\u201cWhen you bring students inside to actually meet real prisoners, they meet human beings,\u201d Prejean told WBEZ. \u201cWhere human beings encounter real human beings, we both change.\u201d<\/p>\n
For DePaul and other colleges that see social justice as part of their educational mission, that kind of engagement \u2014 sending faculty and students inside prison walls while also bringing people who are incarcerated into academic conversations \u2014 is central to how they educate students. DePaul, for instance, also runs aclass inside Cook County Jail<\/a> that brings together incarcerated and traditional students.<\/p>\n Former Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn, who signed the legislation abolishing execution in Illinois, also spoke at the event, which fell on the same day the U.S. Department of Justice announced<\/a> it was expanding its use of the federal death penalty. While in office, Quinn also commuted the sentences of 15 people still on Illinois\u2019 death row, building on a moratorium and mass commutation initiated by Republican Gov. George Ryan nearly a decade earlier. About half of U.S. states still sentence people to death.<\/p>\n The event also featured a recorded video message from Pope Leo XIV, the Chicago-born pontiff whose parents earned graduate degrees from DePaul. Prejean spent years lobbying the Vatican to take a public stance against capital punishment. In 2018, Pope Francis made the church\u2019s opposition to the death penalty official<\/a>. Pope Leo\u2019s message echoed that position, stating that \u201cthe dignity of the person is not lost even after very serious crimes are committed.\u201d<\/p>\n For Prejean, the work has always been about getting people close enough to see what they otherwise wouldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m a storyteller more than a lecturer, and I take them close,\u201d she said. \u201cMost people say, \u2018Oh, I didn\u2019t know it was like that. We can be safe without the execution.\u2019\u201d Her 1993 memoir Dead Man Walking \u2014 now also out as agraphic novel<\/a> \u2014 has taken her story to young people across the country, she said.<\/p>\n At DePaul, that means events like this one, where students sit alongside faculty, administrators, advocates, and people who spent time on death row.<\/p>\n Renaldo Hudson spent 13 years of his 37 years of incarceration on Illinois\u2019 death row before Ryan commuted his sentence life without parole. Two decades later, he came home after Gov. JB Pritzker granted him clemency in 2020. At the event, he warmly greeted Prejean, with whom he has built a relationship over years of speaking events and advocacy work.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Sister Helen Prejean, right, and Renaldo Hudson talk with former Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn at DePaul University on Friday. Hudson spent more than a decade on death row in Illinois. He was released from prison in 2020 after being granted clemency by Quinn.<\/p>\n Hudson said the event was exactly the kind of space universities should be creating. \u201cAt the end of the day, they\u2019re the people that are going to be making decisions in 10, 20 years,\u201d he said of the undergraduates in the room. \u201cIt\u2019s crucially important that they be informed about these real human rights violations and uplifting the humanity of people.\u201d<\/p>\n Watching students engage \u2014 leaning in, asking questions, stepping into the conversation with confidence \u2014 was one of his biggest takeaways.<\/p>\n \u201cWhere else can you sit down with Sister Helen and a governor and a bishop?\u201d he said. \u201cFor me, that\u2019s the true reason for universities \u2014 to have moments like that where you can put theory to application.\u201d<\/p>\n The event was part of DePaul\u2019s Dialogue Collaborative, an initiative that brings together faculty, staff and students in structured conversation. Organizers are deliberate about mixing the tables \u2014 a first-year student sits alongside the university president.<\/p>\n Prejean said that\u2019s exactly why she keeps coming back.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat are we educating students for?\u201d she said. \u201cWhen you go meet people on the margins, it puts you in touch with how privileged you are, and it challenges you to look and see how society is set up. And it gives you motivation to have a full soul life.\u201d<\/p>\n As for how she keeps going after more than four decades of this work, Prejean was characteristically direct: \u201cHope is a verb,\u201d she said. \u201cYou got to practice hope. You got to do something. You got to be active in it.\u201d<\/p>\n Charlotte West is a reporter covering the intersection of higher education and criminal justice for Open Campus<\/a>, a nonprofit newsroom focused on higher education. Sign up for her newsletter, College Inside<\/a>. WBEZ\u2019s Erin Allen and Charlotte West contributed reporting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The tulips, Sister Helen Prejean jokes, bloom for her birthday. The nun and death penalty abolitionist turned 87…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":756422,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5124],"tags":[960,5386,1818],"class_list":{"0":"post-756421","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago","8":"tag-chicago","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-illinois"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116476273814301839","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=756421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756421\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/756422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=756421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=756421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=756421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Helen](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/1777286777_893_.jpeg\")
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