IMAGE: CNS/Paul Haring
By David Agren
CIUDAD
JUAREZ, Mexico (CNS) — Pope Francis urged society to rethink its ideas of
locking up inmates and throwing away the key, calling such an approach another
symptom of the “throwaway culture” he often decries and “a
symptom of a culture that has stopped supporting life, of a society that has
abandoned its children.”
Speaking
in a prison previously plagued by riots and controlled by drug cartels in a
city once considered the “murder capital of the world,” the pope proposed
focusing on prevention, reintegration and a system of “social health,”
instead of on only on incarceration and insisting that inmates pay for their
crimes.
“Celebrating
the Jubilee of Mercy with you is recalling the pressing journey that we must
undertake in order to break the cycle of violence and crime,” Pope Francis
said Feb. 17 at Cereso prison, home to some 3,000 inmates.
“We
have already lost many decades thinking and believing that everything will be
resolved by isolating, separating, incarcerating, and ridding ourselves of
problems, believing that these policies really solve problems,” the pope
continued. “We have forgotten to focus on what must truly be our concern:
people’s lives; their lives, those of their families, and those who have
suffered because of this cycle of violence.”
Pope
Francis often includes prison visits in his papal tours, drawing attention to a
population on the periphery of the church he is trying to construct. Prison
officials in Ciudad Juarez say their facility — once considered the most violent
in Latin America — has vastly improved since the horror of its worst year
2010, when 216 murders were committed there and rival gangs, fighting for
control of drugs running through Ciudad Juarez, carried out crimes from behind
bars.
His
trip drew attention to the horrors of Mexico’s oft-maligned prison system, marked
by overcrowding, corruption and inmates paying for privileges, protection and
basics — everything from toilet paper to proper food. Inmate control inside
correctional facilities is common.
The
trip follows a brawl — blamed on incarcerated members of rival cartels
clashing — in a Monterrey prison a week earlier. Forty-nine inmates died. Pope
Francis sent condolences for the tragedy in the Topo Chico prison, where state
officials subsequently found luxury cells with king-size beds, bars and even a
sauna.
In
Ciudad Juarez, the pope proposed prevention, along with reintegration and
rehabilitation, which he said, “begins outside, in the streets of the
city.”
It
also “begins by creating a system which we could call social health, that
is, a society which seeks not to cause sickness, polluting relationships in
neighborhoods, schools, town squares, the streets, homes and in the whole of
the social spectrum … a system of social health that endeavors to promote a
culture which acts and seeks to prevent those situations and pathways that end
in damaging and impairing the social fabric.”
Pope
Francis mentioned the Year of Mercy often in his address to inmates, saying: “Jesus
urges us to have mercy that embraces everyone and is found in every corner of
the world. There is no place beyond the reach of his mercy, no space or person
it cannot touch.”
He
called concern for prisoners “a moral imperative for the whole society,”
in working to toward an improved “common life.”
“It
is within a society’s capacity to include the poor, infirm and imprisoned, that
we see its ability to heal their wounds and make them builders of a peaceful
coexistence,” Pope Francis said. “Social reintegration begins by
making sure that all of our children go to school and that their families
obtain dignified work by creating public spaces for leisure and recreation, and
by fostering civic participation, health services and access to basic services,
to name just a few possible measures.”
“Social
reintegration begins by making sure that all of our children go to school and
that their families obtain dignified work by creating public spaces for leisure
and recreation, and by fostering civic participation, health services and
access to basic services, to name just a few possible measures.”
Toward
the end of the brief meeting, Pope Francis joined the inmates for a moment of
silent prayer, telling them that only they knew what they would ask forgiveness
for. Several inmates were seen crying as they prayed.
“I
tell you from my own wounds, errors and sin,” he said, “that the Lord
wants to forgive.”
He
ended his talk with the assembled inmates, sitting under sunny skies outside a
recently renovated prison chapel, by urging them to no long be “prisoners
of the past,” learn to “open the door to the future,” and speak
with their loved ones to put an end to “this cycle of violence and
exclusion.”
“The
one who has suffered the greatest pain, and we could say ‘has experienced hell,’
can become a prophet in society,” he said. “Work so that this
society, which uses people and discards them will not go on claiming victims.”
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