“I can’t bear the thought that that you would die without seeing one loving face. I will be the face of Christ for you."
Sister Helen Prejean, Dead Man Walking

Some corporal works lend themselves to expansion and development more easily than others, but visiting the imprisoned is hardly one of these.

Those who visit the imprisoned tend for the most part to be either family or friends, and chaplains. Sometimes visitors have to be specially vetted, so that one cannot simply get up one bright morning and say:  “Today I’m going to go visiting prisoners.” By definition, prison visitation remains a fairly rare occurrence for most people.

There are, even so, remarkable instances of what visitation can effect in prisoners’ lives. A fine example is the witness described in Dead Man Walking, a book (and film) that recounts the journey made by Sister Helen Prejean, a Sister of St Joseph of Medaille, with Matthew Poncelet, an unrepentant, racist murderer in rural Louisiana.

Prejean accompanied Ponclelet from the time of his conviction till he went to the electric chair. “I can't bear the thought,” she says to him, as his execution date gets close, “that you would die without seeing one loving face. I will be the face of Christ for you."

This is perhaps the book’s climactic moment, but it’s about more than a special relationship. It represents a wide, realistic, unsentimental look at the realities surrounding imprisonment, and from that perspective it allows us to do “visitation” regarding some of these realities in an instructive though quite vicarious way.

First, there is the fact of wrongdoing. To talk to prisoners sometimes is to get the impression that no one in prison is guilty; nobody’s there because they did what they’re alleged to have done.

Dead Man Walking,on the other hand, is far from blaming anyone or anything else for Poncelet’s fate, except Poncelet himself. He is no example of imprisoned innocence, hurt by society or by circumstance.

He is a far from pleasant character, and he has no feeling for the value of other people’s lives. Only gradually does Prejean come to see the frightened, lonely person hidden by his foulness and bluster.

Prejean must also deal, secondly, with the families of Poncelet’s victims. Families of prisoners and victims alike are a fundamental part of prison ministry, but the families Prejean encounters aren’t interested either in her sympathy or his rehabilitation.

What they want is the “simple justice” of his death, as recompense for their abysmal sense of loss. Prejean has to contain in her heart the polarising ambiguity of standing firmly with Poncelet, while not dismissing the pain and anguish of the victims.

It’s perfectly understandable that victims should express their pain in terms of revenge. Where hurt is deep, one does not come quickly or easily to forgiveness. And yet, here again, one sometimes sees extraordinary examples of forgiveness under very devastating circumstances.

One example, involving murder, is that of Amy Biehl, a twenty-year old, white student from Berkeley, California, a Fulbright scholar, who went to South Africa in 1993 to assist blacks in registering to vote in their first all-races election. She was set upon and killed by mob of a hundred or more marauding young blacks.

Amy had prepared her parents for the day of her death, telling them that the frustrated and angry black South African youth shouldn’t be blamed for their (prior, ongoing) violence since they were “only doing what had been done to them by generations of white oppressors.”

Four young men were convicted of murder and public violence after Amy’s death, and sentenced to 18 years of hard labour. They applied for amnesty under the terms of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and were later released unconditionally.

Peter and Linda Biehl, Amy’s parents, in their own statement to the commission, said they would not stand in the way of amnesty being granted. Amy would have supported the process, they said.  They harboured no grudge, and had no desire for revenge.

“We sincerely hope that the families and the communities will gather around [the young men] and give them the support necessary to live productive lives in a non-violent atmosphere. We hope they grow up well. We’re not going to waste any time…regretting that they have been given a second chance.”

Thirdly, the possibility of salvation. This is, of course, the goal of prison visitation and prison ministry. “He sent me to bring the good news to the poor, to tell prisoners that they are prisoners no more…”

The line is part of the rousing hymn we sing, but the implication is not that in some simple volunteeristic way we declare prisoners free. It is that prisoners can come by a deeper, more expansive freedom, even while incarcerated, if they welcome the good news into their lives.

Fourthly, the question of prisoners’ rights. Does incarceration imply that prisoners lose all their rights? It’s an assumption Prejean had to confront in many of those condemning Poncelet.

Clearly incarceration entails the curtailment or forfeiture of some fundamental rights – the right of free association, for example, and the right to freedom of expression. One right much in dispute today is the right to vote. Does incarceration mean that this right is abridged? 

Eighteen European states place no formal prohibition on prisoners voting. Neither does Canada, Australia, and South Africa. In the US and the UK the issue remains controversial. Only two states, Maine and Vermont, allow prisoners to vote.

In 2004, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the British government was in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights in denying a prisoner this right; the European Court’s Grand Chamber rejected the British government’s appeal a year later, but the law in the UK remains unchanged.

Prisoners, of course, do not lose their human rights, though in the culture of incarceration, respect for such rights is routinely disregarded.