Find Your Way Home: Words From the Street, Wisdom From the Heart, a modest new book published by Abingdon Press, was written, according to the byline, "by the Women of Magdalene." Modeled in part on the sixth century Benedictine Rule, the book presents 24 principles for living in community, each supported by gritty and moving personal testimony. The Rule of Magdalene begins with "Come Together" and ends a little more than 100 pages later with "Leave Thankfully." None of the participants, staff or volunteers of Magdalene, a two-year residential program for women with a criminal history of addiction and prostitution, is credited for her contributions, gathered over the course of three years. "We decided as a group not to use names," explains Reverend Becca Stevens, founder and executive director of Magdalene. "It is all of us, and could be any of us. This is our story."

Last month, Stevens launched the new book in the same place where Magdalene began more than 11 years ago, and where many of the residents of the five houses start their journey to healing: behind bars. In this case, it was the Otter Creek Correctional Center in Wheelwright, Ky., a minimum- to medium-security prison with inmates serving sentences of anything from a weekend to life for crimes ranging from writing a bad check to murder.

"In 1997, we went to prison to try to understand the needs of the women we would be serving," Stevens remembers. "At that first meeting was an attorney, a counselor, a guard, a prisoner and me, a priest. As it turned out, all of us had been members of Overton High School's class of 1981. I looked around the table and realized that all of us, each of us, could be in the other's shoes. We are more alike than we are different. What holds us together as women, our humanity, is much stronger than our separateness."

So, on a sunny late September day, a three-car caravan left Nashville for Wheelwright, a coal-mining camp town of just over 1,000 people, not counting the 656 female inmates of the Otter Creek Correctional Center, our destination. I was in an entourage of nine: Stevens; her husband, songwriter Marcus Hummon; singer-songwriter Julie Roberts; Marlei Olson, director of PR and development for Magdalene and Thistle Farms, the cottage industry of bath and body products run by Magdalene women; Ali Sevila, a graduate student at Vanderbilt Divinity School; Gwen Cockrill, a Thistle Farms employee and resident who will graduate next year; Katrina Davidson, a 2007 graduate of Magdalene and now a Thistle Farms sales representative; and Regina Mullins, one of the original residents of the first house and now Magdalene's outreach coordinator.

Wheelwright is, to understate, in a remote mountainous region of southwestern Kentucky, an hour's drive from the nearest large city, Hazzard, where we spent the night at a hotel, and where we met prison warden Jeff Little and members of his executive staff for dinner. Rick Seiter, the chief corrections officer at Corrections Corporation of America—which has made grants to Magdalene for the last three years—also drove up from Nashville for the book launch. During the meal, the Magdalene group and the OCCC staff shared information about their programs; the Residential Drug Abuse Treatment Program (RDAP) run by Renee Cornett was of particular interest to us. RDAP houses nearly 100 participants separate from the general population in one large unit described as a "modified therapeutic community environment" for nine to 12 months. Thirty percent of the inmates are transferred in from Hawaii, which has experienced a spike in prison population thanks to the prevalence of methamphetamine. Visits with family back on the island are conducted by video. The staff echoed what Stevens has heard from prison representatives for years: Women are far more difficult to deal with than male inmates. "They're so emotional," said one.

Back at the hotel, we gathered in one of the rooms to talk about our hopes for the visit. Cockrill remembered looking at the outside world from a tiny window in prison. "I'm not nervous," she said. "I'm excited about where we're going." Davidson spoke about the irony of the situation. "When you get out of prison the last time, you do everything not to go back; you don't even run a red light. But to have a reason to want to go back and bring something positive is such a gift."

Early the next morning, we drove about 30 minutes to meet one of Warden Little's staff, who led us another 30 miles or so to the prison. The closer we got to Wheelwright, the narrower and more winding the route became. We passed a sign saying, "Welcome to Wheelwright, Home of the Trojans," and then a huge statue of Jesus outside one of the several churches in the struggling town. The road, lined on both sides by small, closely spaced row houses, began to climb, and as we left the center of Wheelwright we were all struck by the isolation of the prison, literally at the end of the road. Escape seems a ridiculous notion when you're 100 miles from nowhere.

Apart from a box of books, we left everything we brought in the cars and passed through security. Little and Cornett led our group to the RDAP building, where inmates offered handmade leis and hugs of welcome, as if we were embarking on a cruise. The program was simple: Each of the three Magdalene women spoke briefly about their criminal history and journey through Magdalene, then read a passage from the book; Hummon and Roberts provided a musical bridge between each reading.

The women sat in folding chairs arranged like church pews with a central aisle. Whenever one of the Magdalene women said something that struck a chord, they snapped their fingers. (It's surprising how loud 100 pairs of snapping fingers can be.) It wasn't just the women who were "so emotional." As Hummon sang, he was so overwhelmed by the roomful of inmates quietly singing along to his song "Bless the Broken Road" that he forgot his own words at the line, "I'd like to have the time I lost, and give it back to you," and the only sound was his guitar accompanying soft singing from the most captive audience he's ever faced.

After three hours in the RDAP building, we were taken to the gymnasium, where a dozen of the Hawaiian inmates in costume performed hula dances for us, an interlude that didn't seem the least bit odd. Then we repeated the program for about 400 members of the general population in an outdoor area that might be called the commons were it on a college campus instead of a prison yard surrounded by 12-foot fencing topped with rolls of barbed wire that sparkled in the afternoon sun. Several members of RDAP stood on the periphery of the larger event, and when they caught our eyes, they smiled at us across the heads of the other women. In their hands were copies of Find Your Way Home.

A couple of weeks later, Cockrill, Davidson and Mullins sit on the front stoop of the house on the St. George's property at Vanderbilt, where Thistle Farms products are made. I have brought a copy of the photo made in the RDAP building of our group and 13 of the women, arms draped around one another and every one of our faces beaming with huge smiles. If not for their khaki uniforms and the leis around our necks, there would be no way to tell us apart. The three Magdalene women touch the faces in the photo with their fingers. "We are them. They can be us," Davidson says.

In the introduction to the book, Stevens writes, "If you are reading these words from a bunk in a prison cell, take comfort in knowing that part of this book may have been written by a woman who sat in the same prison."

"That was a great day," says Cockrill. "It was so hard to leave, but I feel like we left them with hope. I wanted to tell them, 'This is where it started for me, in prison. You are not wasting your time. This can be the beginning.'"