"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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