Challenges & Solutions

Challenges

One of the largest challenges in this ministry is the cost of sending the Good & Evil books to individuals who are incarcerated in California. Another large challenge is the frequency of transportation and deportation from jails and prisons.

Solutions

To solve both of these challenges, we have just recently started a new program with a few local chaplains. We give these chaplains a few boxes (there are 26 Good & Evil Books in a box) for him to take back to their offices in these facilities. Then when we get a request in the mail from one of these facilities, we will send an email to the chaplain with the inmates name and number. The chaplain then routes one of the books that we gave him earlier to the inmates through the internal facility mail system. From our calculations this saves up to $4.13 per book. The book costs us $5.00 to purchase from the publisher (they sell the book to us for prison ministry only at cost) and to get them shipped to us. So instead of costing $9.13 per book we can lower our cost down to approximately $5.00. Since we send out approximately 9,500 of these books per year, it would save us approximately $39,235 per year if we could get a similar program setup with all of the chaplains in CA. This process also solves the second challenge I mentioned above because when we email the request to the chaplain it saves approximately 1 week on arrival thereby decreasing the chances of the inmates moving into a different facility or from being released. If they already have been released or transported to a different facility then we save the whole cost of the book from being wasted.

Some of our more elderly volunteers diligently reading the prisoner letters