Angel Tree Fact Sheet

The Only Nationwide, Year-Round Effort that Reaches out Exclusively to the 1.7 Million Children in America with a Father or Mother Behind Bars

By mobilizing churches and organizations throughout the United States, Prison Fellowship’s Angel Tree works to provide prisoners’ children with Christmas gifts and much more by encouraging the local church’s year-round involvement in the lives of prisoners’ children. 

Prison Fellowship’s Angel Tree begins with a gift at Christmas but extends to a year-round effort - including camping and mentoring opportunities - that link the children of prisoners to a local church congregation to help break the intergenerational cycle of crime and bring reconciliation and hope to families split by incarceration.  Thousands of families from churches across the nation sponsor prisoners’ children to provide much-needed love and assistance that is given on behalf of their incarcerated parent. 

• Approximately 32 percent - an average of 480,000 annually - of all children of incarcerated parents in the United States receive Christmas gifts through Prison Fellowship’s Angel Tree program each year.
• Each year, volunteers from some 10,000 churches nationwide help brighten Christmas for children who are doing hard time at home while their parents are in prison.
• During the past 27 years, Prison Fellowship’s Angel Tree volunteers have delivered more than 16.5 million Christmas gifts to more than 8 million children of prisoners nationwide.  These gifts are presented to the children on behalf of their incarcerated parent.
• Prison Fellowship’s Angel Tree has expanded to connect the children of prisoners to a local congregation year-round, providing a variety of activities throughout the year including camping and mentoring opportunities.  Since 2001, some 40,000 children of prisoners have participated in summer camping and some 5,000 children of prisoners have been mentored through Prison Fellowship’s Angel Tree.

Reaching Out to Children at Risk

By every measure, prisoners’ children are some of the most severely at-risk children and youth in America:

• There are some 1.7 million children in the United States who have a parent serving a sentence in a state or federal prison (Vulnerability of Children of Incarcerated Addict Mothers: Implications for Preventive Intervention, Children and Youth Service Review, 2005).
• The average age of children with an incarcerated parent is eight years old; 22 percent of the children are under the age of five (Incarcerated Parents and Their Children, Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report, 2000).
• Some 10 million young people in the United States have had a mother or father - or both - spend time behind bars at some point in their lifetime (U.S. News & World Report, April 2002).
• More than 60 percent of offenders in state and federal prisons in the United States are incarcerated more than 100 miles from their last place of residence (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2000).
• Parental incarceration creates financial instability and material hardship as well as instability in family relationships and structure (Parental Incarceration in Fragile Families: Summary of Three Year Findings, an unpublished report to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2007).
• Having an incarcerated parent often results in school behavior and performance problems as well as social and institutional stigma and shame (Vulnerability of Children of Incarcerated Addict Mothers: Implications for Preventive Intervention, Children and Youth Services Review, 2005).

Prison Fellowship’s Angel Tree reaches out to help prisoners’ children deal with the anger, hurt and disappointment they may feel because of their parent’s incarceration.

• In addition to lowering the likelihood of recidivism among incarcerated parents, there is evidence that maintaining the child-parent relationship while a parent is incarcerated improves a child’s emotional response to the incarceration and encourages parent-child attachment (Examining the Effect of Incarceration and In-Prison Family Contact on Prisoners’ Family Relationships, Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 2005).

How Prison Fellowship’s Angel Tree Works

Throughout the summer, inmates are given the opportunity to sign up their children to receive Christmas gifts given by volunteers on the incarcerated parents’ behalf.  Angel Tree volunteers then contact the children’s caregivers to solicit their gift wishes.  Leading up to Christmas, each child’s name and gift wishes are written on paper angels and hung on Christmas trees placed in participating churches.  Volunteer families and individuals purchase and wrap the requested items and either deliver the gifts personally or host a party where the gifts are distributed to all the children sponsored within their church.  Each child receives a toy or recreational item and a clothing item (about $15-20 per gift).
Once relationships between the local church and a prisoner’s child are established at Christmas, year-round initiatives are encouraged through Prison Fellowship’s Angel Tree.  These activities include mentoring, which enables mature Christian adults to invest in the lives of at-risk children, and summer camping, which gives children a positive, fun experience in an environment that promotes physical, emotional and spiritual health.

Every year, Angel Tree does its best to match each prisoner's child with a nearby church.  But each Christmas, thousands of requests come in for children who live in isolated or rural areas where an Angel Tree church is just not available.  For the first time, with the help of donations, Prison Fellowship's Angel Tree can reach out to these children who would otherwise not receive a gift from their parent in prison.  For about $35 a child in an isolated area will receive a message from his or her incarcerated parent, a Christmas gift, and an age appropriate children's book that presents the Gospel.  AngelTree.org allows the following options for anyone to choose a child (or children):

• Selecting a child (or children) in a particular state
• Selecting the gender of the child (or children)
• Selecting the age of the child (or children)

 

The History of Prison Fellowship’s Angel Tree

In 1982, Prison Fellowship’s Angel Tree debuted in Birmingham, Ala., when Mary Kay Beard, an ex-prisoner, received permission to erect Christmas trees in shopping malls to recruit shoppers to purchase presents for prisoners’ children.  Beard, who served part of a 22-year sentence for burglary, grand larceny and robbery, spent six Christmases in a state prison watching women gather soap, shampoo and toothpaste received from charity groups and wrap them as Christmas gifts for their children.  “I realized that children don’t care as much about things as they do about being loved,” said Beard.  In Angel Tree’s first year, Prison Fellowship volunteers distributed Christmas gifts to 556 children in Alabama.

To find out how to get involved with Prison Fellowship’s Angel Tree, call 1-800-55-ANGEL or visit www.angeltree.org.