When Los Angeles artist Stephanie Segel steps behind prison bars for a project, all paint brushes and art pens are labeled; each bottle of paint is accounted for. When she leaves, all supplies return with her. It's standard prison safety protocol: What goes in must go back out.

Convicted women carry a lot into prison, too. Guilt. Shame. Destructive habits. Wounds of abuse. But what if people didn't have to leave prison with all the emotional and spiritual baggage with which they entered? What if these could be let go for good?

That's part of the vision for Create: New Beginnings, the restorative in-prison art workshop Stephanie co-leads with fellow artist Martha Ackerman. Create: New Beginnings has visited Rikers Island Jail, Minnesota Correctional Facility-Shakopee, California Institute for Women (CIW), and other correctional facilities.

Located in Corona, Calif., CIW is also home to a Prison Fellowship Academy^® site, where participants address criminal thinking and behavior, addiction, victim impact, and more. Forty women from CIW's Academy cohort welcomed Martha and Stephanie for a lesson on the art of forgiveness.

After the discussion came the hands-on activity. For such a difficult subject, participants received simple instructions: Write a letter. Direct it to someone you harbor negative feelings toward. Share openly and don't hold back. The letter will be destroyed—never delivered—so, no pressure.

Martha, Stephanie, and their team of volunteers joined in to write their own.

Another woman wrote to her husband, asking for his forgiveness. In her addiction, she'd abandoned him and their children. Still another wrote begging her entire family to forgive her for her unbridled anger and for choosing over her family the friends she'd followed into addiction.

Once everyone who wanted to share had done so, the incarcerated women tore their letters into pieces—a symbolic "letting go" of bitter feelings. Each woman pasted the scraps of her letter to a clean sheet of paper, creating a canvas of new and old.  Paintbrushes in hand, the artists began blending colors into beauty and healing.