Great-grandmother changes inmates’ lives at Gwinnett prison

And while they don't allow it, the petite white-haired great-grandmother who peppers her speech with "precious" and "honey" is, perhaps, the only one at Phillips who can walk the grounds without a gun and not have to worry about harm coming to her.

“She has no idea the impact she has made on these men,” said Darnell Winston, an emergency response officer.

And its staff.

When she arrived more than a decade ago, Katie Wright, a 76-year-old retired pastor born and raised on a Lenox Road farm, was simply responding to one of those nagging feelings she’d gotten from God.

She hadn’t intended to stay, but, well, the men, the majority of whom suffer from severe mental illness, somehow touched her heart.

But let me back up. The truth is she was heading to this place or someplace like it for years before her arrival in 2006.

Several years prior, Ms. Katie said she had this persistent urge to see a doctor, something she hadn’t been inclined to do.

“For several weeks it got stronger and stronger,” she said.

Asked by the doctor what was wrong, Ms. Katie responded, “Nothing. I just thought I’d come to see you.”

The doctor decided to run a battery of tests any way and then one Friday called with the results. He wanted her at the hospital Monday morning.

“I appeared and I wondered why they there putting me to sleep,” she recalled. “When I woke up the room was full of doctors and nurses staring down at me.”

The doctor told her she had cancer. If she hadn’t come when she did, she would’ve been dead in six months.

You're a lucky lady, he said.

But Ms. Katie knew it wasn’t luck at all.

“It was God,” she said.

While at home recuperating, she said she got another nagging feeling. This one told her to go to Phillips.

Ms. Katie had visited the Buford prison once before with a ministry from her church. If there was anything she’d learned over the years it was this: When you get a persistent feeling, you go with it. She called the chaplain to see if there was anything she could do to help. There was. They could use a volunteer coordinator.

That was in April 2006. Ms. Katie, now a chaplain, has been there every day ever since — leading church services, Bible studies and life skill programs. Sometimes she just sits with the lonely and holds the hands of the dying.

She arrives each day at 9 a.m., serving hugs to the staff at the top of the hill then heads down the hill, where the inmates flood out of their rooms into the common area for the same loving care.

Her day usually ends when she’s good and ready, about 6:30 p.m.

Now if you think that makes Ms. Katie special, forget about it. This isn’t about her, she likes to remind you.

“I represent the hundreds, perhaps thousands of men and women who volunteer, spend their time in our state prisons and transition centers,” she says. “People with care and compassion and hearts come because housed in these prisons are men and women who have lost their way.

“They are the outcasts of society. They are the lost sheep and we have a moral obligation to reach out to them and help them change their lives.”

And so it occurred to her a few years ago that she needed a place to work on inmates’ hearts, and they needed a place to heal before they were released. That’s how Block B, a re-entry dorm, came into play.

Fifty-five of the 900 men housed at Phillips are enrolled in Ms. Katie’s re-entry program, launched just four months ago. Inmates within two years of their release date qualify. There they learn basic skills such as how to manage money and use a cell phone and a computer.

A 2010 study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that two-thirds of offenders incarcerated in state systems were arrested for a new crime within three years, and more than three-quarters were arrested within five years.

But done right, corrections officials say, re-entry programs like the one at Phillips can help reduce recidivism rates.

“It’s my call to first reach their hearts,” Ms. Katie said. “If we don’t change hearts, we’re never going to change their lives.”

It might seem simplistic, but Ms. Katie believes that to do that, you must first be willing to meet people where they are and show you care. She has looked in their eyes and seen the brokenness and the fear. Her goal is to replace that with faith and hope.

Last week, to honor Ms.Katie’s work, the Georgia Department of Corrections voted unanimously to name Block B the Katie J. Wright Re-entry Dormitory.

Andrea Shelton, founder of HeartBound Ministries, which supports and funds prison chaplains at facilities where there are none, couldn’t be happier.

“She deserves it,” Shelton said. “She’s somewhat of a superstar around Phillips. She’s a straight shooter who is not afraid to tell you the truth; ‘wise as a serpent and gentle as a dove.’ She understands human nature and has that unique capacity to see others as God sees them, flawed and fallen, but loved. She makes you want to be a better person.”

The way Ms. Katie sees it, though, she’s just doing what she was called to do — walking alongside those who have lost their way.

“I can’t save them all, but if I reach just one, it’s OK,” she said.

You have to wonder, what shaped that big ol' heart of her's?

“A life of learning and ups and downs,” she said. “I know what it’s like to have nothing and recognize that I am blessed beyond measure, honey.”