After many years of teaching in schools, Sister Lee Ann McNally, R.S.M., moved on to teaching in jails and prisons in Little Rock, Arkansas. She helped to found the Center for Women in Transition, a nonprofit agency that helps women being released from incarceration make the transition back to living in the outside world.

Sister McNally grew up in Gulfport, Mississippi, the oldest of nine children in an Irish Catholic family, and joined the Sisters of Mercy in 1960. Of working with prisoners she said, “What I see are good people who never had anyone respect them as individuals. Respect to me is very big. I teach that, I act that way in class, I insist that the women treat each other with respect.”