2009 - Q2 Barton Award winners. Students at SJA and CHS join to ...

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inmate. Many of the men participating in the program
have not had face-to-face visits or other regular
contact with their children for an extended
period, Ellerbe says.
“This is a way for them to reconnect with their
kids,” she says.
Rebuilding that bond was a priority
for Phelps officials. A 2008
examination of its records found
that 109 of its roughly 940 offenders
had not been visited by
a family member in more than
two years, says Assistant Warden
Jolene Constance. “These men
were getting ready to be released,
and ‘Read to Me Daddy’ helped
them bridge that bond.”
The “Read to Me Daddy” project received funding
from the Foundation in 2007 to pay for video
equipment and personnel to film its first group of
19 offenders, including men from the Baton Rouge
region who were incarcerated at Phelps. Offenders
chose the stories they wanted to read from a
collection of books donated by Baton Rouge
Community College’s criminal justice program.
To date, 25 children, ages 3 to 12, have received
books and DVDs from the first filming in 2008, but
that number will grow as the program expands to
Dixon and other facilities this year, Ellerbe explains.
And the concept could be traveling out of state,
too. In February, Michael Ellerbe, Ellerbe’s husband,
founder of Refined By Fire and director of the
Pre-Release Program at Dixon, co-presented the
project at an international gathering of nonprofit
groups that provide family-focused programs
to offender populations. With him was Phelps’
Constance.
For the Ellerbes, work with Louisiana offenders
has long been both a spiritual and professional
mission. The couple, along with now-grown daughter
Ari, began performing Christian rock—they
“It made me feel good
to be able to reach out
and do that for her.”
—Kendell Hinton, prisoner
have three albums to their credit—in the early ‘80s.
From the beginning, the family connected with offenders
whose life experiences were vastly different
from their own.
What struck the Ellerbes from their early interactions
with incarcerated men in Louisiana and other
states was the great need for what Mrs. Ellerbe describes
as the “human connection,” and emotional
nurturing. “There is a rapport there, a synergy, because
I think the offenders connect with our being
a family and want that connection for themselves,”
she says.
The chance to nurture their children through
“Read to Me Daddy” is one of the project’s benefits
to offenders and children alike, Mr. Ellerbe says.
The idea of caring for their children in this way
sometimes feels foreign to men whose fathers may
have been absent from their own childhood, he
says. The program also contributes to the literacy
skills of offenders who may not be strong readers.
“For some, this has given them the motivation
to learn to read because they wanted to be able to
tell a story to their child,” he says. “Nothing breeds
success like success, so the hope is that if they
read one book for the program, then they are going
to want to keep reading.” •
Baton Rouge Area Foundation