The annual Prison Fellowship Angel Tree direct fundraising letter has arrived in the mailboxes of Christians across the nation.

On a positive note, the ministry didn’t role out the organization’s usual sob letter supposedly written by a convict, incarcerated for a sentence of about nine years, asking for a handout for his daughter.

I guess if they had continued repeatedly sending the same plea as they have done year after year since at least 2005, the discerning would have realized it was nearly time for this deadbeat to be released.

Thing is, this year’s appeal still left much to be desired.

One woman is quoted as saying, “It was hard to see…him [her father] in prison…Angel Tree just showed us that he was thinking about us while he was there.”

Perhaps all well and good. But what is Angel Tree doing for the children of victims no longer able to let their children know that they are thinking about them thanks to a number of the very same convicts Prison Fellowship no doubt depicts as being put behind bars by an inequitable criminal justice system rather than by felonious misdeeds?

by Frederick Meekins