| Funds that ‘should go to reform’ are
building more prisons
By ARTHUR JONES
NCR Staff
The engine driving the unprecedented number of incarcerations
today, argue Pauline and Charles Sullivan, “is the half-billion dollars
the federal government is each year giving the states to build more prisons.
We’ve got to stop that.”
The Sullivans, co-founders of CURE: Citizens United for
Rehabilitation of Errants, for more than a quarter-century have been lobbying
for criminal justice reform.
“We have 2 million people in prisons, half under 30, most for
drug crimes, and there’s no money to provide drug treatment because
it’s all going into buildings.”
The Sullivans, who attended the National Cathedral Restorative and
Transformative Justice Conference that Fr. Jim Consedine addressed, understand
prison from the inside.
In the early 1970s, as anti-war protesters, they were arrested in
the May Day 1971 rally in Washington. For Pauline, who formerly was a Sister of
St. Joseph of Carondolet, and Charles, who had been a priest of the
Mobile/Birmingham, Ala., diocese, that jail experience, along with visiting
incarcerated friends, alerted them to the problems associated with prisons.
“Back then, gas was cheap,” said Charles Sullivan,
“so we traveled the country and then were living in a van on Capitol Hill,
lobbying for reform.”
Then came Attica, the September 1971 prison riot in upstate New
York that was suppressed amid much bloodshed. “We didn’t have a TV in
the van. We heard it on the radio. We knew prisons and jails were terrible. We
decided to return to Texas. We ran a bus service taking families to prisons,
and that grew into an advocacy group.”
In the 1980s they moved back to Washington. They no longer live in
a van, but they do live simply as they lobby Capitol Hill and organize national
conferences: no telephone at home, no car (both ride bicycles) and if you call
them long-distance and at their little desk at St. Aloysius Church and ask them
to return your call, they’ll have to call back collect.
“We live a lifestyle that’s very comfortable. We’re
not starving or whatever,” said the elegantly (thrift-store) suited
Sullivan en route to the National Cathedral. “We’re in good health --
just very, very conscious of how we spend money.”
For more information, contact CURE: P.O. Box 2310, Washington D.C.
20013. Tel: 202-789-2126. Web site: www.curenational.org. E-mail:
cure@curenational.org
National Catholic Reporter, January 7,
2000
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