A Pennsylvania nun who spent time in a federal prison learned a lot from the experience — including, she says, what it is like to live in a “state of uncertainty.”

This, from the Catholic Exponent, in nearby Youngstown, Ohio:

Serving a prison sentence in a federal penitentiary is something that Humility of Mary Sister Sheila Salmon will never forget. But she learned some life lessons there that she will carry with her wherever she goes. Among them: that federal prisoners are treated as things, not persons; that many people in prisons should not be there; and that “being imprisoned was a special gift from God.”

Sister Sheila was back at her motherhouse in western Pennsylvania recently and was interviewed by the Catholic Exponent concerning her misdemeanor sentence for protesting at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security and Economic Cooperation, formerly known as the U.S. Army School of the Americas, in Fort Benning, Ga.

The nun, who lives in Sebastian, Fla., and does outreach work with Mexican migrants at Our Lady of Guadalupe there, had served a 100-day sentence in early 2007 for her participation in the annual peaceful protest last November against the school, which trains Latin America security personnel in combat, counter-insurgency and counter-narcotics. This time, as in 1999, she crossed the line and trespassed on federal property with 15 others, ranging in age from 17 to 70. Sister Sheila was 70 at the time of her arrest.

“The protest itself is a peaceful funeral procession,” she explained. “You carry a cross with the name of someone who, it has been documented, has been killed by one of the SOA graduates. The protests started in 1984 with nine persons present; last year there were 22,000.” The Humility of Mary community here has been participating for nine years. In the last year or so, she said, she “felt I had to take a stronger stand and go through the fence [trespass]. Part of our charism as a community is nonviolent resistance to unjust things.” Noting that she worked in the South for six years with a priest who was later killed by people trained at the SOA, she now works in Florida at a parish where she met a man from El Salvador whose brother was killed by someone trained at the SOA. So taking the protest to another level with trespassing felt right, she added.

Once assigned to Tallahassee Federal prison and the only person serving a misdemeanor sentence among the 1,100 women there, Sister Sheila settled into her days and nights living in a 6’ X 8’ cube. “I have to tell you,” she said, “the inmates were wonderful to me. They could not have been any nicer. There is a whole rumor mill that exists in a prison; they know who is coming in, what they have done. They would come up and say, ‘Are you really a nun?’ When I told them I was really a nun and was in for 100 days for stepping on the grass [federal property], they said, ‘That’s stupid. You shouldn’t be here.’ They said they would watch out for me.”

Although she was “treated well” there, Sister Sheila admitted that “I was not used to the constant noise and the total lack of privacy. I wasn’t used to guards screaming at you all the time, which they did. The hardest adjustment for me was to come to the realization that I was being treated as a thing, not a person. I was not a person while I was in prison, except to the inmates. I don’t think anyone could ever get used to that. There is something about people hollering at you all the time for the sake of hollering that is unsettling.”

The experience taught her about the way in which prisoners “live in a state of uncertainty,” she added. “There is tremendous uncertainty in every move. What is going to happen next? [Prison authorities] keep changing things but will not tell you why. But I found that the fact that we were all living in a state of uncertainty…created a bond of compassion. We were all uncertain together.” She also discovered that prisoners there – who came from all levels of education and none at all – shared a loss of control over their own lives. “When you have lost all control over everything that makes you you,” she observed, “everything that separates you from others is gone as well. So in a way, I considered being there a special gift from God, because I don’t think I ever noticed these things before.”

There’s much more about her experience at the Youngstown newspaper’s link.