Kevin Waters, CEO of the Dream Live Hope Foundation in Inglewood, helps prisoners who are re-entering society, including veterans and those who can’t afford the skyrocketing Los Angeles rental market. He was one of them, not too long ago, doing 25 years of a life sentence in prison, and then sent to a transition house.

Waters wasn’t free to see his father who was sick with pancreatic cancer. But his parole agent knew someone who might be able to help, Sister Mary Sean Hodges, and Waters asked the sister if she could get him time with his father before he died.

“Within three days, I was taken from that facility to one she was partnering with, and from there I was able to spend the next 52 days with my dad,” Waters recalls. “She was instrumental in making that happen.”

Waters later rose to the position of manager at the transition house and met weekly with Hodges, founder of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles’s nationwide restorative justice effort, the Partnership for Re-Entry Program, or PREP.

PREP is an effort to provide in-prison coaching and self-development through mail-in courses, and has reached an estimated 40,000 prisoners nationwide, many of them serving life sentences.

“She helps people constantly, always trying to open or facilitate programs that can help mainly returning citizens,” Waters says, referring to inmates released from prison. “I’d venture to say, I don’t know this for a fact, she hasn’t been paid a great deal of money to do these things. The fact that she’s able to do that — that she has that altruistic quality — speaks to her quest just to be of service.”

For 20 years, Sister Mary, now 81, has worked with prisoners often sentenced to life, guiding them to re-enter society as individuals who know themselves better and understand the factors that led them to a life behind bars.

“It’s been a beautiful, beautiful journey,” Hodges told a crowd of about 200 on Aug. 13 at St. Basil’s Catholic Church in Los Angeles, at a celebration of the program’s 20th year that honored her. “It’s just not one person, it’s the team that makes us who we are.”

Some of the lifers were paroled and now lead productive lives, a direct result, they say, of the retired Dominican nun who began her journey out of high school with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

“People inside hear about her,” said Marc Vahanian, an executive coach and founder of the nonprofit Pathway to Kinship, who works in collaboration with Hodges. “She’s a legend. She is the closest thing to a living saint that I have ever met — and I’m not Catholic. She does this because she believes in people, knows it’s the right thing to do. She has taught me to love people in a radical way.”

As Hodges describes her efforts, “When we began working with the lifer population, all of them needed programs of rehabilitation in order to change their lives. So we began writing 13 progressive lessons on anger management that ask: Why am I so angry? What brought my anger? And what can I do to change my anger?”

The courses in her program are designed to give inmates tools to change their attitudes and thought patterns. The lessons are mailed to inmates, who complete and return them to program staff at PREP, and they receive certificates upon completion. But the outreach to inmates goes beyond the mail-in project. Hodges, a Catholic school teacher for 40 years mostly in the Los Angeles area, taps those teaching skills to conduct in-person classes in prisons.

Of the prisoners she engaged with via her mail-in program and classroom programs, only 3% have returned to crime and to prison, according to PREP.

Kevin Waters calls Hodges an agent of change. “For many, many lives inside and out (of prison), including those who never even met her, they do the program and try to better themselves,” Waters said. “She’s touched and moved many more lives than she can possibly imagine, and she’s an inspiration to many, many people. She exudes love at every turn.”

Hodges is most satisfied by developing personal relationships inside the prisons. She believes prisoners don’t believe in their own self-worth because of their backgrounds and their crimes. “By going to the prison, it says to the people inside ‘You care enough about us to come visit us’ and that’s important,” Hodges said.

PREP theory says that a person often ends up imprisoned due to harm they suffered when young that often led to quitting school, starting to use drugs and alcohol — even at age 10 or 11 — and hanging out with gang members to belong.

“If (I) don’t belong in (my) own family … then I will go in search of where I belong,” Hodges explains. “Then I cover it up with drugs, alcohol and join a gang. Once I’m in a gang, I’m challenged to do graffiti, do stealing, get a gun —  and it usually ends up in some kind of violence.”

Hodges says many prisoners are angry and blame others. They don’t take responsibility for what they did, she says, and when they face years in jail some of them come to the conclusion that they are never getting out.

“After that settles in for a bit, a person begins to say ‘Well, I can do something about that; I can change my life’,” she said. “In this insight workshop I give, I say ‘OK what was it that you said? I can change my life?’ What’s that moment of transformation? And everyone can name one. The transformation is a whole process in life, it takes awhile.”

Ex-prisoner Dujuan Springfield, 44, of Los Angeles, says that when he was in prison, “I started off writing to her and what she’d do is for free, and no charge to me, and she’d send me these courses.”

Springfield stuck with it and found that, “The lessons helped me learn the process of how anger started, showed me how to release anger in a positive manner and taught me it’s okay to be angry (and) how to release it.”

Hodges wrote letters to the Board of Prison Terms on Springfield’s behalf before he was released from prison on Nov. 4, 2021. When he got out, Hodges offered Springfield a spot in a transitional home. 

Springfield had come a long way, thanks to the courses he took in prison. Those courses “helped me get in touch with inner feelings, the stuff I never paid attention to,” he recalls. “The object of these courses is that when you are writing … it’s making you think. Looking back, I was thinking about certain things that happened in my childhood.”

But Hodges’ attitude toward him was a part of it, as well. “She’s very social, she talks to everyone, she treats everybody like they are family,” Springfield says. “She’s always polite and respectful. Once you meet her, she remembers your name.”

Quan Huynh of Garden Grove was incarcerated for 15 years to life and released in November 2015, and he vividly remembers the first time he saw Sister Mary in prison in 2012.

“She felt like a living-day saint amongst,” says Huynh, 48.

Today he is executive director of Defy Ventures, a nonprofit whose mission is to give people their best shot at a second chance through career readiness, personal development and entrepreneurial training programs.

“The way she looked at us, with such kind eyes and love, you can just feel it,” says Huynh. “I don’t know how to describe it. There are people during my journey that looked at us as human beings, who we are, and she’s one of them. Her presence was there, so kind, so gentle.”

In the early 2000s, prisons were called detention centers and the Archdiocese had an Office of Detention ministry. But the church reconsidered what some argued was a negative connotation, and the Archdiocese renamed its detention ministry the Restorative Justice ministry.

Many Catholic dioceses in the country fell in line. The concept was that a person wasn’t imprisoned to be punished but to be healed and returned to the community.

“About seven to eight years ago, I went to a parish and presented our program and a woman came up and she was furious with me because I believed in releasing persons from prison,” Hodges recalled. “She was just angry, angry and she said her mother was killed 30 years ago and she felt that person should stay in prison until they died. And I felt, how sad for that person, to carry the burden of that anger for 30 years.”

While Hodges has worked with victims and their offenders when both are willing participants, the PREP program primarily focuses on the offender. She doesn’t always meet them, but some seek her out if she visits a prison to teach a course, or after they are released.

Having seen suffering up close in her two decades of working with prisoners, she sums up her philosophy by saying, “If a crime happens in my neighborhood, it makes my neighborhood afraid and the goal is to … bring in people from the neighborhood to meet the offender, to meet the victim, and to come to healing. So that you live in harmony.”