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Tuesday, December 17, 2013

"Sending a Nun to Prison to Die" By Lisa De Bode, Al Jazeera America


 83-year-old Sister Megan Rice continues her anti-nuclear activism in jail, pleads for a Catholic Church 'of the streets'
"Sister Megan Rice presses the palm of her hand against the glass in greeting, her blue eyes welcoming her visitor in a cell opposite hers. Lamps illuminate her oval face framed by cropped hair like a white halo. Her uniform - a green-striped jumpsuit, sneakers and a gray blanket that covers her slender shoulders - is not the norm for a Roman Catholic nun, but she sees her presence in Georgia's Irwin County Detention Center as answering her Christian calling.
The 83-year-old Rice has chosen to spend the final chapter of her life behind bars.
She faces a possible 30-year prison sentence on charges of interfering with national security and damaging federal property, resulting from an act of civil disobedience she committed in July last year.
Exhausted after hiking through the woods adjacent to the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., that once provided the enriched uranium for the Hiroshima bomb, Rice, along with Michael Walli and Gregory Boertje-Obed splashed blood against the walls, put up banners and beat hammers "into plowshares" - a biblical reference to Isaiah 2:4, "They shall beat swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks."
Breaking into a sensitive nuclear facility to stage a protest, the three activists were prepared for the worst. "We were very aware that we could have died," Rice said.
They were not killed but found themselves incarcerated. Now she spends her days answering letters from supporters and educating other detainees about the dangers of nuclear weapons - and the connections she draws between militarism and the poverty she believes has landed so many young women behind bars. Rice accuses the U.S. government of denying citizens such basic rights such as medical care and access to education because it invests so many billions of dollars in military equipment.
"Every day is a day to talk about it," she told Al Jazeera, raising her voice a bit to be heard through the glass wall that separates her from the outside world. "It's not time lost by any means."
Citing backgrounds of poverty from towns "where there are hardly any other options," she blames a capitalist economy for not investing more in social services available to the underclass and effortlessly connects nuclear weapons to the "prison-industrial complex." They're not bad people, she says of her fellow inmates, but were unfortunate enough to be born into a society that gave them few choices.
"They know that they are the human fallout and the victims of the profiteering by the elite and top leaders of the corporations that are contracted to make the nuclear weapons. It's (the money) denied to human services that should be the priority of any government," she said.
She coughs slightly, her nose running from the cold inside the jail. Every morning, she stands in line to receive her daily dose of antihistamines, but others receive pills for conditions far worse than what she has to endure, she said. "So many should not be here," she sighed, edging closer to the glass wall in which a talking hole was partly blocked.
"I don't see them as perpetrators but as the victims. People are being warehoused in detention centers all over the country."
Walli, a 64-year-old Vietnam veteran, also spends long hours talking to inmates, veterans from Iraq with post-traumatic stress disorder, whom he said should be getting proper treatment. "We try to do missionary work here," he said. "We're trying to instill the idea that human life is sacred..."

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