Alyson R. Quinn

Jeffery Hopper has a picture of himself and his daughter, Amanda, sitting on the couch when she was just a little girl.

“She adored me. I was her world,” Jeffery remembers. “I destroyed it by going to prison.”

Jeffery grew up in Port Neches, Texas, where he adopted a criminal lifestyle early on.

One dark night in January, a cold drizzle enshrouds the California Institution for Women. But inside the education wing, one room overflows with light, life, and joy.

Cynthia Tilley has a black-and-white photograph of her, her brother, and her father. She doesn’t remember the occasion, but she believes it must have been taken at their Texas home around Christmastime. Wrapped gift boxes surround the father and his two tiny children.

Prison can be a dark place, full of dangerous personalities and corrosive influences. Inmates who want to follow Christ must fight against a tide that threatens to push them back into old behaviors and thought patterns. Other inmates might be curious about Jesus, but, cynical about the value of “religion,” they balk at the idea of attending a chapel service.

The National Gallery of Art, carved out of a quarry’s worth of marble, stands on the edge of the National Mall.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of prisoners who otherwise couldn’t provide Christmas gifts for their children do so through Prison Fellowship’s Angel Tree program. In 2012, some Arizona prisoners decided to give back—in the amount of $3,300.

La Palma Correctional Center, a prison privately operated by the Corrections Corporation of America, houses 3,100 men in several compounds.

Burl Cain, a member of Prison Fellowship’s board of directors and the long-serving warden of Angola Prison, was recently interviewed by the Acton Institute for an article appearing on its website. Since Cain took over Angola in 1995, it’s gone from being “the bloodiest prison in America” to one of the most revolutionary.

Angela Patton is the director of Camp Diva, an organization that helps empower young women. In a TED Talk, she explains how her organization arranged a father-daughter dance for 16 men and their 18 daughters – inside the county jail! The dance gave the men a rare opportunity to show their daughters how much they cared by dancing with them, pulling out their chairs for a meal, and giving them their undivided attention.

A January 2013 article by Jessi Strong, written for Bible Study Magazine, examines the unique perspective that incarcerated men and women bring to the study of God’s Word.

Prison Fellowship Ministries CEO Jim Liske told the magazine, “You don’t have to spend time talking to an inmate about how their life is not working out.

“We have seamstresses sitting with nothing to do,” a Florida Department of Corrections official told Raeanne Hance, the regional executive director for Prison Fellowship® in the Southeast.

To save money as 2012 wound to a close, the FDOC had prepared to close seven prisons and four work camps.

We first brought you the story of the Cleveland family in 2010. Recently, Prison Fellowship caught up with the father-son Angel Tree duo to learn how they are doing today.

Forget Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, and Vixen. Forget Rudolph and the sleigh. These days, Santa Claus rides a Harley-Davidson – or at least that’s how he arrived at the 2012 Angel Tree Christmas party put on by Bethany First Church of the Nazarene.

Through a partnership with the Fellowship of Fathers Foundation, 25,000 copies of a new bestselling book about fatherhood will be made available to Angel Tree dads this Christmas.

In the opening pages of Be a Better Dad Today! 10 Tools Every Father Needs, author Gregory Slayton writes, “I didn’t have much of a dad growing up.

In a recent opinion piece in The New York Times, writer Hanna Pylvainen asks the provocative question, “What do I owe my neighbor?” She wrestles with this problem after an acquaintance on her block asks him to bail him out of jail, and her deliberations are only complicated when Hurricane Sandy rips through New York, possibly endangering the inmate population of Rikers Island – her neighbor included.

For inmates’ families in western Pennsylvania, Christmas is a little brighter because of God’s work through South Hills Assembly, a congregation that has been doing Angel Tree ministry for 20 years.

The Angel Tree program as South Hills Assembly started with Clarence McMillan, an elderly member who “really had a heart for prisoners,” according to Pastor Rick Kardell, who coordinates the Angel Tree program there.