Mandela Rules
A new era.
Nelson Mandela spent 27 years of his life in prison. He successfully led the resistance to South Africa’s policy of apartheid and was the country’s first black head of state. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993.
Mandela said: “It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.”
By those standards, the United States, and especially Texas, do not fare well. I make this statement not to berate or condemn us but to encourage us to improve. It is not necessary to have a merciless prison system. There are countries—Germany, for example—that have humane prison systems which rehabilitate rather than punish and are substantially less costly than the Texas prison system. And, they have substantially less recidivism than does the Texas prison system.
The United Nations Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice recently adopted crucial revisions of 60-year-old international standards on treatment of prisoners (known as the “Mandela Rules”), which could herald in a new era of respect for prisoners’ human rights. If implemented, they would help turn imprisonment from a wasted time of suffering and humiliation into one used for personal development leading to women and men who are better citizens when they are released, to the benefit of society as a whole.
It is not only the United Nations Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice that speaks for those who are incarcerated, Father Ron Rolheiser, until recently the President of Oblate School of Theology here in San Antonio, posted the following on his blog on August 7, 2023: “The great prophets of Israel had coined this mantra: The quality of your faith will be judged by the quality of justice in the land. And the quality of justice in the land will always be judged by how ‘widows, orphans, and strangers’ are faring while you are alive. That phrase, ‘widows, orphans, and strangers’, was code for the three weakest, most-vulnerable, groups in society at the time.” In my opinion, inmates are among the most vulnerable groups in our society today.
I urge you to send an email or write a letter to your federal and state representatives and senators letting them know that you consider prison reform important and urging them to support legislation to treat inmates humanely.