What are Inmate "Sponsor letters?"

These are letters written by the Inmates on Sunday afternoon of their four day weekend to their financial sponsor.

We spend all weekend working with the inmates, teaching them how to accept unconditional love.  They are chided every time that they attempt to thank any on the team for what we have done for them, and that includes the open mike and the Closing ceremony. 

The only exception to this rule is the letter they are asked to write to the person who made a $125.00 donation to cover the cost of supplies and food for the inmate.  Most of the $10,000.00 to $15,000.00 cost of the weekend is paid by team members.  However, long ago it was recognized that there are people who want to support this ministry but are either unable, or unwilling to enter the prisons.  The sponsorship program provides a vehicle for that support. 

In return for their donation a sponsor received a picture of the team and all the candidates, a letter from the Rector and a letter from a Candidate talking about their experiences on the weekend.  Posted here are copies of those letters.  Many of the candidates don't understand exactly who they are writing to, and of course we do not provide them with the Sponsor's names.

There is a wide range of reactions to the weekend and a wide range of ability to write about their reactions.  Thus by 'luck of the draw' one sponsor might receive a wonderful heart touching letter while another receive an almost indecipherable rant.  By posting the letters here Sponsors, or others interested in seeing how the Inmates respond to the weekend, during the weekend can read these letters in the inmates own words and in their own handwriting.

Each link is to the PDF file that contains a letter

If you don't already have Adobe, you can download it free by clicking the icon below.

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Most of these are very short, I have put the longer letter at the end.

Letter 1

Letter 4 

Letter-05  Letter-06  Letter 07  Letter 08  Letter-09  Letter 10  Letter 12   Letter 14   Letter 17     Letter 19  Letter 20

Letter 21 

Letter 23 

Letter 24 

Letter 25

Letter 26  

Letter 27   Letter 30  Letter 31   Letter 33  Letter 34  Letter 35  Letter 36  Letter 37  Letter-38

The Longer letters

Letter13 Letter 16 Letter 18  Letter 22   Letter 28   Letter 29  Letter 32 

During the weekend the time allowed to write letters was very short, so additional time was given to write a new letter during the Instructional that was held the Sunday after the weekend.  These letters also show how the inmates were responding to their Kairos experience a week later, a week when they had had to return to the normal prison life, a week to face the trials and temptations that are part of that prison experience.

This file contains those letters, it is a 2.78 Mb file.  The size of a large MP3 song and it is also in Adobe.  You can figure how low it will take to download it, but I think you will find it interesting to see how the men are responding a week later.

Hughes 11 sponsor Letter II ( 2.78 MB file will take over 10 minutes to download fully at 56K connection speeds but you should be able to read immediately

If you are using the current version of Adobe, MS Internet Explorer or Netscape you should be able to read the first letter while the rest are being downloaded.  You won't be able to skip to the end until the full file is downloaded but you should be able to download faster than you can read.

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