I don’t know what I was expecting. World peace? The end of poverty?

But when I asked the six felons at the table around me what they wanted for Christmas, they responded in unison. “Papers!”

“Papers?” I naively asked.

“Yeah. Parole papers,” the one closest to me explained. “We want to be home for Christmas.”

Half of the men at my table were in the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary prison ministry degree program. (Yeah, I know. It’s a mouth-full.) I questioned those three again. “But what about your degree? If you got out on parole-” They stopped me before I could continue.