Samaritan helps free souls of inmates

Stacy J. Willis

Friday, June 8, 2001 | 5:18 a.m.

The young woman is crying. Her wrists are handcuffed, bound to her waist with a chain. This is all wrong. This is not where she is supposed to be today. She is supposed to be at work. Turning her life around.

But she violated the conditions of house arrest. She failed to tell her probation officer her new address. So she's sitting on a bench in this noisy intake unit of the Clark County Detention Center.

She closes her eyes. Tears drip from her chin onto her blouse.

Someone touches her cheek. It's a small, older woman in bright floral shirt.

"I'm Bonnie Polley," the small woman says. Her voice is sugary and southern. "You will be all right. I know it doesn't seem like it now, but you will."

Maybe it's the way she says it. Maybe it's just her presence. Something makes the girl stop crying. She looks up and says, "Thank you."

Bonnie Polley, 62, has been volunteering in the halls of Clark County's jail for nearly 20 years. She carries the unpaid title "religious coordinator" and has her own desk tucked in a corner by the elevators on the 12th floor.

Day after day, she answers the requests 1,800 inmates -- written requests for eyeglasses, for books, for a visit, for a prayer. Polley isn't a newsmaker -- but the inmates she spends one-on-one time with are often the infamous: Sandy Murphy and Jessica Williams, among many others.

Polley says she tries not to judge them or their crimes. Nor, given the authority, would she let them out. "They are here to serve their time. I know people think I'm a do-gooder who would let them out, but that's not me.

"I think if I do anything here it's to be present with these people and give them hope. I believe there is hope in a relationship with God. If our relationship with the Lord is OK, it doesn't matter where we are.

"I'm here to help individuals become at peace with themselves, wherever they are."

This place, however -- this overflowing, controversy-plagued jail -- is not where Polley ever expected to be.

She's the mother of three boys and the wife of an attorney, a woman from Lake Charles, La., whose burning passion for the first half of her life wasn't justice or mercy, but dentistry.

"I just loved being a dental assistant," Polley says, revealing her own set of straight teeth. "I wasn't all that interested in God."

But somewhere along the line Polley developed that interest in a way that led her not just to church, but to jail cells.

It started superficially enough -- she was persuaded to join an Episcopalian church group in the late 1970s by a woman who was socially influential. "I was a little afraid of this woman. I wouldn't have dreamed of telling her no," Polley says.

"But what happened is, we were sitting there in this circle at church, and I thought, 'Oh my God, what am I doing here? I don't even like any of these people.' And then they went around and asked everyone all the good reasons why they were there, and I heard myself say, 'I don't know. I just don't know.'

"It was the first time in my life I was pretty honest. I was tired of trying to keep up appearances. I left," she said. "I cried all the way home. But I felt cleansed."

What emerged on the other side of her honesty was a clear look at her life: she was the daughter of an alcoholic, and the wife of an alcoholic, and someone who knew something about pain, about fear, about loneliness.

"I was the typical Al-Anon (a support group for family members of alcoholics) person, and I felt I had just hit bottom, and I was either going to drown or go over the brink," she said. "So I turned to Jesus."

Beginnings

It was 1980. Carol Lamb had just shot and killed her allegedly abusive husband while he lay sleeping on the living room sofa. Lamb called the police, turned herself in, and was sitting in jail the next day when she had a visitor.

"I was still in a state of shock," Lamb recalls tearfully. "And I was surprised that someone I didn't know cared that much to come in and comfort me -- and not throw me out with the trash."

It was Bonnie Polley. The two had met once before, when Lamb worked as as a dental assistant.

Bonnie had never visited a jail before, and she feared it wouldn't be easy to get access to Lamb, because the murder victim was the nephew of three influential brothers: Sheriff Ralph Lamb, Nevada Senator Floyd Lamb and Clark County Commissioner Darwin Lamb.

"I read about the shooting in the paper," Polley recalls. "Something in me said I should go see her. But I thought there is no way they are going to let me in... Well, I went down to the jail, and my heart was beating so hard I could hear it."

To her surprise, the jailer said all she needed to do was sign in.

"So I punched the button and waited for the door to let me in, and then it slammed behind me. I can still hear the clicking and clanking. And I said to myself, 'What am I going to say?

"I sat down, and she came out and sat down on the other side of the glass, and we picked up the phones. She said, 'Bonnie Polley. What are you doing here?'

"And I said, 'I'm just here because I care about you.'

"And we talked for two hours."

Lamb was sentenced to 25 years in prison, and led a prison ministry while behind bars. Polley was ordained an Episcopal deacon in 1982. Lamb was pardoned in 1984.

Forgiveness

Jail is about punishment and loss of freedom. Religion, Polley says, is about liberation.

Polley provides inmates with religious material from all faiths -- Books of Mormon or Korans or whatever they request. For her, the common underlying principle is what's most important:

"There are people who have never felt unconditional love, have never been taught that God loves them, always," she says, walking past several dozen male inmates who are eating from trays in unit 3A. "I share with men and women every day that I believe good can come out of all things -- all things -- if you seek God."

But Polley's faith has not come without challenges.

One of Polley's sons is now an Episcopal priest, another is a social worker, and a third is homeless -- a street musician in California.

"I hear from him only every now and then," she says, turning her head away. "I got a letter from him a little while ago that said, 'Why would you bring me into this world knowing what it's like?'

"It's hard,' " she says, her voice tapering off. "Bless his heart."

On the wall beside her desk she has a pin that reads, "No Outcasts."

"I can't allow myself to take all of these children home," Polley says about troubled people in general. "At first, as a younger person, I wanted to. Those of us involved in ministry probably are dysfunctional in that we want to take care of the world that way."

Once or twice, she has made caretaking decisions that proved to be bad choices. One inmate needed a place to stay upon his release because he couldn't find immediate transitional housing.

"So I took him home," she says.

Tony, as she calls him, was a drug offender. He stayed three days, went to transitional housing, and then began doing drugs again.

"Then one day I came home, and the door was not locked, and I went in and there was my TV on the washing machine as if it were on its way out the door," she said. "And my antique silver ladel and soup tureen were gone."

Tony ended up back in jail on drug charges.

"I saw him and said, 'Tony, I know you took it. Where is it?' But he denied it. Well, later I got a letter from him, and he admitted it and asked for my forgiveness, which I gave him, but I told him I would not work with him any more."

She never recovered the silver soup tureen and ladel.

No exceptions

On this day, undaunted, she's standing in the jail laundry facility, where a crowd of male inmates are folding piles of orange, jail-issue socks. She tells a large Hispanic man who is being released the next week that he'd better "keep his nose clean."

"Yes ma'am, Miss Polley," he says. "God willing."

The inmates are twice, maybe three times her barely 100-pound size. She is never armed, and she often wanders through the building alone.

"Nobody touches Bonnie," says Officer Kenny O'Rourke. "If a guy even moves toward Bonnie, the other guys will be all over him."

But, says Lt. Leroy Kirkegard, that doesn't mean officers aren't protective.

"I worry about her all the time," Kirkegard says.

"But from a professional standpoint, Bonnie is one of the most important members of the division team. We deal with some very different people here, and sometimes they just respond better to Bonnie. She is a saint."

Take, for example, a man who was arrested last year on charges of robbery, kidnapping and attempted murder, and who was particularly known for his violent temper.

'He wanted to meet with her. I was very apprehensive about it. But my officers were right there. But when she went in and sat down with him, she told the officers, 'Please give me some space.' She's not afraid," Kirkegard said.

There, Polley says, the accused criminal opened up.

"He cried," Polley says. "He said he didn't want to be mean. I said, 'You don't have to be.' He asked for a Bible. He said he had never read the Bible.

"He said he came from a terrible background and consequently he hated everything and everybody...I told him the Lord will help him. He said, 'How can I stop hating and stop being so angry?'

" 'We can only do that with help from God,' I said, 'You've got to talk to God just like we're talking and ask him to show you the way to forgive yourself and others.'

"I believe unforgiveness is the root of all of our problems," Polley said.

Murphy, Polley says, met with her several times during her trial for the murder of casino-owner Ted Binion in 1999.

"We talked, but Sandy and I never really shared too much other than me just asking how she was doing. She really is a very sweet little girl."

Polley says she became closer friends with Jessica Williams, who was convicted last spring on six counts of driving with a prohibited substance in her blood after running over and killing six teenagers on Interstate 15.

"Jessica and I would sit down and talk a long time, talk about God and Jesus. She was searching. She is a precious child who made a horrible, horrible decision."

Williams was sentenced to 18 to 48 years in prison.

"But I think she has found Jesus," Polley says. "I think in spite of her situation, she has truly been set free."

And, in these jail hallways, so has Polley. Sun reporter

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