Volunteers pack holiday packages for SC’s 17,000 inmates

COLUMBIA — Every year Lacy Neaderheiser was in prison, she looked forward to receiving a holiday gift bag.

So, as she drove up to Columbia’s NewSpring Baptist Church on Tuesday morning to help pack the bags, she started to get emotional. She was happy to be on the other side of the razor wire but sad for the people she left behind when she got out nine months ago.

“I know how much these bags mean to people still behind the wall,” said Neaderheiser, who was incarcerated for 10 years on drug charges.

This was the 48th year volunteers from the South Carolina Baptist Convention gathered to stuff donated items into baggies for the state’s 17,000 inmates.

The Christmas tradition is a way for members of the church to give back, and it’s a bright spot for inmates during a particularly difficult time of year to be away from family, said volunteers working Tuesday.

The gift packages aren’t extravagant. The clear plastic baggies contained bars of soap, toothbrushes, tubes of toothpaste, notebooks, pens, envelopes and rolls of hard candy. As a holiday touch, volunteers added Christmas cards.

The best part of receiving the packages? “Smelling good,” said Candice Beasley, a former inmate.

“All of the things that everyone gave are just little tokens that we would try to keep for a long time,” Beasley said.

Although prisoners have toothbrushes, soap and other necessities, the congregations donate higher-end brands that the prison either doesn’t offer or that many inmates can’t afford, she said. The notebooks, pens and envelopes mean inmates can more easily write letters to their families for the holidays.

That’s a big deal for inmates separated from loved ones, said Beasley, who now works in Benedict College’s prison education program.

“In prisons, you don’t have your family, so to get a gift from someone who doesn’t know you is a huge thing,” Beasley said.

At 11:20 a.m., about two hours after people started packing their bags, Baptist Convention official Jon Jamison took to the microphone to announce that the 160 or so volunteers had packed 7,500 bags. Only 9,500 to go, he added.

Not long after Jamison’s announcement, a bus pulled up in front of the church from a church in Estill.

“Estill, how far is that?” asked a current inmate. He was among 10 inmates from the low-security Manning Reentry/Work Release Center who were unloading donations from vehicles that pulled in and bringing them to volunteers to sort.

“That’s about 90 miles,” the bus driver replied.

The church from the rural Hampton County town of about 1,700 was one of several hundred participating in the program this year, said Jamison, who leads the convention’s outreach-focused SERVE Team.

He was still getting the final count, but church buses and pick-up trucks from every corner of the state delivered donations to the NewSpring Church in Columbia.

Each church donates what it can.

For instance, Temple Baptist Church in southeast Columbia donated about 50 items during its first time participating this year. Before the bags were even packed, members of the church were promising they would collect more next year, said Rev. Jamie Rogers, who is filling in temporarily as the church’s pastor.

“We get to show the love of Jesus to people in a little, small way,” said Rogers, who is also associational missions strategist for the Columbia Metro Baptist Association.

Part of the volunteers’ job was to determine which items could actually go into the final packages.

The Department of Corrections has strict rules about the items inmates are allowed to have. If a volunteer found a too-big bar of soap or a pen in a color other than black, they brought it a table lined with plastic tubs.

The church will donate any non-regulation items to other charities, Jamison said.

Once a bag was packed, volunteers stacked them in cardboard boxes for inmates to collect. After dumping the full boxes onto tables in the back of the room, inmates and officers counted out groups of 25 for laundry bags stamped with the Baptist Convention’s name and logo.

Just before 4 p.m., the room full of volunteers finished packing their 17,175 prisoner packs. Nearly 700 laundry bags sat in neat stacks, filling the back entrance to the church lobby.

By the end of the day, the church received enough items for close to 20,000 packages, outnumbering the 17,000 people incarcerated in the state’s 21 prisons. With each package being worth about $7, that’s an estimated $140,000 in donations, Jamison said.

Any excess matching the prison’s specifications will go to Columbia-area prisons for inmates who don’t have enough money to buy items at the commissary.

On Wednesday morning, prison chaplains picked up the completed packages to bring to the inmates.

The best part of the whole event is seeing the way inmates’ faces light up when they get the bags that volunteers worked so hard to create, said Michael Cannon, a prison chaplain.

Many privileges in prison depend on a person’s disciplinary record, but not the gift bags. The fact that everyone gets one is a big boost for morale, he said.

“What may not mean a lot to us means the world to them,” said Cannon, who works at eight prisons in the Midlands.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, volunteers also went into the prisons to help distribute the packages they made, but they haven’t been since lockdown precautions ended that aspect. In coming years, though, the convention wants to help get people behind the razor wire to hand out the packages themselves again, Jamison said.

That’s because the church’s goal goes beyond sending inmates a care package once a year, Jamison said. Actually getting to see inmates might inspire some people to keep volunteering year-round with groups that go into the prisons, he said.

“Our hope is that some of these volunteers catch a vision,” Jamison said.