Meet Michael, Featured Volunteer for Spring 2025

Michael Winkelhorst has been volunteering with Books to Prisoners for over eight years. He began when we were still in the church basement in the U District.  He explains what keeps him coming back.

What got you interested in BTP to begin with, or what made you start volunteering? Does it tie into the rest of your life in any meaningful way?

 I can’t recall how I first heard about BtP or the circumstances of first volunteering. I could have been my reading of Brian Stevenson’s “Just Mercy”: Here was a way to do something meaningful to improve the lives of the inmates in our wretched prisons. It keeps me mindful of my privileged and fortunate life.

 Is there anything you especially like about volunteering with us? What are your favorite parts of the process?

 BtP makes it easy to volunteer, and that flexibility is helpful. Like most volunteers, I suppose, I look forward to filling requests. There isn’t a lot of conversation during a shift, because we’re all focused on our tasks, but it is rewarding to be able to turn to another volunteer and ask for help on a challenging request. And, of course, once or twice a shift, you might be able to perfectly match a request with books on our shelves and then imagine the eventual smile on the face of the recipient. 

Everybody starts off by responding to letters, even if they eventually move on to wrapping or other tasks. Some of the letters can be memorable. Are there any requests that surprised you, or that you remember standing out in any way?

When I am answering letters, hardly a shift goes by without one of those requests clutching my heart with its circumstances. The gratitude that an inmate can express after waiting months for a few paperbacks is wrenching. Or the letter that comes from someone with minimal communications ability and barely legible handwriting. What can I do today to expand his or her horizon even a bit? Well, sometimes that is providing the requested dictionary, which a surprising number of inmates want. And there is the occasional humor. One writer opened his letter with, “My poker game sucks,” and proceeded to ask for some gaming reading.

In the time that you’ve been here, do you think that your views on the prison system, or what it’s like to be incarcerated, have changed? Please feel free to talk about those views if you would like.

Like most of us, I suppose, I rarely thought about prison before working with BtP. My views - that American prisons are inhumane and cruel and counterproductive and racist - have been reinforced by reading the letters from within. And my volunteer work has made me more attuned to news stories about carceral issues. 

Do you have any book recommendations for us? Is there anything you especially like to read in your spare time?

I’ve been reading quite a bit recently about the civil rights movement in the ’50s and ‘60s in the South and about European colonization of the North American continent, the latter a history from the Indians’ point of view. I’ll mention two books perhaps not widely known: “The Rediscovery of America” by Ned Blackhawk and “Medgar & Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America.” Neither is devoted to incarceration per se, but in each you read about the routine denial of liberty – and life – by state and national governments that show little more regard today for fundamental human rights than those in our past. 

Are there any other parting words that you’d like to share with whoever’s reading this?

Come volunteer or donate some books. As important, remember the people in our prisons and work for justice.