- David Moore has come home to die.

It has been a long journey that took him to inner-city Chicago, where he counseled gang members and drug addicts, and through countless displaced-persons camps in Africa, Asia and Latin America, where he fed, housed and comforted the sick and impoverished.

Nearly two decades ago, he became a minister to a small-town Michigan church.

Then, his life took a decidedly less-glorious turn.

He spent the past 14 years in prison, convicted of having sexual relations with two teenage boys. He makes no excuses.

"Don't forget why you're here," he often told himself. "You did this."

Medically paroled due to terminal cancer, he hopes to spend his remaining days raising awareness of the conditions inside the walls. He also wants to expose a prison medical system he believes sentenced him and others to death.

Prisoner rights advocates are glad Moore is speaking out.

"All that happened to him happens to other prisoners," said Penny Ryder, head of the Criminal Justice Program for the American Friends Service Committee in Ann Arbor. Last year, she received 2,950 letters from Michigan inmates protesting conditions. About a third complained of inadequate health care.

This is no surprise to Moore. At 67, he knows he did much good in his life, but "I think I dwell on the negativity of my past, the horror that I wreaked," he said. "I wonder if it would have been better if I had died at 35."

By that age, he had been in Vietnam working for an international Christian relief agency. As Saigon fell to communist forces in April 1975, he spirited out of the country the family of a South Vietnamese official who coordinated relief efforts there -- the father, mother and four children -- by falsely claiming the oldest daughter was his wife. That lie saved them from certain persecution, likely imprisonment and possible death, "the most significant thing I did in my life," he said.

After graduating from Union High School, Moore traveled the world -- 92 countries, by his count -- working in refugee camps in places such as Sudan and Bangladesh, as well as a resettlement camp in Arkansas for Vietnamese refugees.

In 1988, when he was 48, Moore was ordained as a minister in the United Church of Christ and hired by a church in Bronson.

"I loved the people, and I was so well accepted," he said, then added, "until I sabotaged everything."

Drinking freed his latent sexual urges, Moore believes, or perhaps was his way of trying to forget them.

He became sexually involved with two teenage boys. In 1993, he pleaded guilty to two counts of third-degree criminal sexual conduct and was sentenced to 10 1/2 to 22 1/2 years in prison.

As he entered a Jackson prison, "I was scared. I was depressed," he said. "I thought my life was over. In fact, I wanted it to be over."

But he had survived so much before -- the fall of Vietnam, a stabbing in Tanzania -- "I will survive this too," he said. "I was more concerned about my spiritual and psychological well-being than my physical."

He became editor of the prison newspaper at the Gus Harrison Correctional Facility in Adrian until the administration took that away. He created a program teaching other inmates to read, but the prison officials dropped that class and threw away the textbooks.

He conducted classes in transactional analysis, a therapy emphasizing personal growth and change, but corrections officials stopped that, too.

Most of his efforts to better himself and other prisoners were frustrated, as the Corrections Department placed more emphasis on punishment than rehabilitation, he said. Even arts and crafts programs were eliminated.

"I saw hard-core lifers -- murderers -- crying, because they took their leather tools away," Moore said. "They took their livelihood. They took their dignity. They often say you come out of prison worse than when you went in, and nobody asks why. It's a callous, evil system that perpetuates itself."

Fight for their dignity
By denying inmates the chance to improve themselves, the prisons guarantee most will return, Moore said. They begin thinking of themselves as victims.

He fought that urge.

"It's so much easier to focus on me as a victim than on the victims I created by my crime," he said. "You can't rehabilitate if you're a victim."

Permitted no contact with his victims, Moore wrote them a letter, but never mailed it. He wanted to tell them: "You didn't do anything. Your mistake was in believing in me. I'm solely responsible for this. I deserved the punishment."

Other inmates had been raised in poverty, without hope. "I had no excuse," Moore said. "I had loving parents. I never was hungry. I had every opportunity. My being in prison was more disgusting in my mind."

If the prison administration would not offer the inmates hope, Moore decided he would. In 2000, with the help of friends on the outside, he founded a nonprofit organization called Restore Hope to prepare inmates for parole and support them after their release.

He offered to create restorative justice programs, an approach that emphasizes repairing the harm done by the criminal and making him a contributing member of society. The corrections department turned him down.

In 2001, Restore Hope opened a halfway house for parolees in Zeeland, but closed it five months later in a disagreement with the building's owner. Restore Hope ordered self-help books for inmates in a substance abuse treatment program, but the prison administrators refused to deliver them.

"Everything he was attempting was doing some good," said Bob Sobeski, a Restore Hope board member who chaired the committee that hired Moore at the Bronson church. "It was a matter that he wanted to do something to help the paroled people get back into society."

Battle for his life
In February 2002, Moore complained he was bleeding rectally and asked for medical care. Six months later, a doctor at Ionia County Memorial Hospital performed a colonoscopy, removed several polyps he called precancerous, and said Moore should have another colonoscopy in six months.

He did not get it, despite his repeated complaints he was continuing to bleed. Time and again, he made medical appointments but, without explanation, they were canceled. Fourteen months after the first colonoscopy, Moore had another at the Duane Waters Hospital inside the Jackson prison complex. He was given no advance notice for the procedure, which was performed without anesthetic. Afterward he overheard a doctor saying the exam showed malignant colon cancer.

"I just sat there and stared," Moore recalled. "My God, I've got cancer, and it's malignant."

He underwent surgery, but the next few years brought more frustration: medical appointments canceled without explanation, prescriptions unfilled for weeks. When a doctor at Jackson's Foote Health System hospital prescribed a drug to counteract the side affects of chemotherapy, Correctional Medical Services (CMS), the company under contract with the state to provide care in the prisons, declined to fill it, Moore said, forcing the doctor to cancel the next chemotherapy treatment.

Some prison doctors and staff members clearly cared, he said. Others could not have cared less. A guard escorting him for an appointment at Duane Waters Hospital asked, "Why don't you die?" Moore recalled. "You're just costing us money, and we don't need your kind out there."

"The medical service is a joke, a sick, sad joke," Moore said. "I've been in refugee camps in Africa and Asia. I've never seen disgusting, degrading conditions like at Duane Waters."

CMS spokesman Ken Fields, citing patient confidentiality restrictions, declined to talk specifically about Moore's case but said some of the timeline and events Moore described "are not consistent with the medical records for this patient. Further, the patient received ongoing medical care throughout his incarceration."

The Corrections Department, battered by complaints of poor medical care, plans to drop CMS next spring and contract with several HMOs to provide care in the prisons.

Under a pilot program called the Michigan Prisoner Reentry Initiative, the department also hopes to reduce the nearly 50 percent of paroled inmates who return to prison, spokesman Russ Marlan said. The program, now being tested in Kent County and other areas of the state, attempts to reduce the recidivism rate by preparing inmates for life outside prison.

Moore and other prisoner advocates doubt it will have enough resources to succeed.

By early 2004, tests showed Moore's cancer had spread, and he underwent surgery to remove part of his liver, but it was too late. His doctors told him he would die maybe in months, maybe a year.

Four years past his minimum sentence, Moore had twice been denied parole. In the summer of 2006, facing death and frustrated in his efforts to get Restore Hope off the ground, he gave up. He wrote his friends and told them to disband Restore Hope.

"There is no hope," he wrote.

"I was convinced I'd never get out. I wanted to die. I wanted to get out and die the next day. I didn't want to die in prison."

His friends would not hear of it.

"If you're a good friend, you don't leave a person when he has a problem," said Jack Bartlett, a Restore Hope board member.

When Moore heard that Bartlett's 32-year-old daughter had died of cancer, "I wept," he said. "Why can't I die and she live?"

Out in the open
Early this year, the parole board, under pressure to release some old and sick inmates, relented, granting Moore a medical parole with the understanding he likely would die within six months. He was released March 16.

For several months he lived with his sister, and this fall moved into his own house in Grand Rapids. He began attending Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ and, after informing Rev. Doug Van Doren of his past, became a member.

"David was very forthright," Van Doren said. "He said, 'I don't want to cause any problems. I want a place to worship.' He wants and needs to be in community, especially a religious community. He's a religious man."

Once a week, Moore goes for chemotherapy at the Lacks Cancer Center at Saint Mary's Health Care. A recent CAT scan showed the liver tumors are still there, but held in check by the drugs pumped into his veins every week.

"It's a back-and-forth game," Dr. Stephen Huang told him. "The cancer is progressing and moving forward. I'd say it's stable."

"So I should go Christmas shopping?" Moore asked.

Eventually the drugs will stop working, and then Moore figures he will have maybe a few months to live. Restore Hope is dormant, and he and his friends expect when he dies, it will, too.

Moore knows there are risks in speaking out now. Some will shun him, say he deserves to die behind bars.

"I can say, 'I'm a parolee and a sex offender, but, fortunately, I'm going to die soon, so you don't have to worry about it,'" he said.

If people don't care how inmates are treated, he wants them to know, "Your dollars are being squandered on a system that is doing more harm than good. People are dying not just physically, but spiritually and psychologically."

He has written his memorial service, and once thought of having only his inmate number -- 230342 -- engraved on his headstone, since the corrections system tried to strip him of his identity and his dignity.

"When I get to my last days or weeks, I don't want to be lying on my back looking at the ceiling saying, 'What should I have done?'" he said. "I feel an obligation to the people who are left behind.

"The cancer, in one way, has been liberating for me. I know my days are numbered, and I know there are things I want to do and accomplish, and I'm doing it.

"If God has a purpose for me in these days, this is it."