Ruth Graham helps dedicate new women’s chapel at Mississippi prison

JACKSON, Miss. (WLBT) – A new women’s chapel is offering a sense of freedom and hope for female inmates at the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility.

They beam with pride as they share what they’re creating for their prison community.

“It’s a testimony to the whole prison, the whole state that God is here and God is at work,” said Ruth Graham, daughter of famed evangelist Billy Graham.

She’s become more of a friend to some of these women who participated in a webinar based on her book on forgiveness in the summer of 2021.

“Well I tell my story because with my father being gone so often, I had abandonment issues,” noted Graham. “And I didn’t know that until I was an adult, and very difficult and caused repercussions in my life. And so I had to forgive my father. Now, I know people go ‘What do you have to forgive Billy Graham for?’ But he was absent. And when I needed a daddy close by, he was usually farther away. And so I missed that.”

She says sharing her story, she finds the inmates became more vulnerable and opened up to her. Since those classes, 12 of these women have received their seminary degrees.

“This is transformation,” she explained. “This is not reformation. And that’s what we’re all about.”

The chapel represents the first of nine chapels planned at different MDOC facilities around the state. But none are being funded with taxpayer dollars.

They’re all funded with private donations. Commissioner Burl Cain says it’s all part of a broader plan for the system.

“The whole point here, there’s really gang abatement because you create these churches, and then you create the preacher that we’re preaching with the seminary, then they plant churches, just like you would be in any community or city or another foreign land,” explained Cain. “And so therefore, as you build these churches, and they become groups, then the gains have to go away.”

“Giving these individuals that are incarcerated here an opportunity that none of this is mandatory,” added Governor Tate Reeves. “This is something that they get to choose to do, and it gives them hope.”

The women who’ve graduated from seminary will be the ones holding services in the chapel with other inmates in attendance.

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