Pubdate: 23 Sep 1998 Source: St Paul Pioneer Press Author: Kay Harvey, Staff Writer Website: http://www.pioneerplanet.com/ Note: Among the dozens of items on the MAP website about the School of Americas is one from Capt. Kevin McIver, Public Affairs Officer U.S. Army School of the Americas which states: "the school is responsible for providing counter-drug operations training, our primary focus now, and a mission which is helping to impede the flow of narcotics into our nation." http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v98/n347/a01.html SISTER RIM STEINHAGEN'S PRISON TERM ENDS Homecoming Likely To Be A Time Of Reflection As The Nun Remembers The Women She Came To Know During Her Six-month Incarceration. The silence is the best part of being home, says Sister Rita Steinhagen. Four days after her release from a noisy, crowded Illinois federal prison, the white-haired nun enjoys the simple things -her quiet apartment, freedom and friendships. Dozens of friends gathered around her Tuesday evening for an official welcome-home reception at the Carondelet Center in St. Paul hosted by nuns in her religious order, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet. "It feels so good to be home," she said. "You can't imagine what it was like living in 'the alley.'" Convicted of criminal trespassing during a protest outside the Army-run School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Ga., Steinhagen returned to her Minneapolis home Sunday after six months in a women's minimum-security facility, where she slept a yard away from the next inmate in a prison wing known as 'the alley' and worked at a 12-cents-an-hour job. Steinhagen's focus on her return is not on herself. Although she stops short of saying prison reform is her next cause, she is intent on working for better conditions in the nation's prisons. In her months as a federal prison inmate, she felt her anger rising as she observed women performing mostly meaningless work and being drained of hope. "My anger now includes another target besides the School of the Americas and my harsh prison sentence," she wrote home for a newsletter printed by her religious order. "It now includes tile sentencing laws and the prison system." Steinhagen rose at 6 every morning to pray and reflect, eat breakfast and work as a proofreader in a computerized writing lab. She shared a doorless cubicle with partial walls with another nun who had been convicted of the same crime. She befriended women inmates -- many of them mothers -- serving 10- to 17-year sentences for' drug-related crimes or forgery. Women sometimes sought her counsel and compassion. She listened. When asked. she prayed with them, beside metal beds on the tile floors of their tiny cubicles. Steinhagen found serenity every morning and evening outside her prison residence in a grassy area near the unfenced prison's boundaries, where she prayed in the half-light of vibrant sunrises and sunsets. Her religious life was "a basic," she says, in balancing the monotony and hopelessness of prison days. "Thank goodness I have an inner life." At age 71. she left the Federal Prison Camp in the Peoria, Ill., suburb of Pekin as a changed person, she says. "I don't know how you could leave those women and not be deeply affected by their pain and suffering. Some call it a house of sorrows. And it is." Many of the women inmates gathered for a prayer service last Saturday night to bid her goodbye. Some presented her with gifts they had made. "They told us they thought we had been sent there for a reason," she said of herself and two other nuns at the prison on civil disobedience convictions. "They said. 'Don't forget us' And I told them I never could." While Steinhagen will participate again in November in an annual protest outside tile School of the Americas, she has decided she will not cross the trespassing line again. It was that illegal move last year that got her the federal prison sentence and a $3000 fine. "I don't think I could take another six months with the prison noise," she said. "And the prison has a very bad health-care system I was very conscious while I was there of trying to stay healthy." A veteran protester who created a Twin Cities shelter for youth in the 1960s. she worked before going to prison as a victim advocate at the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis. She will regroup before deciding whether to return to her job there, she says Her next adventure? Next week. she's going fishing. A fan of fishing since her girlhood in Walker, Minn., Sister Rita snares not only fish but inspiration at the end of her fishing pole, her fellow sisters say. "I hope it will be warm enough to fish," said Steinhagen, who is headed to northern Minnesota. "I missed the whole season this year." - --- Checked-by: Richard Lake