By Mark Gregory
Editorial Director
@Hear_The_Beard
mark@buglemewspapers.com
While Christmas for many is a time surrounded by family, friends and loved ones, for more than 3,000 Crest Hill residents, however, the holiday has a different feeling.
For those incarcerated in Stateville Correctional Center, the maximum security prison located on Rt. 53, Christmas is confinement over cheer.
This year members of the Joliet Seventh-day Adventist Church tried to change that.
(Submitted Photo)
In conjunction with Christmas Behind Bars, a charity based in Bluffton, IN, third generation church member Vickie Funk and other volunteers brought care packages of food and religious reading material to each and every prisoner in Stateville.
“I know they are criminals and they are where they are supposed to be, but they are still human beings and they deserve to be treated as such,” Funk said. “I went in and actually saw the men in their cells and it makes a big impact on you.”
The program, which took place over two days the week after Thanksgiving, was the first of its kind at Stateville.
The guys said he had been there over 22 years and no one had ever done that for him before. It was just an awesome experience.
“This is the first time it has ever been done at Stateville,” Funk said. “Other organizations have come in and given the inmates crackers or a candy bar, but to come in with a whole grocery bag of food and religious material and individually give them to each inmate – that has never been done before.
“We went to all the different houses in Stateville and handed the bags out cell by cell and we were able to talk with each inmate and wish them a Merry Christmas and in some cases, we were able to pray with them.”
The undertaking was a big one for the church, which has fewer than 75 members, had to raise more than $25,000 to pay for all of the 3,650 bags which were distributed.
“We raised most of the funds and we are still working on it,” Funk said. “I had talked with Lemuel Vega, who runs Christmas Behind Bars and he said just raise the funds that we could and they would help with the rest.”
Stateville was the largest delivery in the 20-plus years of the program.
“It is not about the numbers, it is about the opportunity,” Vega said. “If it was 120 members in the county jail, that would have been phenomenal, too. However, it is very impactful to our organization to know that most of the men that helped unload the truck are all pretty well doing 20-plus years or almost life in prison and to reach a group of people that have lost hope because their family members that were supportive of them have passed away or are no longer able to visit and we pray that our mission of hope will have a lasting impact. It is not just about the bag of food – it is to encourage them to try even though they are still incarcerated. That may be a GED, a work program, college education, a bible study – it is not to encourage them in one way only, but to try as a whole. Maybe that is to rekindle family relationships or to write that letter for forgiveness to whoever they did wrong. Whatever it is, we want to encourage them to try one more time.”
It wasn’t only the volunteers helping the inmates distribute the gift bags, it was other inmates helping as well.
“The way the prison is set up, each house has five stories and there were a lot of stairs, so when we brought the bags in, we got help from the inmates to carry them up to the levels. It was so impressive that the inmates were helping distribute bags to the other inmates,” Funk said. “We distributed to everyone – We went to maximum, minimum, segregation, the hospital and we went to each inmate and distributed. There were some we weren’t able to visit in the medical side and in the receiving area, so they kept the bags to the side to distribute to them later.”
Vega knows what it means to inmates to get a little bit of love from strangers when it is needed the most.
“I was 18 years old and I was facing prison time and a group came in to sing for us. They didn’t talk about religion, they just came in to sing,” he said. “I went to prison at 18 and I was at a church service and I don’t remember what was talked about that day, but I remember I had tears in my eyes and I prayed to Jesus to use me if he ever needed. Ironically that day, when we were leaving, there was a 20-pound bag of peanuts in the shell someone had brought in and I filled my pockets up with peanuts and I ate them all the way back to the cell house. When I got to my cell, I put the rest of the peanuts in my locker and I ate them one a day until they were gone. When I got out of prison, I tried to do what was right and for 12 years, I was back into drug addiction and at 35-years old, I was suicidal, I was going to die of a drug overdose or I was going back to prison and I went to rehab. When I was clean for a year, the pastor’s wife of the church I was attending had the idea to make some packages for the local jail and I knew they would appreciate it. I was selling groceries at the time, so I had product and for the first years, the grocery business funded the gift packages – it all started with people singing, a handful of peanuts and someone else’s idea.”