Keeping closely connected to their son, who has been far away in an Arizona prison the past 10 years, was the saving grace for Jamee and Kalei Miller’s family. They are now trying to transform a criminal justice system that they believe penalizes Native Hawaiians unfairly.

A year ago, they formed ‘Ekolu Mea Nui — honoring their son ‘Ekolu — a grassroots nonprofit that helps families maintain their bonds with imprisoned loved ones. To raise funds, last March they started selling an original crack seed snack, labeled Seeds of Change, made by ‘Ekolu’s grandmother.

The money went to purchase masks and hand sanitizers for prisoners at the start of pandemic, Jamee Miller said, when the prisons weren’t receiving funding for the personal protective equipment. “I was really worried about an outbreak.”

They partnered with other nonprofits also working on reforming the incarceration system. By the end of December, following a Christmas rush, they had raised some $15,000.

Recently ‘Ekolu Mea Nui shifted its focus from personal protective equipment to enabling families to send free postcards imprinted with personal photos to loved ones behind bars. Through an app called Flikshop, the postcards are sent in the regular mail.

“It’s so important to keep that connection because Hawaii sends so many inmates out of Hawaii,” she said. Many are sent to the Saguaro Correctional Facility in Arizona, from which her son will be released this year. “Always being able to call us kept him in good spirits. The support of outside family is so incredibly important — that’s been our saving grace. He was a good person going in; we only got to help him become better.”

Depending on the facility, prisoners are limited in the amount of pictures they may keep, but postcards are considered letters, she said. As long as the pictures on the postcards adhere to certain rules, they are allowed. Families can email info3meanui@gmail.com to receive gift codes from ‘Ekolu Mea Nui to get free access to Flikshop.

‘Ekolu, now 30, was 19 and attending college when he got into a car accident while drinking, and his passenger died. He was charged with negligent homicide, and though it was his first offense, received the 10-year maximum sentence, whereas the average is 4-1/2 years, Miller said. It’s been hard waiting for ‘Ekolu to complete his sentence and experiencing firsthand the “gaping holes” in the system, she said.

“Hawaii is a very punitive state,” Miller said, and the justice system is unfair to people of color and the poor. The group’s website, ­ekolumeanui.org, cites statistics from the ­Office of Hawaiian Affairs’ 2010 study on “The Disparate Treatment of Native Hawaiians in the Criminal Justice System.” Other reports and legislation introduced since 2010 continue to support the study’s findings.

“For a long time we were afraid to tell our story because we were ashamed. But once we were able to get over this hump, people kept asking us to share, and it just opened up the heavens,” Miller said. “People I thought would be more judgmental were not, they were accepting and empathetic, and full of wanting to help.”

A consultant who helped her organize the nonprofit in 2019 urged her to make the crack seed for fundraising, after Miller gave her a bag. Miller gave out the seeds to friends and colleagues as a thank you gesture. “She ate it in 15 minutes and asked: What the heck is this? This tastes fabulous! Where did you buy this?”

Though Miller’s day job is statewide director of ‘Aina Ulu, a land legacy education program of Kamehameha Schools, she thought she could make the seed mix in her downtime.

The snack is a combination of a dozen varieties of preserved fruits and ginger, laced with a sauce to balance the flavors. It is a recipe her mother, Roena Vasconcellos, had devised as a remedy for the motion sickness Miller suffered when she was traveling frequently about a dozen years ago.

At first her mom gave her preserved ginger, a homespun antidote for nausea, but Miller didn’t like the taste; so then her mom tried dried lemon peel, which Miller accepted. Soon Vasconcellos was cutting ginger into very fine pieces and mixing them with other crack seed and Miller noticed she felt better, oblivious to the ginger. She’d share her mix with other passengers on airplanes and the flight attendants; they’d always ask for more and where to get it.

After work in the evenings she, her husband and mom make large batches of the mix and package it. Miller’s mother gauges how sweet or salty a mix will be depending on the types of seeds available, and adjusts her sauce to balance everything. The mix includes the usual kinds of crack seed that can be found in stores, including plums, different kinds of mango and lemon, three kinds of ginger, guava and more, some of it flavored with li hing powder. The Seeds of Change mixture is sold on the nonprofit’s website in 3-ounce, 8-ounce or 1-pound sizes, from $12.50 to $25.

“It’s really a beautiful story. (The seeds) helped me heal, it tastes really good, but at the same time we’re using this product to help the organization. Really, we’re not making a lot of money. Whatever we are making, we’re putting it right back in,” Miller said.

The name of ‘Ekolu Mea Nui comes from 1 Corinthians 13:13 of the Christian Bible and it’s also the name of a hymn, which means “the three important things” in Hawaiian, referring to the faith, hope and love alluded to in the passage. The name, she said, “has lots of symbolism for us since ‘Ekolu was born. These three values are the cornerstone of our family and have kept us together through this traumatic experience that seems never-­ending.”

John Berger’s On the Scene column will return March 14.