Christmas behind bars - and after release

The mail doesn’t run on Christmas Day.

In prison, that means a lot.

Maybe there will be a larger piece of cake in the chow hall on Christmas Day. Maybe volunteers will visit. Maybe inmates will watch football together. The lucky ones might get an extended visit with family.

But there’s no mail.

For Alonzo Hill, 55, this Christmas will be different. After spending 15 years in Kansas prisons, Hill is about to have his first Christmas “free on the inside and the outside.”

The Wichita Eagle spoke with seven former inmates about their experiences having Christmas in prison — and how it’s different now that they’re out.

Some were able to visit with family in prison, some sent Christmas cards. Sometimes volunteer groups provided Christmas packages with a Christian message, a box of cherry chocolates and hygiene products.

Before prison, Hill said, he lived a double life. It was in prison, he said, that God caught his attention and helped turn that life around. Now that he’s out, he wants to help people who are less fortunate than him.

Many people go into prison and come out changed, said Hill, who served time for rape.

He said he was blessed to get out of prison, so now he’s taking what God has given him to bless others.

While in prison, Christmas was a matter of making the best of a bad situation, Hill said. He and other Christian inmates would get together on Christmas Day to cook, eat and watch football.

Spencer Lindsay, executive director of Working Men in Christ, says Christmas is “a day you want to be over with” when incarcerated. He spent more than 10 years in prison on drug-related charges, including aggravated burglary and distribution of drugs.

“You try to make it, you try to fake it like it ain’t nothing, but inside it wounds your soul,” Lindsay said.

Nearly seven years ago, Lindsay founded the ministry Working Men in Christ. The group does mentoring with inmates and provides group homes for former inmates as they move back into society. It has houses in Wichita and Topeka.

Hill lives in one of those homes. He plans to spend Christmas Day with both his fianceé and his Working Men in Christ family, enjoying a “Merry Christmas dinner” of ham, mashed potatoes and pies.

He’s planning gifts and cards, things he’ll be able to pick out himself.

Bob Shelby, 54, is in a similar situation. This will be his first year as a Christian during Christmas.

It’s hard, he said, to go into your first Christmas after prison.

“I’m scared,” Shelby said. “I don’t know where I fit. I long for my family, but I’m happy because I have a new family, and this new family shows me more love than I’ve ever had.”

He spent 25 years in prison for indecent liberties and enticement of a child. He violated parole several times, going back to prison.

“I pretty much destroyed anything I touched,” Shelby said, before he learned “how Christ wanted me.” He says he asked the parole board to extend his stay in prison to participate in a Christian program. Now, he lives at a Working Men in Christ home.

Shelby has one new family member who is particularly important: a Malinois-shepherd mix named Nollia, who he rescued.

She’ll chase her tail endlessly as long as Shelby keeps laughing.

This holiday is the greatest gift he could have, Shelby says. He now has a home, a family in Working Men of Christ and love. Nollia stays with him all the time. He’s planning to get her a big rawhide bone for Christmas, made extra special since she only recently learned that rawhides are meant to be chewed.

“That’s my baby,” Shelby says, pointing to Nollia. “That’s my Christmas.”

This story was originally published December 23, 2017 at 10:13 AM with the headline "Christmas behind bars - and after release."