Sister Helen Prejean was born in Baton Rouge,
Louisiana, on April 21, 1939, to an upper-middle-class Catholic
family. As a child, Prejean lived in a society deeply divided by
race and class. Segregation in the South was nearly universal, and
violence against blacks was relatively common. In Dead Man
Walking, Prejean recounts her first experience with racial
violence, an episode that left her with a permanent mark.
Prejean joined the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille in
1957. She graduated from St. Mary’s Dominican College in New Orleans
with a B.A. in English and Education in 1962. Although originally
she planned a life of quiet religious contemplation, Prejean’s experiences
and understanding of Jesus’ teachings gradually called her to a
life of social activism. In 1980, Prejean was inspired by a lecture
on social justice given by Sister Marie August Neal. Sister Neal
stressed Jesus’s idea that the affluent must share what they have
with the poor and live as if the struggles of the poor are their
own.
One year after attending Neal’s lecture, Prejean moved
into the St. Thomas housing projects in New Orleans. There, she
saw inner city poverty at its worst: violence, drugs, teenage pregnancy,
the struggles of the working poor. As she experienced poverty firsthand in
St. Thomas, Prejean also became aware of the dramatic shift in the
government’s treatment of the impoverished. While Prejean and other
social activists worked on behalf of the poor, the federal government
made drastic cuts in funding for social services.
In 1982, Prejean began a correspondence with Patrick Sonnier,
a man on death row. This correspondence marked the beginning of Prejean’s
interest in the capital punishment system, a system she came to
believe was cruel and unfair. The execution of Patrick Sonnier permanently
altered Prejean. Although at first she thought she could never return
to death row, Prejean returned to counsel Robert Willie six months
after Sonnier’s execution. She became a full-time advocate for abolishing
the death penalty and expanded her work to include assisting victims’
families.
Prejean’s moral and spiritual philosophy is informed both
by her faith and by the philosophies of Albert Camus, Martin Luther
King, Mahatma Gandhi, and Dorothy Day, cofounder of the Catholic Worker
movement. Prejean often returns to the ideas of individual responsibility
and nonviolent action, both of which were essential components of
Camus, Gandhi, and King’s philosophies. Prejean criticizes the rampant
abuse and discrimination in a criminal justice system that executes
poor and minority defendants at a higher rate than middle-class
and white defendants. Prejean argues that as an instrument of social
policy, the death penalty is not only ineffective but also inefficient.
More important even than these considerations, she says, is the
moral cost of killing an individual. Prejean never excuses or attempts
to minimize the suffering and pain caused by a murder, but she argues
that murderers retain their humanity, frail and damaged though that
humanity might be.
Prejean has witnessed a total of five executions in Louisiana,
two of which she records in Dead Man Walking. Since
the publication of Dead Man Walking in 1993, Prejean
has become a national figure. Her book, in addition to being a national
bestseller, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. The 1996 screen
adaptation of Dead Man Walking brought Prejean’s
work to an even wider audience. The movie was a critical and commercial
success, earning four Academy Award nominations. Since the film’s
release, Prejean has gone on to receive numerous honorary degrees
and awards for her work on behalf of victims’ families and to abolish
the death penalty.
