sisters
Daphany Ragland
Sister Lee Ann gives a hug to Carol Harrison, who has benefitted from the Center for Women in Transition in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Teacher first, sister always For Sister Lee Ann McNally, R.S.M., ministering to prisoners started as a new adventure, but it was also an extension of the work she is sure God had in mind for her right from the start.
by
Leslie Scanlon
D
APhany Ragland met Sister Lee Ann McNally when Ragland—who was then in the Pulaski County Jail in Little Rock, Arkansas and on her way to prison—took a class called “Reinventing Your Life” that McNally taught. “I was known as a habitual criminal and they said I wasn’t fit to live in society,” Ragland said. But McNally told her, “You have so much good in
Leslie Scanlon is a writer in Louisville, Kentucky.
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you”—something Ragland had never heard before. “More than anything, she was patient, just listening. And to think that a nun would take the time with me, that was very impressive to me. When my family wouldn’t take the time to listen to me, she would.” Ragland now works for McNally at the Center for Women in Transition, a nonprofit agency McNally helped to found as an outgrowth of her work teaching in jails and prisons, to help women being released from incarceration make the transition back to living in the outside world. For McNally, teaching prisoners was
VISION 2010
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