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Faces of forgiveness: a prison ministry in East Texas tries to rehabilitate criminals and heal victims by doing something inventive: bringing them together.

Article Excerpt
LOSING A CHILD IS UNBEARABLE; losing four children in one night is the hell that Bob and Kathy Connell had to live through in 1997, when a drunk driver hit their kids' car head-on. "Some one could have dug a fifth hole in the ground for me, and I would have laid down beside them," Bob says. "The pain was more than we could stand. But there came a point when we had to decide if we were going to die along with them or if we were going to join the living." He and his wife decided to get involved with a prison ministry called Bridges to Life, and during visits to prisons around East Texas, they began having face-to-face conversations with inmates, including men who were serving time for the same crime that had claimed their children's lives. "It started off as away to try to persuade people not to drive drunk, and it turned out to be a way to heal ourselves," Kathy says. [paragraph] Bridges to Life is one of only two prison ministries in Texas that are trying to rehabilitate violent offenders by creating a dialogue between inmates and crime victims. (Volunteers are not paired with the people who victimized them.) The eight-year-old program is an example of restorative justice, an approach that encourages offenders to see the profound imp act that their crimes have had on others and to take responsibility for their actions. The fourteen-week program, which inmates participate in shortly before they are released on parole, requires them to listen to crime victims' stories, take part in weekly discussion groups,...

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