About us · Est. 2025
Who we are
The Institute for Death Row Correspondence is a program of the Execution Intervention Project. It exists to train, match, and sustain the people who write to those condemned to die.
Our mission
Nobody disappears on our watch.
The death penalty depends on a particular kind of forgetting. The Institute exists to make that forgetting impossible — one correspondent, one message, one faithful month at a time.
We connect correspondents with people on death row who have asked to be written to. We sustain those correspondents in community. And we advocate alongside them when a case reaches its final stages.
Our practice is written down in The Deliverance of Hope, free to read in full on this site.
01 · Dean
Wendy Ramage
Dean, Institute for Death Row Correspondence
Wendy Ramage was educated at Sonoma State University, where she earned a double major in Psychology and Sociology, and later received her MSSW from the University of Texas at Austin School of Social Work. Her professional life centers on helping others find and use their voice. She works as an empowerment life coach with a focus on grief and life transitions.
Wendy has previously served as an advocate in domestic violence service programs and in emergency psychiatric services, supporting individuals who require consistent and comprehensive care. She came to abolition work through her commitment to ending the death penalty and confronting the systemic injustices faced by those condemned to die.
Wendy is committed to amplifying marginalized voices and working toward systems grounded in dignity, compassion, and human rights. Recently, she finished her NThD at The New Theology School with a focus on correspondence with death row prisoners.
I just don't consider anybody else all that different from me.
02 · Priest & Founder
Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood
Priest & Founder, Execution Intervention Project
The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood is a nationally recognized priest (Old Catholic) and public theologian. Dr. Hood holds advanced degrees from a wide diversity of institutions, including Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Candler School of Theology at Emory University, the University of Alabama, Creighton University and Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University. In addition to formal degrees, Dr. Hood has studied throughout the world at alternative centers of meditation and theological exploration.
Author of over 100 books and countless significant articles, Dr. Hood's work and activism has also appeared extensively in the national and international media, including extended profiles in Rolling Stone, Newsweek, USA Today and GQ, a plethora of other print interviews and appearances on the BBC World Service, NBC Nightly News, NPR's Morning Edition, CNN, MSNBC and Good Morning America amongst a whole host of outlets.
Dr. Hood has received awards for his work against the death penalty, for the rights of LGBTQ persons and for leadership during the Black Lives Matter Movement. A participant in history, Dr. Hood organized and led the July 7, 2016, Dallas, Texas rally against police brutality that tragically ended in the shooting deaths of five police officers and appeared extensively in the media afterward calling for a revival of both love and justice.
In his primary work as a national death row spiritual advisor, Dr. Hood regularly accompanies individuals that he works with to their executions and comforts them as they are executed. There is no other spiritual advisor in the country who has been present in the execution chamber to provide comfort during as many executions as Dr. Hood. In Alabama during the execution of Kenneth Smith, Dr. Hood was the first spiritual advisor to be present in the execution chamber for a nitrogen hypoxia execution in January of 2024, an unbelievably horrific moment. As both advocate and priest, Dr. Hood ensures that the guys he serves are at the center of the abolition conversation.
With many arrests, various assaults endured, near constant threats and thousands of miles marched, Dr. Hood is not afraid to give his body over to the struggle for justice.
Every letter you write is a protest against the death penalty. Not a slogan. A fact. You are choosing, in writing, that the person is still here.