Helen Prejean.

• Author: Pennington, Judy
• Position: Nun, anti-capital punishment author and activist - Interview

Insightful, quick-witted, and gutsy, Sister Helen Prejean is the author of the best-selling book, Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States, published by Random House in 1993 and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. The book is a detailed study of the death penalty in the United States. It also tells the true story of a friendly, down-to-earth nun who brought love to a death-row killer, and to the families of his victims. It weaves in startling facts about the death penalty, and ushers readers into the execution chambet with Prejean, to witness the grisly electrocution of the prisoner she had.befriended.

Prejean's walk with a death-row inmate is now the subject of a movie to be released in late December. Starring Susan Sarandon as Prejean and Sean Penn as an unrepentant murderer, Dead Man Walking depicts the moral struggles involved during the long countdown to execution. In January, Columbia Records will release a benefit album of songs written about the death penalty by major recording artists.

Back in 1987, I met Prejean at a candlelight vigil held to protest the executions of eight death-row inmates. Even then, she was a powerful witness against the empty political rhetoric and the vengeful "eye-for-an-eye" mentality behind capital punishment. Today, she is one of the most influential voices ever to be heard on this issue.

Q: You were the middle daughter of a lawyer and a nurse living on the cusp of upper-class society. You grew up in an idyllic country home outside of Baton Rouge and could have done anything with your life. What made you decide to become a nun?

Prejean: Well, we're what you'd call a deeply Catholic family--it's in everybody's DNA molecules. At one point, my mother thought of becoming a nun, and my father was an altar boy who thought about being a priest. He had priests over to the house a lot, and the involvement with the Church was always there.

I remember the mystery in the mass--the silence, prayer, music, incense, candles, the big vaulted church, and the saints in the stained-glass windows. It gave me a sense of this invisible presence--that God was somehow with me and the most important thing was to do God's will, to hear that voice and follow it. That's been with me my whole life. I had this thought that there was another way of loving people besides marrying and having a family, and I saw that the sisters did that. By the time I was a senior in high school, I knew that was what I wanted to do.

Q: You joined the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille in New Orleans and were perfectly happy living the contemplative life for twenty years. What changed that?

Prejean: I was forty years old before I realized the connection between the gospel of Jesus and the poor. I tended to stay away from social justice, thinking it was too political, or that we were nuns, we weren't social workers. I would go out to teach--we are what is called an apostolic order--but it was still within a monastic framework of religious life. But then, things were bubbling up in the community. We had missionaries down in Latin America coming back and saying that the peasants were really struggling and we needed to get involved with them. I realized that I had to be among the poor and learn from them what I might be called to do. That's how I got to the St. Thomas Housing Project, in a brown Toyota truck on June 1, 1981.

Q: What was it like when you got there?

Prejean: It was a shock. Growing up in the forties and fifties I had known black people only as my family's servants. Now it was MY turn to serve them. It didn't take long to see that for poor people, especially poor black people, there was a greased track to prison and death row. As one woman put it, "Our boys leave here in a police car or a hearse."

It was a very scary place. You'd hear shootings and see blood on the sidewalk sometimes. There were rampant drugs, and the housing was terrible. There was an old lady in her eighties who had a roof leak in her apartment for years. She was in a wheelchair and couldn't get her feet off the floor all the time. She got an infection in her foot and died.

You know there's poverty and you know there's racism, but to be there and to live among the people and to see how the police treated them, that's a whole other thing.

Q: How did this involve you in death-penalty work?

Prejean: I had never immersed myself in a situation where people were struggling so hard against so many odds. St. Thomas brought me to this level of humanness with people, to a deep point of solidarity and compassion and identification.

That kind of grounding, humility, and just humanness was really good for me. It was in this context that Chava Colon [of the Louisiana Coalition of Prisons and Jails] said, "Hey, you wanna write to a death-row inmate?" I said sure. I didn't know anything about the guy yet, but I already knew enough about how the system worked, that if he was on death row, he was poor. I was there to serve the poor.

Q: Your intention was simply to write Patrick Sonnier, the inmate. What changed your mind?

Prejean: What transformed me, and what I think transforms anyone into activism, is being with people and witnessing their suffering. You have to experience the injustice of what they go...