Going to prison Former inmate returns for ministry

Stacey Smith’s mission trip to Haiti last month started off with bad news. Her small team had traveled from Arkansas to distribute Bibles to inmates in the Port-au-Prince women’s prison.

“They had some security issues and we were told we probably wouldn’t be able to visit,” Smith said.

It was disappointing news for the Southern Baptist chaplain. A former inmate, Smith now focuses her ministry on sharing the Gospel with female prisoners in Arkansas’ McPherson and Hawkins units. She felt drawn to Haiti to do the same.

Smith serves as a chaplain through the Arkansas Baptist State Convention. She knew that dozens of Southern Baptist teams from Arkansas had traveled, and continue to travel, to Haiti since the 2010 earthquake to provide assistance with rebuilding and to evangelize, plant churches and help out with medical and dental clinics. But no one had visited the women’s prison.

“It was a slow process of the Lord stirring my heart,” Smith said. “Last fall I wondered, ‘We do medical, dental and vision, but what about the prisons?’”

Smith’s hope was to visit the prison and also to train local Haitian women to carry on the ministry after the team’s departure.

Bob Fielding, Smith’s supervisor, serves as the Haiti mission project coordinator for the state convention. He said Smith’s experience made her a great fit for the task.

“Her experience as an inmate and chaplain gives her a unique perspective and equips her, in this case, to teach Haitian women to start similar work in the Haitian prison,” he said. “The story of her own fall, incarceration and subsequent life change offers hope to women that God can do the same for them.”

UNDETERRED So, undeterred by the bad news, Smith and the team’s Haitian host sought help from a government lawyer, hoping he could help persuade officials to let the team visit the prisoners. She soon found herself before a magistrate in the highest court in the country.

“There was sense of awe inside me and quietness, of ‘Lord, where have you brought us?’” she said.

After much discussion, the visit was approved and the team was given permission to personally distribute Bibles and hygiene items to the inmates. They took Bibles written in Creole and packed dozens and dozens of kits filled with soap, toothpaste, toothbrushes, shampoo and other items and were finally allowed to enter the prison.

Smith said conditions in the prison were poor and the cells were crowded, some with up to 26 women in one small room.

“The girls were coming out of their cells and, as we would hand them [the Bibles], the light of Christ was going into this dark place,” Smith said. “There were 238 women there and out of those only 20 had been sentenced. The others were waiting for a judge. Some had been waiting seven years or more.”

Smith said the prison was hot and overcrowded but orderly. Since it was the team’s first trip, Smith was just glad to be allowed inside. The team was not permitted to evangelize but was happy with “eye contact and a smile,” Smith said. She hopes the locals that they were able to train in prison out-

reach will be able to do more, including taking food to the inmates. And she hopes Baptist teams from Arkansas will be interested in taking medical, dental and vision clinics to the prison when they are in the country.

SENDING TEAMS Fielding said he has contacted the prison warden about sending teams to the prison.

“She was elated,” he said. “We want her, her security officers and the inmates to know that we really care about them, but, more importantly, that Jesus really cares about them.”

Smith’s journey to the chaplaincy wasn’t easy. Twenty years ago she was 29 and facing a 60-year prison sentence for a drug conviction. Despite what she calls an “all-American childhood,” her teenage rebellion led down darker and darker roads until she found herself battling a $500-a-day drug habit. She knew she needed help and in desperation turned to a God she wasn’t sure she believed in.

“Two days before I was arrested I looked in the mirror and said, ‘If there’s a God, help me,’” Smith said. “I didn’t know how that help would come and, if I had known I was going to be arrested two days later, I wouldn’t have prayed that.”

But she did. And when the arrest came, Smith was relieved.

“I don’t believe I would have lived another year,” she said.

Prison turned out to be a life-changing experience. Waiting in a county jail after her arrest, she had prayed with Christian volunteers who came to talk to her about Jesus. But her journey of faith had just begun. She truly began to change as she served her sentence at the McPherson Unit near Newport and she was assigned to work in the prison chaplain’s office. She ended up working in the ministry there for most of her 12 years of incarceration.

“I think God called me to give my life to missions in prison,” Smith said. “Once I was saved, prison wasn’t prison anymore. I didn’t see the bars as much as I saw people who needed Christ.”

Even after her sentence was commuted in 2005, Smith felt drawn to continue serving the inmates. In addition to serving as a denominational chaplain for the Arkansas Baptist State Convention, she leads Prison to Purpose, an outreach ministry for former inmates. The ministry builds on the training participants receive from the Principles and Applications for Life Program while in prison.

“There’s a real need to grow believers to be able to walk in this walk and to go out of prison and find purpose,” she said. “That’s really the heart of my ministry, training women up in biblical principles for a successful life, so when they leave prison they will have a purpose in their life.”

MISSION WORK Through her work, Smith not only shares the Gospel with the inmates but helps the women have a hand in mission work from afar.

“It’s not just teaching biblical principles but, over the past few years, really building a mission mindset with the ladies on how they can be involved in missions right there,” she said.

Smith does this in a variety of ways, including inviting missionaries to visit and tell their stories. Mission teams throughout the state also ask the women to pray for them as they travel around the globe.

“When they come back, we ask them to bring a flag and we put it up in the barracks,” she said, adding that most times a team member will go to the prison to share a report on the trip with the inmates. “It encourages the women.”

Last month the female inmates of McPherson and Hawkins provided prayer support as Smith and her team traveled to Haiti. The inmates had been praying for more than six weeks as the team prepared, Smith said, and they set up a schedule to pray in 15-minute shifts the entire time the team was gone.

The inmates also bought soap to put in hygiene kits for the Haitian prisoners.

“They bought soap from their own accounts and we took 155 pounds with us,” Smith said. “It was one inmate to another.”

When she returned home to Arkansas, Smith shared the team’s story with the inmates so they could hear how they had helped reach the women of Haiti.

“It was a great morale builder for the compound,” she said.

Smith is planning to return to Haiti in the fall to continue the work. In the meantime, she’ll continue her ministry with the inmates, striving to inspire them to live lives of faith and, hopefully, one day to enter the mission field outside the prison walls.

“The main thing is to be involved and don’t let parole, don’t let finances be an issue and don’t let the negatives deter you,” she said. “Be on mission wherever you go.”