SÃO PAULO, Brazil – A Chilean nun who voluntarily spent 18 months in prison in order to support inmates has said that she hopes a recent award she was given will help call attention to the issue of protecting the human dignity of people behind bars.
Sister Nelly León, who’s worked with imprisoned women for 25 years, was among the 2024 winners of the Zayed Award for Human Fraternity, which recognizes individuals and institutions that promote peace, understanding and solidarity.
“It will help us to keep fighting to restore the lives of so many people deprived of liberty, especially women,” Sister León says. “But we have to invite more people for that task. That’s a problem that society as a whole needs to address.”
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, between 2020-2021, the Chilean penal system was closed to visitors. León decided that she would remain with the prisoners at Santiago’s female prison, remaining there for 18 months without being able to leave.
Over the years, León has become a well-known advocate for the rights of prisoners in Latin America and has constantly denounced the continuous violations of their rights in a region notorious for overcrowded, unhealthy and violent penal facilities.
“In Chile, there is nowadays a higher awareness of the fact that it’s the poor people that are in prison, León told Crux, adding that “more Catholics, including members of the clergy, are committed to those people”.
But, she said, in society as a whole there is a “deep desire that more and more people go to jail due to a general feeling of insecurity”.
That climate of fear and uncertainty means that “few people believe that a person who has been deprived of liberty deserves a second chance and can be rehabilitated and reintegrated,” she said, highlighting how abuse and violence are common in the lives of most of the women she works with and that often this combination of factors is behind women’s wrongful actions.
León laments the fact that religious assistance is not available to inmates in all penitentiaries, something that she considers to be a duty of the Church.
“That’s something that we owe those men and especially those women,” she said. “We have a challenge to stop imprisoning people and to release the imprisoned with precautionary measures. We have to ensure that people serving their time can study and work. We have to promote their dignity.”
A member of the congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd, after more than a decade working with vulnerable women in poor neighbourhoods of Santiago, León began to assist inmates in 1999 in Valparaiso. She soon realised that many young ladies needed somebody who could listen to them and guide them through a process of deep healing and decided to pursue graduate studies in psychospiritual support.
She also realised that most women would go back to their previous lives of crime if they didn’t have adequate opportunities. Together with Father Alfonso Baeza, León established the Fundación Mujer Levantate (Rise Up Woman Foundation), which helps female prisoners when they are serving time and works to reintegrate them in their communities after they leave the penal system.
The Zayed award ceremony took place on 5 February in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. The prize was inspired by Pope Francis’s vision of human fraternity, and was established in Abu Dhabi in 2019 when Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al Azhar Ahmed Al-Tayeb signed the Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together. Award honourees receive $1 million for their projects.
Past recipients include Pope Francis and Al-Tayeb, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres, Moroccan-French activist against extremism Latifa Ibn Ziaten, and Kenyan peace mediator and community mobilizer Shamsa Abubakar Fadhil.
The sister says the Zayed prize will be very useful in her struggle against mass incarceration in Chile, and will help to give visibility to the tough reality of the female prisoners.
Photo: Sister Nelly León. (Credit: Image courtesy of the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd; via Crux.)
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