Can a Christmas gift help prevent crime?
Lieutenant Jim Quattrone, a sheriff’s deputy with 29 years of experience, believes it just might.
Jim has served communities in Chautauqua County, New York, on the coast of Lake Erie, for his entire career in uniform. In the last decade, he’s found a powerful way to serve those same communities, even in plainclothes: Prison Fellowship’s Angel Tree® program.
Jim graduated from the Centurions program, now called the Colson Fellows Program, in 2008. After learning about Angel Tree’s impact on the families of the incarcerated, he became the Angel Tree coordinator at his home church of Lakewood Baptist. Every year since, volunteers at Lakewood Baptist have purchased, wrapped, and delivered gifts to several dozen children on behalf of their incarcerated parents, helping them to experience the love of their Heavenly Father, and to restore and strengthen strained family bonds.
Jim’s day job, protecting and serving many of the same neighborhoods where he makes Angel Tree deliveries each Christmas, has made the importance of Angel Tree especially clear.
“I feel that most of the people we arrest are good people who have made bad choices. And their families are the ones that suffer the consequences of those choices,” he says.
Jim has even delivered Angel Tree gifts to the children of a woman he arrested. Now that she’s home, the officer and the former prisoner are on friendly terms. “She’s very appreciative of what the program has done for her children,” he notes.
Jim hopes that each Angel Tree delivery will make the communities he serves a bit safer. As families grow closer together through Angel Tree, they can begin to step out of the cycle of crime and incarceration, a heritage too often handed down from parent to child.
“Having a parent in prison is one of the biggest factors in future criminality,” Jim says, explaining how a simple gift can help keep children and youth on the right road. “It’s not so much about the financial need. It’s about that need for social and emotional connection between the child and the incarcerated parent that Angel Tree provides.”
“In a way,” he adds, “I think of it as crime prevention.”
This year, Lakewood Baptist is going above and beyond. Responding to increased local need, they have stepped up to serve 116 children spread out over three counties. Do they have any special strategies for serving almost twice as many children as usual?
“Prayer!” Jim says. “It’s a leap of faith.”
There are still approximately 20,000 children waiting to be assigned to a local Angel Tree church. Can your church help stand in the gap? Get more information here.