"Reaching Prisoners Literature, Covid 19, and Criminal Justice Trends" by Mike Fisher

The one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Strength to Strength. It's another day the Lord has made. Let's rejoice and be glad in it. Strength to Strength is just another resource for the seeker and a source of encouragement for the children of God, a place where we come together and share inspiration and encouragement. This morning we have Mike Fisher with us from Bedford, Pennsylvania. Is that right, Mike? That's correct.

And he's going to be sharing about prison ministry. And before we get going, let's stop ahead and have a word of prayer.

Holy Father, the only wise God, we come before You this morning. We thank You for Your love and Your mercy. We thank You for Your care over Your children. We thank You that we can be Your children and call You Father. Thank You for the blood of Christ that has opened up the holiest of holies. We can come into Your presence with gladness and come into Your presence with singing. We pray, Lord, that You would bless our gathering this morning, be with each of Your children that have come on this morning.

Pray for the seekers as well. Pray that Your word would be lifted up and truth would be taught. We pray that You would be with Brother Mike as he shares this morning. We pray that he would be comfortable and that he would share freely the thoughts that You've laid on his heart, that we could be strengthened and encouraged about the work of the kingdom that's going on. We just pray that Your Holy Spirit would be here and guide each one of us. And we ask this in Jesus' name.

We're going to have a time of question and answer after Brother Mike is done with his presentation. So be thinking about that as well. Yeah, Mike, if you could just introduce yourself and. It's yours. Go ahead. Okay, sure.

I appreciate being invited here to talk about a collection of things all related to prison ministry. Brother Brian Martin had asked me to be here.

I'm here basically to represent Lighthouse Publishing, which is an organization that the church I belong to operates. And a good part of my presentation is to describe what we do. And then I've got a couple of bullet points about prison life, and some of those I might go over pretty quickly.

This is a presentation I share whenever I'm asked to share on Lighthouse. So I've got a number of things that are just kind of general interest things about prison life. And then also just some information, not a lot, but we did a recent survey of our magazine distributors asking what it has been like in the past year in prisons attempting to minister to prison inmates in the COVID-19 situation. And then I think part of the reason Brian asked me on is because I've been sharing some on my Facebook page a couple of months ago, some findings about crime trends in the United States that I learned from reading a study on those things. So I'll share some things about that as well.

So like everybody knows, my name is Mike Fisher from Bedford, Pennsylvania. My wife and I have 12 children. I own a grocery store. And so we have a pretty busy life. And God is very good to us. So I'm going to go ahead and start my presentation on Lighthouse Publishing. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen here.

So just a few words about what Lighthouse is and how it came to be. Lighthouse Publishing is an organization that was founded by Darryl Degingrich, who currently lives in Iowa, but it was founded in Pikeville, Tennessee. And it came from a conversation that he had had with folks in a local prison in Pikeville who told him that the greatest need in prison is for Christian discipleship literature. There is a lot of evangelistic material and preaching and teaching in prison, but there is a lack of discipleship material, how to teach and train Christians to live the Christian life. And so that was his inspiration for starting a magazine that he called Lows and Fishes. So he put together the first printing of the magazine and sent it out as a sample mailing to a list of chaplains that he received across the country.

It was in the early '90s. It was in Pikeville, Tennessee. Darryl was able to acquire a printing press and printing equipment and printed the magazine in-house in Pikeville, Tennessee, at the facility that was built for Lighthouse. It was a ministry of a small congregation called Pikeville Christian Fellowship.

As the circulation of the magazine grew, it became much more cost-effective to have it printed out of the facility. And so that is eventually what happened. Actually, the printing presses and equipment were sold. And even today, the magazine is printed by commercial printers, and we just order it, and it comes into our warehouse.

This is Lighthouse's warehouse and offices in Tennessee. And then around 2012, 2013, the Pikeville Christian Fellowship congregation disbanded. And because of some connections, Brother Darryl's son, Lavern, had to Bedford, Pennsylvania, he proposed to Burning Bush Mennonite Church for the ministry to be moved to Pennsylvania and for our congregation to take it over. And that is what happened.

Lighthouse moved to Bedford in April of 2014. We rented a small facility. It was a former car dealership. It was small, but it did the job. We were there for four years. And in 2018, we had the opportunity to rent something a little more suitable. It's a warehouse with an office and a nice open facility. So that is where Lighthouse is located today.

We have plenty of space. We have restrooms. And our ministry at Lighthouse Publishing is basically about one thing. It is to publish and distribute Lows and Fishes magazine. We do mail various tracts and other materials in our routine mail, replying to folks and correspondence limited to what we do. We also print a little run of calendar cards at the end of the year, about 40,000 of those, which we send to a couple of our larger magazine distributors.

The big things that happen here are our bulk mailings. We try to publish two to four issues per year as funds permit. And when we have those bulk mailing events, we take about 20 to 30 volunteers in an evening. In two to three hours, we can pack the magazines. They need to be labeled and postage applied to the boxes. And a good portion of them are broken down into smaller quantities. It's an evening event. Those are the large events that happen here. Like I say, two to four times per year is what basically we can afford financially.

Here's a couple of photos of our recent bulk mailings.

And start to finish, on the left, you see the books coming from the printer, getting offloaded here at our warehouse. And on the right, you can see the USPS bins with the finished packages ready to head out to the distributors.

The magazine is a 50-page full-color magazine. We went full-color several years ago.

The content focus, like I said before, is Christian discipleship and is from a conservative Anabaptist worldview.

What we do is choose a theme for each magazine issue and introduce that theme with an editorial from our editor. One thing we are privileged to be able to include in the magazine is an advertisement for Lamp and Light Bible Study Correspondence Courses. And over the past, it's at least five or six years that we've been able to have this in our magazine. Lamp and Light has received thousands and thousands of new correspondence enrollees.

Every issue also contains a Book of the Bible Study Guide for self-study with a background, author and audience, the time of writing, a book outline, and some study questions to help introduce a Book of the Bible to the readers.

We also reprint a lot of material that we have permission to republish. We're currently reprinting a book on finances by Gary Miller, a book called Life with an Alcoholic, where a person is giving their testimony of what it is like to be a spouse to an alcoholic.

Those are books that are reprinted by permission from the publisher. And we especially try to include articles on the Christian home and family living, other topics as well. We have a lot of scripture puzzles in the magazine, and that's a popular feature in the magazine.

We also will do write original content. We have a science and creation featured article that's written for every issue by Andrew Zimmerman.

The most popular section of the magazine is reprinted testimonies and poetry that our readers will submit to the magazine. We have a little list of guidelines for them to use. And we get quite a lot of material in, and we try to select what's of the better quality for publication.

But we get a lot of positive feedback. They enjoy seeing the poetry, and they know these people are in the same situation they are. And it does mean a lot to them. Our magazine circulation up to our last printing was 131,000 copies.

However, since our last printing, we did an automatic expiration of bulk subscribers who we had not heard from in two years or more. And we gave a number of opportunities for people by sending them mailers and trying to reach some of them to resubscribe. But combination of the fact that we've never expired bulk distributors automatically, and also COVID has impacted the ability of at least some of our bulk distributors to distribute the magazine like they normally do. So based on recent expirations, our circulation is down to about 90,000 in bulk.

I'm sorry, about 90,000 total. And of these, about 2,900 are single-copy subscriptions. We do send out single-copy subscriptions on request. We do prefer to send out the magazine in bulk. It is quite a bit more cost-effective to do that. And so the primary way that our magazine is distributed is by chaplains and prison ministries.

The circulation has grown significantly up till the past issue. The printing and shipping costs are quite expensive. At our last printing, a printing of the magazine costs $21,000, and the shipping of the bulk mailing costs about $11,000. The cost per copy, not counting other overhead, is about 25 cents per magazine. So it is a cost-effective way. 25 cents gets a copy of this magazine shipped and printed and shipped out to a prison inmate.

Until our recent expirations, we had about 600 bulk distributors. And these are going to be primarily chaplains, some prison ministries, some churches, and some individuals as well. An example distributor that we've worked with for a lot of years is Carolina Chaplaincy Program in South Carolina. It's operated by the Mennonite Churches of South Carolina. They get 900 copies of the magazine each time we print. And we send as many copies as they request.

So they're taking these copies of the magazine and using them in their visitation to prison inmates in the prisons. Our largest distributor at the moment, at least when I created this presentation, is a chaplain at CMCF in Pearl, Mississippi, who gets 3,600 copies of the magazine.

So like I said, prison chaplains are the primary way our magazine reaches prison inmates. We have distributors in most states of the United States.

Like I said, we do also offer single subscriptions on request. In 2020, we mailed 397,415 copies of Lows and Fishes magazine. We mailed 40,000 of the calendar cards along with miscellaneous materials and tracts. Our revenue in 2020 was typical.

We typically see from 100,000 to 130,000 dollars of revenue in a year. That was up 11% over 2019. And taking our total cost, our total expenses for the year divided by the magazines distributed, our cost for distributing a magazine is 34 cents per magazine. That's fairly typical of what it costs.

So why we go to prisons? These are some obvious things. For us as believers, Jesus and the apostles called us to minister to those in prison.

Continue to remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison. I think one of the things that you learn over time when you're speaking to folks in prison or have been in prison, there really is not that much dividing us. And I have a thought at the end that I think is probably the most scary thought, most frightening thought that rests in the back of my mind as I work in prison ministry. And we'll finish up with that then.

There are over 7,000 prisons, jails, and juvenile correctional facilities in the United States. The US has the highest prison population of any country in the world, about 2.3 million. And you can see the chart there with the incredible growth in the last 100 years.

Not only that, but the US has the world's highest incarceration rate, about 700 people per 100,000 population.

That's followed by Russia, the Ukraine, Poland, and so forth.

Since the 1980s, the US prison population has more than quadrupled. And a very interesting fact, and one that I've known for a while but didn't really know a lot about, is the fact that over the past time period when the prison population has mushroomed, violent crime has drastically declined. And so the question in my mind is, why then, while crime has drastically declined, has the prison population increased?

So I had the opportunity to read a book on that topic. I'll show it to you in a minute here. But here are some trends from Pew Research Center. Violent crimes per 100,000 people from '93 to 2018 dropped from 747 to 368, so about a 50% drop in violent crime in that time period. Property crimes, same thing, even more drastic of a decline, over half of property crimes have declined since 1993.

So the study that I read is called The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America. It's not actually a study. It's basically the findings from a lot of studies. It is by an American criminologist named Barry Latzer. And it's basically to describe and try to talk about the causes for both the rise and the fall of violent crime in the United States that began back in the 1960s. And if you look at this chart, the figures are pretty staggering.

And this is crime rate, not total number of crimes. This is rate per 100,000 of population. In 1960, violent crimes known to police were under 200 per 100,000 of population. And they peaked out in the early '90s at between 7 and 800. So you're talking like the statistic earlier was more than quadrupled violent crime. This is specifically on violent crime.

Homicide victimization rates more than doubled in that time period. And this book gives three reasons for that increase in violent crime. And one of them is that there was simply a massive growth of the US population during that time in a specific age range.

Apparently, and I did not know this before, the age group of 18 to 24 is the age group that is most likely to commit violent crime. And we've heard of the baby boom generation. That generation came of age in the time period where the tremendous growth of violent crime happened. And that is the baby boomer generation was born from 1946 to 1964. So 18 to 24 years later, after that period is when we saw the violent crime boom like it did. And so the second reason, I don't believe these are in order of importance, for that growth in violent crime was sort of a snowball effect, the inability of the criminal justice system to deal with the sudden rush of crime.

And when there's no consequences for crime, that creates more incentives to commit crime, is his argument. And another one, and this is a difficult one to think about, is that, but given the data that he presented, it's inescapable. Mass migration to major cities in the United States, such as New York and Chicago and places like that, of rural southern US populations with a history of violence. There was a point when there was a tremendous economic incentive to move from rural areas to cities in the United States. And it created a tremendous demographic shift that was a factor in the rise in crime.

So followed by all of that, we have the dramatic downturn that happened in violent crime starting in the early 1990s. And this chart is of murders and non-negligent manslaughters. So this is about homicides going in from 1980, a high of over 10 per 100,000, to about half that, about 5 in 2010.

Murders dropped by about half. Robberies dropped even more dramatically by two-thirds between the highs in the 1980s and 2010. There were times in the '60s, '70s, early '80s when crime was so bad in cities, people felt unsafe to simply walk down the street. And that was during the highs of this crime wave.

So why the dramatic decrease in violent crime? Again, from Barry Latzer's book, not in any particular order. And some of them seem fairly obvious. More aggressive policing. At the same time when violent crime was decreasing, there was actually a 28% increase in arrests for violent crime. And once they were arrested, more of them were sent to prison and for a longer period of time due to tougher sentencing laws.

You might have heard of the Three Strikes Law. And that was a law enacted during this time period where a third felony offense, even if it's a minor offense, could result in a life sentence if the prior offenses were considered serious or violent. So you can get life in prison from committing a small theft if you have prior violent offenses.

And another thing that happened, and I'm going to assume this was part of the increase in crime, was the drug situation. But part of the reason for the decline is the cocaine epidemic ran its course. And drugs drive a lot of other crimes.

And that drug was so devastating that it was deadly to the people who were involved in it. And also, apparently, the next generation was turned away from it just by its terrible effects. So the greatest reason for the decline in violent crime in the 1990s, according to Latzer, was a revivified criminal justice system.

Longer sentences, mandatory minimum sentences for certain crimes, such as drug crimes. For example, laws that require a mandatory minimum of five years for a first-time non-violent drug offense. And this is a paragraph that he gives as a summary.

To summarize, the retirement from crime of the baby boom generation was the main reason for the end of the post-1960s crime tsunami. Their children prayed to the Lord of cocaine, launched a short-term crime wave of their own. But in the face of this latest escalation, the retrenched criminal justice system responded aggressively instead of caving in, as it had in the late 1960s and early '70s. The pressures of police harassment, arrests, and the high rates of imprisonment, combined with the consequences of the whole grim cocaine lifestyle, set off an anti-crack craze. The great crime title wave was finally receding.

So obviously, crime trends can change. And just in the last year, in 2020, there was a 36% increase in homicides in the United States. In fact, there were more than 20,000 murders last year for the first time since 1995.

So almost a quarter of the world's prisoners are in the United States. Half of the world's prisoners are in three countries: the US, China, and Russia.

In the US, 2.3 million people are incarcerated. 4.7 million are on probation or on parole. A little over half of those 2.3 million folks are in state prisons. A little over a quarter are in local jails, a smaller percentage in federal, and then others in juvenile detention centers, immigration, and so forth. And this has had a cost annually to US taxpayers of $81 billion and $100 billion of costs paid by individuals.

Keeping somebody in prison costs the government $31,000 a year.

Prison population is about 90% male, about 10% female.

The US incarceration rate is about 700 per 100,000. But the main racial demographics have a real disparity here. It is 380 per 100,000 for whites, 966 for Latinos, 2,207 for black.

2.7 million children in the US have a parent behind bars.

I'll go over this one quickly. It's a snapshot into one aspect of prison life, and that is prison food. That's something of a general interest to everybody, food. Here's an example of a prison breakfast. What it might look like: some fruit, juice, coffee, cereal, biscuits, and gravy. Here's another one.

These come from a study that was done. Here's another one: juice, milk, coffee, toast, eggs, wheat. Here's an example of a prison dinner. We've got cake and cornbread and something called vitamin beverage, meat-fried rice, beans. Got a couple of other examples.

If you know anybody in prison or you've been there, you probably know about this one. But I find that a lot of folks haven't heard about things like this.

There's a way to cook in prison using improvised devices. This one is called a stinger. And it's made by taking an extension cord and cutting off one of the ends and leaving two bare wires exposed. And it's used to boil water in a container. You put the two ends into the water, and you plug the electrical plug into the outlet. And that keeps the tips of the two wires apart. And that will heat up the water in between the two wires. And with that, you can heat up things like ramen noodles. You can make coffee. You can make canned fish.

Prison commissaries have things you can buy if you have the money, such as snacks, condiments, hygiene, phone cards, stationery, clothing and shoes, batteries, earbuds, remotes, extension cords, radios, and so forth. Prisons have a special food in some cases, which you get as a punishment. And it's called neutral loaf.

It may be served to inmates who have assaulted guards or fellow inmates or done especially bad things in prison. It is a baked solid loaf that may contain, for example, vegetables, fruit, meat, bread, grains, beans, or "dairy blend" altogether. Here's the one you get in Idaho. It's made of gelatin, breadcrumbs, powdered milk, ground beef, vegetables, canned fruit, cheese, beans, onions.

Neutral loaf is so hated by prison inmates that it has actually been banned in at least three states. Prisoners are ingenious and have time to be inventive.

Prisons are likely to remain a vast population that is in need of hearing the good news of Jesus. And I think we're in a political climate where it's—and we have been here—where it's trendy to become easier on sentencing and things like that. But the prisons are here to stay. And the population in prisons is basically not going anywhere.

At Lighthouse Publishing, our mission is targeted to a small subset of folks who are in prison. Out of the 2.3 million prisoners, hard to know what sector is interested in faith or Christianity and how many of those are serious about following Jesus. It's just hard to know. But at 130,000 magazines approximately, that is 5.7% of the US prison population. So you could think that that's about the percentage of the prison population that we're reaching with our ministry, about 5%.

So then there's a question of why are we sending literature into prisons? Printed material is declining everywhere. The use of printed material is on the decline. Books, newspapers, magazines are all in decline. Newspaper circulation, you can see from this chart, has dropped from in the mid-30% of US households down to below 10% in 2017. And I'm sure that's only dropped since then.

And we know why that is. It's because of the internet, digital media, which is faster. It's easily accessible. It's more attractive in some ways. It's also much cheaper. Except in prisons, there is no or virtually no internet. There is limited email. There's, in some cases, some limited and very expensive content allowed on digital devices. And here's an example of one of those. This is, I think, a JPEG tablet. Many prisons have the opportunity for people to purchase a basic tablet computer. To me, this is really exciting because of the possibilities it could maybe one day present for sending material to prisons.

But it's a closed proprietary system. And it's run by third-party vendors who have books, games, and music. Obviously, they're curated by the prison or by officials or professionals. And they're available for purchase to prison inmates. And the possibility of someday eliminating or reducing printed magazine costs by being able to distribute content digitally is really exciting.

I don't know if it will ever be possible to do that. But when you think about the cost of printing and mailing a magazine being $30,000, the technology is certainly there to distribute it digitally to a lot of prison inmates. Whether or not it would ever be a system that's open for people to use or to apply for is unknown at this point. But it's an attractive possibility anyway. But until then, prison media continues to be the best way to reach the largest number of Christian believers in prison.

Another reason for sending our literature into prison—and this I've heard personally from prison inmates—is that the church services are often enthusiastic. They're often very Pentecostal. They're very exuberant in nature. But they often lack solid Christian teaching. You know, I have a Christian friend in prison who can barely bring himself to attend the service because of that reason. The volume of the music is just insane.

So literature helps fill the void for sincere believers who are really looking for direction for their life. So some things that we've gathered about COVID-19 in prison. And we did a survey by email of our chaplains. And we had about 50 or 60 of them respond. And we also hear from prison inmates just in their letters requesting things and so forth. But we know for a fact that the pandemic has tremendously increased the difficulties of being in prison. It's also increased the difficulty for many prison ministries to operate. So the biggest issue is probably mental health.

The restrictions, the isolation, and the constant fear also of the virus causes depression and anxiety. One inmate wrote to us the other day. And this is just a typical response that we get. We were locked in again, except for 25 minutes every other day. And we've had about two dozen cases of the virus on my block. We're out 45 minutes a day again now, but no visits, library, or yard. And yard is where you typically get your exercise. And library is where you can occupy time and get reading material. And visits, of course, are really the emotional lifeblood of a lot of inmates.

And he says he's fine but isn't very easy mental health-wise. Pray for us all. And one of our distributors wrote, "Overall, there's inmate discouragement due to COVID-19 limitations in place." So it varies by distributor. The actual employees of the prison, chaplains, and some officers have actually been able to get out more than before because there's no other way for them to provide chaplain services to inmates, I mean, than having their employees go out and about in the prisons. But prisons are used to having volunteers provide many of those services. And that's what the biggest challenge is. The outside volunteers have across the board—I mean, I've not heard of any prison ministry that sends volunteers into prison—being able to operate as normal in the past year.

And so that creates a heavier burden on facility staff and chaplains. Some of us are telling us that in this environment, they can actually use more literature than normal. But generally, because of the lack of volunteers going in, there's less being used. About two-thirds of our distributors have said that COVID-19 has affected their ability to distribute our magazines to inmates.

This is all supposed to be temporary, but it's been a year now where they've not been able to have in-person visitations by friends and family, in-person services by volunteers. And it has surely had a severe effect on the morale of inmates. And many of these restrictions remain in place with no end in sight. I don't know of any—I mean, I don't know details on a lot of facilities. But the ones that I know of, I have no idea when they will begin to resume any in-person visitations or in-person volunteers prison services. Now, it doesn't mean there aren't any opportunities for ministry to prison inmates. Right now, a primary one is letter writing. And obviously, you have to know someone.

You've got to know where they are. You've got to know their information, their number, their address. And the thing about it is if you know anybody in prison, it is very easy to find their inmate number and their address by the online state inmate locator websites. And we use those often at Lighthouse to make sure they're the correct information for someone. But we're obviously able to write letters that can get in as usual.

Also, digital messaging is something that's relatively new in prison. And it's something that I find easier than writing a letter, putting a stamp on it. And prisons in Pennsylvania, state prisons, have a software called Connect Network where you can log in and send email to a prison. You have to, again, have their information. And there's a cost to it. You can also send money judiciously to prison inmates. I mean, it does not take a lot of money to be a real blessing to an inmate. If you know an inmate personally, send them $5 or $10. It's a tremendous blessing to them.

Another thing that has—this is relatively—it's either relatively new or it hasn't been nearly as widely used as it has the past year. That is video visitation. That's been greatly expanded. And I've done some of that. That's really nice.

Literature ministry, such as what Lighthouse does, is obviously something you can still do during COVID-19. We've been wondering, what are we going to find when we can go back to prisons in person? And I think that we'll see a lot of spiritual hunger, a lot of starvation for in-person contact. And I think there's going to be a lot of opportunity for us to go back into prisons and bring in the good news of Jesus. And I think we probably will see inmates having more than the usual struggles with anxiety and so forth. All right. Just some points about organization. Lighthouse Publishing is a ministry of Burning Bushman and I Church of Bedford, Pennsylvania. The church members form the executive board.

I'm the chairman of the board. We have a treasurer, Seth Stalls, who's a treasurer. We formed a couple of years ago an 11-member advisory board, which meets annually and receives ministry updates during the year. Here are the names. I won't go over them. They represent about six different churches. And I think all of them are in Pennsylvania, except for Zion Christian Fellowship is in Wilman, Iowa.

Where does the money come from to run Lighthouse? The ministry was established when it came to our area. So many of them we do not know. But there's a wide range of individuals, churches, and businesses who donate. Our primary way of fundraising is by sending out our print newsletters and our email newsletters.

And this goes back to 2019. Our revenue was $120,000. And there again, divided by the total number of magazines mailed, this is our total cost to produce and ship the magazines for the year, 33 cents a magazine. So in other words, for every dollar donated, we were able to share an issue of Loaves and Fishes with three prison inmates. Our staff, Darryl Gingrich, is the founder. And he still does do some work for Lighthouse. He selects the material for the free on the inside section. And he creates the scripture puzzles. His son, Laverne Gingrich, is currently on leave as the editor. But he still manages all of our printing and mailing projects.

Sean Schmidt is our interim editor. He is a missionary in Peru. And he's working for Lighthouse this year, doing, I think, at least three, if not four, issues of the magazine for us. Our primary person in our office is Jimmy Weaver, who does the mail processing. He picks up the mail at our post office box and processes the mail.

I do assist Jimmy sometimes. I come in the office probably a couple of times a week. And I'm the executive board chairman. The rest of the labor for producing the magazine, layout, design, other editing, and so forth is done by a combination of volunteer and paid labor.

We do have a couple of—we do have a little bit of a need for a temporary—I'm sorry, not a temporary, a part-time office staff. So we have a need for a person to probably work here about a day a week, learning our processes and helping to handle mail and so forth. So if anyone happened to know someone local enough to be able to come into the office, we've been looking for someone like that for about the past year. We can use your prayer support. And of course, we can always use funding.

You could stay in touch with Lighthouse. We have a Facebook page called Loaves and Fishes Magazine. We have email and print newsletters. And we have a website. And the website is very useful. And we get a lot of magazine subscriptions from our website. If you know a prison inmate, you know their inmate number, you know the address of their facility, you can come onto our website and subscribe them to receive Loaves and Fishes for a one-year subscription. And that's, of course, at no charge.

Also, we receive new bulk subscriptions. If you know someone who is in prison ministry, if you are in prison ministry, and you can use this magazine in your ministry, just go onto our website, sign up, tell us how many copies you can use. We'll immediately send you that quantity from our inventory. And we'll subscribe you for a two-year subscription for that bulk amount. You can also read back issues of Loaves and Fishes on our website. You can read news updates, contact us, donate. So you can help us by spreading the word about what we do, letting folks know about our magazines. And especially with our drop-in subscriptions that happened recently, we're excited about finding new people who are interested in distributing the magazine.

Pray for prisoners. Write to an inmate. And you can also volunteer for a bulk mailing event. We are getting ready to print magazine issue number 5043. In about two or three weeks, we should be ready to ship that. And we're looking for about 20 volunteers from a group that's local enough to be able to come to Lighthouse for an evening to help package that mailing. So if any of you know anyone who would like to organize a group for that or help or just jump in and help, you can contact me. Maybe at the Q&A, I can give my contact information.

So the thing that scares me the most about being involved in prison ministry over all these years is the simple fact that there's one thing that separates me from someone behind bars. And that is a criminal act. To me, that's a sobering thing. That is something that only the grace of God makes any difference between many of us and those who are in prison.

Being involved in prison and ministry simply helps you to know that those folks are exactly the same as you and I are. They have the same feelings, the same emotions, the same fears and sorrows. And what this is all about is fulfilling Jesus' teaching and Jesus' command to reach out to those who are in prison. Jesus mentioned prison ministry directly and talked about remembering those who are in prison. So prisons are really—they're kind of inaccessible. They're hard to get in, hard to get into. And especially over the past year, they've been next to impossible. But I would hope and pray that the least that people can do is to pray.

It's very difficult on a normal basis. But it's been extremely hard in the past year for prison inmates. If there's anybody you know who's in prison, write them. Do what you can to let them know that somebody on the outside cares about them. And if you have the opportunity to get back to in-person prison ministry, by all means, take that opportunity. It's a ministry that's very close to the heart of God.

That is the end of my presentation. So at this point, I suppose there'll be a question and answer. Yep. That's right. Thanks a lot, Mike, for sharing that information and sharing that vision. And thank you for being useful in the kingdom in this way in reaching out to people. It's an important thing. And it was wonderful to be reminded again of this group of people that needs the gospel. And it's our responsibility to give that to them. So we'll open it up for questions. I have a couple to get us started. Do you ship to Canada at all?

No, we do not. Okay. We have two requests that basically get frequently. And we can't do them. Basically, we have to limit what we can do. One of them is for Spanish material, which we don't have, and also shipping to Canada, which we're not able to do. Not able to do at all. I shouldn't say we're not able to do that. It's something that Lighthouse has never done. And essentially, it's basically probably lack of finances is probably the basic reason. It's been a while since I've thought about that. But yeah. All right.

All right. Does anyone have a question for Brother Mike?

Thanks for that, Mike. That was interesting. If you had limitless cash today, what would be your next project? Where would you go with it?

What we would do if we had limitless cash would be to certainly print four issues per year. Because the goal has always been in the back of our minds to be a quarterly magazine. I think one year, we actually shipped four magazines a couple of years ago. But generally, it's three. And once in a while last year, we only shipped two. So it really does depend on finances. So I mean, if there were limitless cash, we could certainly meet our publishing goal. And then there would be—we do zero advertising for what we do. But if we had the money, we could contact, find lists of chaplains of prison ministries and advertise and try to build our circulation that way.

But it's basically done completely by word of mouth or things like that. We don't do a lot to expand our circulation. And prisons are a bottomless pit for free stuff. So when they find out that they're selling—gets a free magazine. And if they're even 10% interested in it, they're going to write and ask for one.

So that in itself is the way our magazine gets advertised in prison by inmate word of mouth and by—yeah, that's essentially it. Mike, I have a question here. It's a little bit off topic from the literature standpoint. But we talked about how COVID-19 has really increased difficulties for inmates and affected mental health and so forth. And I have a friend who I've been trying to keep encouraged over the last year and trying to give creative ideas of things to do when he's cell 23 and a half hours a day.

And I was curious whether you have any insight on creative ideas to give inmates.

I could refer you to—I think our next magazine has a column in it. And I think it's a new column that we've started offering. I have a friend who's in state prison for a 15 to 40-year sentence. And he's early into it, maybe five years in. And it's somebody that I've learned to have some confidence in. And he is anonymously writing a column in our magazine called Persevering in Prison. It's in our free and the inside section. And I think that that column is about using your time wisely in prison.

It's either the next magazine or maybe one upcoming. So I thought it was a great topic for him to talk about. And I don't have it in front of me. But yeah, he definitely has—there's definitely things that you can do.

It's very difficult right now when you can't get out to swap out your books. And for example, my friend does teaching in prison. And he teaches how to read and teaches American history and things like that. That's all been stopped for a year. He hasn't been able to do that. So right now, it's very difficult. That's why it's like being imprisoned in prison, what they're doing right now. It's very difficult. Yeah.

Right. So my friend, I'm sending him some money every month. And he offered to do something in exchange for that if I give him assignments every month. So I'm trying to come up with assignments. Well, yeah, maybe after I get asked, I think we might have some material for ideas. Yep. One other thing I wanted to comment on. You had mentioned how it's really difficult to get into prison ministry as a volunteer, even in normal times. And I would say, especially as an individual. But this is just for anyone listening. There are ways to network with established prison ministries that make it far easier to get in. So I just wanted to put that out.

Yeah. And Pennsylvania does Yelp Fellowship and others.

Thanks for your topic. You're welcome.

Mike. Yes. Is there such a thing as a prison directory? If you know somebody that's in prison, but you have no way of knowing how to contact them or even find them, is there such a way of doing such a thing? Yeah, there sure is. Do you know what state they're in? I knew which state they were from. But I heard that he was in prison somewhere in the western state. But I don't have any way of knowing or anything.

Yeah. I'm not sure what resource they would be if you don't know the state other than just trying a bunch of them. But every state has an online inmate locator. Some of them are hard to use. I mean, we use them all the time. And it's awfully hard to find a person in California for some reason. Even if you have their inmate number, but every state has an inmate locator that if you know their name or even part of their name, you should be able to do a search and then come up with a list. And then when you click on the name, you would have their inmate number, the facility where they are. Maybe some real basic data about them.

But I don't know what they would be for if you didn't know the state. I don't know of any national directory like that. Okay. Thank you. I have another question. Yeah. You said some of the material is written for each mail-out, right? Yes. How do people contribute material? If there's people on here, I'm sure there's a lot of gifted writers.

So if they were interested in submitting material for a magazine, how would they go about that? For sure. You could contact us. And our editor is responsible for compiling the content, for selecting a theme, and selecting material. So if anybody here is interested, you can contact me. And if you have something you've already written that may work well for this format, send it along and let us know what permission you grant us. And I can send it to our editor. And if it's something that fits with some upcoming plans, we would be happy to do that. Sounds great.

Thank you.

Does anyone else have any questions or comments?

I think we do well to remember this ministry in prayer. It is reaching a lot of people. And God promised that the word would not return void. I think we should be faithful in praying.

About written material, my oldest three sons were just recently at Bible school. And I asked them what their favorite thing was. And I think most of them said that it was a thing they had. They had, I think, four or five different men come in and give their life story/personal testimony. So if you're inspired to write something, that would be a blessing to somebody that you've been through some difficult experiences. Or maybe you've been to prison. Maybe you've had serious challenges in life.

Your personal story and how God has been good to you and led you is, I think, more encouraging than just a bland doctrinal article on a topic or something like that. So if anyone's inspired to do that, I think that's something that we could use. It's definitely more relatable.

All right. Well, we're coming up to the top of the hour here. So I think we can, if there's not another question, we can wrap this up. Thanks again, Mike, for taking the time to do this. And I think we're all a little more educated on prisons. And I guess I've wondered why I haven't been more involved. I know years ago, we had services in a prison just not far from where I lived before. And I've been there once or twice. And it was an interesting experience to go in there.