I recently attended a talk hosted by a Science teacher named Mr. Suarez who previously worked in a maximum security prison where he met 2 exceptional prisoners. The main focus of his talk was about connection, redemption and helping others.

Mr Suarez’s first experience in the Argentinian prison system was when he was 16 years old during a field trip. At first scared and worried about the carnage and hardships he may encounter, he was pleasantly surprised when he saw a classroom filled with murderers who were politely and respectfully listening to a young female teacher. This was what motivated him to teach in prison where he felt he could make a difference since 80% of inmates were illiterate. Unfortunately his first teaching job was not at all how he imagined since he worked as a teacher in one of Argentina’s most notorious juvenile prisons where a lot of his students were rapists, drug addicts, rude and not willing to learn. Eventually he got a job at a maximum security prison where the students were murderers and robbers but still polite. The 2 inmates who stood out the most were Gaby and German. Gaby was a murderer and a robber notorious for stealing large amounts of cash and killing policemen in the process. His upbringing was filled with abuse, violence and poverty since he hit his father to save his mother and lived on the streets before being incarcerated. German on the other hand grew up in a loving middle-class home and imprisoned for the lesser crime of possession of a stolen vehicle and having gang affiliations. While both inmates are imprisoned for radically different reasons they both share similar traits, namely strength, intelligence, leadership, loyalty, free spirit and resilience. Both inmates also showed signs of compassion such as Gaby who eventually taught other inmates and German who helped a injured cellmate to his classroom.

With popular culture depicting prisons as hell and inmates as irredeemable animals, the stories that Mr Suarez told were a surprising twist on how the media normally depicts prisons. What I really took away from this talk is that deep down, everybody has a compassionate, intelligent and polite person desperately trying to dig itself up after being buried in years of abuse and neglect. Prisoners just need a time to flourish and nurture their soul. Mr Suarez’s story kinda resembles a cooking method called blanching where you boil bones in water which extracts their delicious flavour and removes any impurities. In this situation the bones are the prisoners, the flavour are traits such as compassion and caring and the impurities are neglect, abuse and violence.

Moral of the story: Compassion is a trait that everybody possesses, criminal or not.