SISTER RIM STEINHAGEN'S PRISON TERM ENDS

Homecoming Likely To Be A Time Of Reflection As The Nun Remembers The Women
She Came To Know During Her Six-month Incarceration.

The silence is the best part of being home, says Sister Rita Steinhagen.
Four days after her release from a noisy, crowded Illinois federal prison,
the white-haired nun enjoys the simple things -her quiet apartment, freedom
and friendships.

Dozens of friends gathered around her Tuesday evening for an official
welcome-home reception at the Carondelet Center in St. Paul hosted by nuns
in her religious order, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet.

"It feels so good to be home," she said. "You can't imagine what it was
like living in 'the alley.'"

Convicted of criminal trespassing during a protest outside the Army-run
School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Ga., Steinhagen returned to her
Minneapolis home Sunday after six months in a women's minimum-security
facility, where she slept a yard away from the next inmate in a prison wing
known as 'the alley' and worked at a 12-cents-an-hour job. Steinhagen's
focus on her return is not on herself. Although she stops short of saying
prison reform is her next cause, she is intent on working for better
conditions in the nation's prisons.

In her months as a federal prison inmate, she felt her anger rising as she
observed women performing mostly meaningless work and being drained of hope.

"My anger now includes another target besides the School of the Americas
and my harsh prison sentence," she wrote home for a newsletter printed by
her religious order. "It now includes tile sentencing laws and the prison
system."

Steinhagen rose at 6 every morning to pray and reflect, eat breakfast and
work as a proofreader in a computerized writing lab. She shared a doorless
cubicle with partial walls with another nun who had been convicted of the
same crime. She befriended women inmates -- many of them mothers -- serving
10- to 17-year sentences for' drug-related crimes or forgery. Women
sometimes sought her counsel and compassion. She listened. When asked. she
prayed with them, beside metal beds on the tile floors of their tiny cubicles.

Steinhagen found serenity every morning and evening outside her prison
residence in a grassy area near the unfenced prison's boundaries, where she
prayed in the half-light of vibrant sunrises and sunsets. Her religious
life was "a basic," she says, in balancing the monotony and hopelessness of
prison days. "Thank goodness I have an inner life."

At age 71. she left the Federal Prison Camp in the Peoria, Ill., suburb of
Pekin as a changed person, she says. "I don't know how you could leave
those women and not be deeply affected by their pain and suffering. Some
call it a house of sorrows. And it is."

Many of the women inmates gathered for a prayer service last Saturday night
to bid her goodbye. Some presented her with gifts they had made. "They told
us they thought we had been sent there for a reason," she said of herself
and two other nuns at the prison on civil disobedience convictions. "They
said. 'Don't forget us' And I told them I never could."

While Steinhagen will participate again in November in an annual protest
outside tile School of the Americas, she has decided she will not cross the
trespassing line again. It was that illegal move last year that got her the
federal prison sentence and a $3000 fine. "I don't think I could take
another six months with the prison noise," she said. "And the prison has a
very bad health-care system I was very conscious while I was there of
trying to stay healthy."

A veteran protester who created a Twin Cities shelter for youth in the
1960s. she worked before going to prison as a victim advocate at the Center
for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis.

She will regroup before deciding whether to return to her job there, she
says Her next adventure? Next week. she's going fishing. A fan of fishing
since her girlhood in Walker, Minn., Sister Rita snares not only fish but
inspiration at the end of her fishing pole, her fellow sisters say. "I hope
it will be warm enough to fish," said Steinhagen, who is headed to northern
Minnesota. "I missed the whole season this year."

Checked-by: Richard Lake