Did you write to me when I was in prison?

Idea exchange
April 2002

Did you write to me when I was in prison?
When a friend asked her if she would write a letter to a man on death row, she accepted the challenge, thinking, "How hard could it be?"

Prison mission "God is sneaky," she always says.

Now Josephite Sister Helen Prejean is the nation's leading advocate for the abolition of the death penalty and a two-time nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.

While certainly not everyone is called to become a national voice for the cause the way Prejean is, one simple way to contribute is by becoming a pen pal to a person on death row. Several organizations throughout the U.S. facilitate pen pal programs, matching up volunteers with inmates on death row who have expressed an interest in receiving letters.

The Death Row Support Project started over 20 years ago, shortly after the death penalty was reinstated in the U.S. A collaborative effort of Rachel Gross and her husband, Bob, they never predicted the overwhelming response they would receive. Gross says she had no idea what she was getting herself into. "I never thought that after 20 years we'd still be using the death penalty in this country, so it seemed the project would be a much more temporary thing," she said.

Rachel Gross runs the project as a volunteer out of her home in northern Indiana, just west of Fort Wayne. She is a one-woman show, answering letters and phone calls and matching up people on death row with people from the "outside" world to be pen pals. While the Church of the Brethren gives her $800 a year for postage and supplies, the program participants come from all faiths. Gross says Catholics outnumber the other faith groups, with a particularly large percentage of Catholic nuns participating.

DRSP suggests that the program can be very effective in a group setting. A small faith community or parish group, even a Sunday school class, can choose to be a collective pen pal to one inmate, sharing the responsibility for letter-writing and supporting each other through an experience that can be quite emotional at times.

As the program brochure states, "Letters can bring a ray of light to the darkness of death row isolation. For those on the outside, learning to know just one prisoner can dispel some of the misconceptions and fears about prisons and those locked away there.

"Jesus' call for us to visit those in prison is clear. Perhaps correspondence can be a form of visiting. And perhaps you will be led, as others have been, to go beyond correspondence, and will want to visit face-to-face. That is up to you. We ask only that you begin by writing a letter, and that you keep up your part in the correspondence with openness, as faithfully as you can."—Tara Dix

To receive more information about the program or to request a pen pal, write or phone Rachel Gross at Death Row Support Project, P.O. Box 600, Liberty Mills, IN 46946 (219) 982-7480.

A similar program exists in North Carolina. Contact: Project Link, Sister Joan Jurski, Office of Peace and Justice, Diocese of Raleigh, 300 Cardinal Gibbons Dr., Raleigh, NC 27606-2198. Phone: 919-821-9751.

For more information:
Would Jesus pull the switch? By Helen Prejean
National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty
Catholics Against Capital Punishment

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