Call to Mission Work Brought Her to Women’s Prison

Some people do good deeds hoping to get noticed. Others do good deeds in ways that almost guarantee that no one else will notice; their satisfaction comes from the act itself.

We all know which kind we like the most. And when the good deeds are of the spiritual kind, we really know which kind we like the most.

By any measure, you’d have to put Lee Krueger in the latter category, and God bless her for that.

Wherever you stand on religion, you’d have to agree that going into a women’s prison to talk to inmates is not a path to fame and fortune. There are no TV cameras, no rich collection plates to tap into, no influential constituency to impress.

If there’s a more forgotten or less powerful target group in America than women in prison, I’m not sure who it would be.

That’s the arena, however, that attracted Krueger, a 63-year-old great-grandmother who heads up the Women Aglow Prison Ministries from the Buena Park home she shares with her husband of 45 years and that often is the site of rollicking Monday night prayer meetings. Her chapter is an offshoot of the national organization. The statewide group has a handful of coordinators who go into the four women’s prisons and try to answer what, Krueger says, imprisoned women ask most often:

“Is there any life for me; is there any hope?”

Krueger decided as a teen-ager to be a missionary. Africa or China seemed like logical choices. She became a practicing Christian at 15, knowing only that she wanted to make some kind of difference in the world.

She didn’t expect to do it behind prison walls.

“I’m the most unlikely prospect for this,” she says, and she’s right. She’s prim in appearance, proper in speech and manner. “I’ve never really been drunk, I never used drugs, I quit smoking when I was 10 (after a summer’s experimentation), and I’ve never been arrested. I’m squeaky clean, but my heart for hurting women seemed to enlarge because I was raised by a single mom and we were very poor.”

The ministry is evangelical in nature, but Krueger insists that she and the other women who conduct the meetings are “not a bunch of Sunday school teachers.” If the prisoners want to walk out of the weekly Sunday meetings, they are free to do so.

Evangelical Christians are not the group that comes to mind when I think of prison reform, much less women’s causes, but Krueger doesn’t hide her contempt for some aspects of the penal system that affect women.

“I know a lot of women who shouldn’t be in prison,” she says. “They have not committed violent crimes, and they’ve been removed from their families for a very long time for crimes that have been in defense of their children.”

The female population in California prisons stands at 6,745, according to the state Department of Corrections. Of that number, spokeswoman Gloria Isaac said, right around 5,000 are imprisoned for nonviolent offenses.

Although she’s had a lifelong empathy for the underdog, Krueger’s feelings about inmates changed soon after her first prison visit 11 years ago. “I had the attitude that if a person was in prison, they were there because they deserved it and they should just serve their time and shut up.”

But from the start, she felt humbled in the presence of these often-forlorn women, who, Krueger says, are often “hurt and trampled on by society and family members.”

She says most of them turned to crime after being abused as children. The resultant damage to their outlook on life led them to drug use, prostitution or more serious crimes, Krueger believes.

“They are dehumanized. Most of the time, they’re disowned by their families (after imprisonment), their children are taken from them unless a family member takes them, most of their husbands divorce them and their boyfriends leave them. It’s horrendous.”

Women Aglow not only offers spiritual guidance for prisoners but follows it up with post-imprisonment contact, Krueger says. “We help them feel like a person. They begin to feel like they have some worth, because we go in time after time.”

For the record, Krueger didn’t call me for a story. I just happened to notice the Women Aglow listing in the phone book.

Anonymous people doing anonymous work.

I asked Krueger about the thankless nature of her work; about the anonymity of it all.

She begged to disagree. “The missionary call I felt when I was in my teens, this is my missionary work,” she says. “It seems so natural. I feel like these are just girls who made wrong choices. From the first time I went, I felt like I belonged, like I had found my niche.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821 .