To remedy that, Dr. Anne Reissner, a director in the Center for Mission Research and Study at Maryknoll, is working with other educators to bring college education back into Sing Sing through private funding. It makes not only humanitarian but also economic sense to give prisoners educational opportunities. The education that Maryknoll Sister Jean Michalec gives to inmates in Japan is basic. A teacher at Sophia University in Tokyo, she also helps Westerners caught in Japan's criminal justice system by teaching them the Japanese language. This enables them to avoid increased punishment for violating the country's rigid prison code, which includes, for example, goose-stepping to and from barracks along painted lines in the floor while not being allowed to look up or talk to fellow inmates.
Papa now works as a paralegal in a New York City law office.
It takes incredible strength to survive in a place like Manila's New Bilibid prison in the Philippines. In the company of prison chaplain Jesuit Father Roy Cosaca, I saw 62 men sharing a cell the size of an average American dining room, with one bathroom and water for washing and drinking brought in by buckets from an often contaminated source. Survival can also include raising a duck or pig or cultivating a stamp-sized vegetable plot. Inmates in the world's poor countries face conditions the same as or even worse than those faced by prisoners in the Philippines. Not surprisingly, in societies often plagued by government corruption, prisons come last on budget priorities when there are not enough funds to promote employment, housing, education or health care for the general population.