« NY: Jail Unit for Gay Men Set to Close at Rikers Island | Main | NY: Crime Numbers Keep Dropping Across the City »
December 31, 2005
NY: Bedford Hills--A Tough Life All About Drugs & Sister Elaine
December 31, 2005
The City Life
Well-Spent Prison Time
By FRANCIS X. CLINES
A two-time loser nicknamed Sexy - so dubbed in her earliest years at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for women - was dying in the prison ward. Old friends, both inmates and keepers, were stopping by, anguished that radiation treatments had taken Sexy's beautiful head of hair. "What really upset her was she lost her teeth, not her hair, and she would die that way on the inside," recalled her chaplain, Sister Elaine Roulet. The nun smiled, singling out Sexy to make a point about the thousands of women convicts - murderers, drug addicts and courier "mules," prostitutes and thieves - she grew close to in 47 years of service at Bedford Hills, a New York prison.
"A tough life for Sexy - all about drugs," the nun recalled, speaking from her supposed retirement at one of the nine homey shelters she created across the city over 25 years for the women she regards as her larger community of sisters: Bedford Hills prison alumnae who have done their time. "But Sexy was always elegant, and she wanted to die that way."
Vanity behind bars is more than an acceptable vice in the subversive catechism of Sister Elaine, who broke out of parochial school teaching early in her career to become a reading teacher for imprisoned women. From there, things took off: she discovered that maternity, not literacy, was the big problem.
She focused on programs that allowed felons to mother their infants on the inside for the first year, to stay close to their children through creative visitor programs in the years that followed, and eventually to find a year's shelter with their children at one of her Providence House shelters in converted convents and rectories. She is so busy in retirement that she could not resist starting another program, called Our Journey, for quick spiritual retreats in the city where the women encourage one another and watch their children grow.
"Something new - there's nothing worse than old ritual," the nun warned, digging through piles of family prison pictures she keeps in a lockbox she got from a longtime friend, Ruth Brown. " 'Ma' Brown - the last woman to escape the electric chair," Sister Elaine said. "She died inside." Sexy's last rites turned out to be special. "The very kind prison dentist said, 'Look, we can't make her false teeth - she'll be dead soon,' " Sister Elaine said. "But he made a plaster mold on his own, and we ran around to dentists, begging them, and one directed me to this guy, some kind of dental mechanic, who finally laughed and made a set for nothing." Sexy loved her new teeth, smiling as much as possible with them before her death, her chaplain recounted. "And the point of this story is you don't do anything alone, in prison or outside: look at all the people who got Sexy her teeth," the nun said, enumerating the half-dozen who had nudged the search along to the final touch of ritual elegance for Sexy. FRANCIS X. CLINES
Posted by lois at December 31, 2005 11:48 AM