The right approach to prisoners

When I read the article Replace Prison With A Hospital And A School, Says Fr Mark Montebello (January 14), my first reaction was: “Here goes Fr Mark again!”. But then I realised that in our society we need the Fr Marks of this world because they are the ones who provoke us to think critically. I also read the online blogs but, unfortunately, for a reason unknown to me, my blogs are never posted. So I opted to write this letter.

For more than 11 years, I have been working in jails and prisons in Colombia, Guatemala and Los Angeles (US) and every single day I am inside, I am scared – absolutely terrified! No, not because the inmates might attack me or con me but because the inmates have a face, a first name, a last name, a family, a mother, a father, a story – same as you and me. And this is what scares us righteous people on the outside. The line which separated “them” from “us” is so thin. We want to lock them up, throw away the key so that they won’t be able to remind us of what we might be capable of doing given the “right” circumstances.

In no way do I want to justify what most of them did. Killing, abusing minors and vulnerable adults, extortion, dealing drugs, stealing are all wrong. Some of the inmates have committed heinous crimes, creating havoc and unnecessary pain to their families and especially to the victim’s families.

Be it self-will or determinism, we have to face the fact that we are failing as a society. We are failing in the type of education we are giving our young people – to teach them to take responsible decisions based on what is right and wrong and not on what is convenient for me or not. We are failing in forming and creating families with solid moral values.

There was another issue mentioned various times in the blogs – the death penalty (a hot issue for me personally because I am daily in contact with men who are facing the death penalty). The death penalty is not the solution. It creates more pain and suffering even for the victim’s family. There is never a closure because an inmate on death row has a right to so many appeals that he/she has to wait sometimes up to 20 or 25 years to use up all the appeals. Can you imagine the victim’s family each time there is a hearing in court, and they have to be present and relive the pain of the memory of their murdered loved ones?

The death penalty is not a deterrent to crime. No one who has decided to kill somebody or no one in a fit of passion or rage, or who is mentally sick, will stop and think: “Oh, let me think twice, because I might get the death penalty”.

I agree with Fr Montebello’s idea of having hospitals and therapeutic schools but those might work for people with a drug or alcohol problem.

My question is how to help those young (and not so young) people who have been in and out of the system and only know how to function in a closed prison setting because they were never taught otherwise? What to do with those who have undergone a change of heart (a true spiritual conversion) but still have to spend their whole life locked up in a prison or worse await the day of their execution?

We have to face big challenges, answer big questions and in the meantime, Marlon, Marvin, Jovanni, Bryant, Reuel are all doing life sentences because they weren’t rich enough to pay for a lawyer to get them out!