By Cody Stark
The Huntsville Item
HUNTSVILLE, Texas — Corrections officers play a vital role in the community and a special group of people are coming to Huntsville to show appreciation to these individuals for their hard work with a hot meal.
About 120 members of the Texas Baptist Men (TBM) organization and other volunteers will feed 5,000 Texas Department of Criminal Justice employees this week at 11 prison facilities in the Walker County area as part of National Correctional Officers and Employees Week.
“This is something that is done every year to let corrections professionals know we appreciate them,” said Bill Kleiber, the executive director of the Restorative Justice Ministries Network of Texas, which TBM is a member of. “We want to encourage criminal justice professionals that they can find peace, joy, meaning and purpose while working in a volatile and stressful profession.”
The Texas Baptist Men will travel from Dallas to Huntsville today. They will begin cooking beef and chicken fajitas with all the fixings around the clock at First Baptist Church and will serve meals and snacks to TDCJ employees over three shifts at the 11 facilities Tuesday and Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Brookshires is providing cold storage for the food before it is cooked and is also donating snacks.
Volunteers will also hand out bibles and other literature to TDCJ staff.
“We will set up tents at the units to feed the officers and the food will be kept warm in these special containers the Texas Baptist Men have. We will hand out bibles and we even have bibles with pink covers for the female officers,” Kleiber said. “There will also be cool water and warm conversation. We ask the officers, ‘How can I pray for you today?’ They will get a personal prayer if they want it.”
The the meals will be served Tuesday and Wednesday at the Ellis, Estelle, Ferguson, Holliday and Gibbs Lewis units as well as Huntsville Memorial Hospital, which has a wing for TDCJ inmates. The volunteers will be at the Huntsville and Wynne units on Tuesday only and will finish with the Goree, Byrd and Eastham units on Wednesday.
Walker County Judge Danny Pierce and Rep. Sylvester Turner have issued proclamations recognizing Correctional Officers Week. The first week of May was designated to honor correctional officers and contact staff for their public service my former President Ronald Reagan in 1984.