Jailhouse Rockefellers

By Barbara Cornell/New York

With his hearty smile, salt-and-pepper beard and pillowy belly, Harvey George would make a perfect Santa -- so it's no surprise to see him fretting about Christmas as early as October. But come December, he will not be making his gift-giving rounds in a sleigh. In fact, he won't get much farther than a 6-ft.-by-12-ft. cell in East Jersey State Prison. For one bunch of determined philanthropists, charity begins behind bars.

George, who is serving a life sentence for conspiracy to commit murder, is president of Lifers' Group Inc., headquartered behind four security doors in the gloomy Victorian fortress in Rahway, N.J. Its 54 members are serving sentences of at least 25 years for crimes ranging from armed robbery to murder. While fellow inmates pump iron, watch TV or gossip in their cells, these jailhouse Rockefellers volunteer their time to help the world outside. "I figured out early on that there were only two things I could work out here," says George, 45. "My health and my mind, and I had to nourish both of them."

There are drawbacks, of course, to serving society while serving time. The prisoners can rarely see the fruits of their labor -- unless someone sends a video of children ripping into Christmas toys or volunteers unloading truckloads of food for hurricane victims in South Carolina. Last year the Lifers' Group helped a local church organization feed more than 500 people at Thanksgiving; they hope to double that number this year. Their computerized data base has about 900 potential donors (half of them lawyers) of food, clothing, toys and money. In fact, the 15-year-old group is so formalized that it has tax-exempt status and a 15-page booklet to explain the group's goals to new members.

Rahway is just one pocket of prison philanthropy. Across the country, inmates find ways, big and small, to escape the moral insulation of prison life. The scale of the effort varies from jail to jail: throughout Pennsylvania, prisoners sponsor statewide run-a-thons that through the years have collected nearly $89,000 for various youth programs. At the Louisiana State Penitentiary, inmates sell pizza in the visiting room to raise $2,500 a year for residents of a juvenile home. At Soledad and San Quentin in California, inmates sort discarded eyeglasses to give to the poor. Female minimum-security inmates at the the D.C. Correctional Complex make heavy gray- green blankets for the homeless.

The Lifers insist they get no special treatment for their good works, no favoritism from the parole board. For many, a tangled struggle for survival landed them behind bars in the first place. Now they use what limited means they have to ease that struggle for someone else. "Society looks at us as someone who can't do anything -- we're not taxpayers or anything," says Maxwell Melvins, who ended up in jail after shooting an innocent bystander in an argument over drugs. "Well, this is my way to reach back out."