Prejean visits 'U' before Capitol

Sister Helen Prejean has had a busy last couple of days in Michigan. Fortunately for her, that's nothing new for the New Orleans nun and author of "Dead Man Walking" who, since the publication of her memoir and the Oscar-winning film it inspired, has become one of the most visible activists against capital punishment.

For the past decade and change, Prejean has traveled across the country and the world, speaking to campus and community audiences about her experiences with Death Row inmates and the providential turns her life has taken as a result. And that's just what she did Monday afternoon at Rackham.

But Prejean had two extra reasons to make this trip. One was the jeopardy faced by the Prison Creative Arts Project, a locally based group of volunteers, many of them University students, who travel to Michigan correctional facilities and engage prisoners in workshop activities involving visual arts, dance, and improvisational theater. The workshop program, under the leadership of University Prof. Buzz Alexander, has recently been eliminated by the state Department of Corrections.

The other reason prompted Sister Helen to journey on to the floor of the state capitol in Lansing, where yesterday she implored the state House of Representatives not to allow Michigan to become the 39th state in the country with capital punishment. Afterwards, she held a press conference.

While in Ann Arbor, however, she found time to visit Alexander's class and speak to students. She attributed the PCAP's travails, which mirror a nationwide trend towards removing educational and religious opportunities for prisoners, to the controlling mentality of prison adminstrations.

"It's the philosophy of warehousing people, making them suffer, and it's retrograde because for prisoners who have this opportunity, the recidivism rate is almost zero," Prejean observed during an interview with The Michigan Daily.

"But with the dynamic of a closed system, like in a prison, you can run things however you want. It's only when you have others coming in for these different programs, eyes from the community with a whole different concept of the humanity of these prisoners, that there is a countervailing force ... which creates conflict," Prejean said.

Prejean also challenged polls that express the support of a large majority of Americans for the death penalty, which she called "a surface response."

"What I have discovered in my years of (public appearances)," Prejean explained, "is that people, when they are brought close to this issue, and given key pieces of information along the way, most of them reject the death penalty.

"We lack the wisdom, and we lack the purity, to administer such a thing," she said.

Prejean talked with humor and charm about a wide range of topics, from the changes in the Catholic Church and the struggles of women within it since she became a nun, to the implications of the new conceptual physics and cosmology, all subjects she intends to include in the new book she revealed to be her next project.

"It's principally a spiritual autobiography," Prejean said."It's about my idea of the Christian faith as something that can be translated into social justice."

But Prejean, an English major who has taught high school and kept journals for over three decades, finds it a challenge to write when she is traveling at least half of each month, especially on such a diversity of issues.

"It's like currents in a river," she explained. "I do love to write ... it's switching from wave to wave, channeling your energy into different things, that I have to adapt to so quickly. What I treasure the most is meeting so many different people, and from prisoners to prison guards, to the Pope, to Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, there's such a common humanity.

"The prisoners even more so than the Pope, because I only got to see him for a minute," she said.

02-24-99