Casa Xalteva Blog

Male UNM students marked to distinguish them from male inmates

University of New Mexico Students went to Granada’s Prison for one of their field trips.  Professor Christine Rack recaps it below…

“We went to the prison here is Granada yesterday. It was fascinating –the juveniles are housed with the adults (though 11 years ago the penal codedeclared that illegal) in a 4-state facility built for 400 and holding 850.  Carrie McCracken set it up with a local non-profit dedicated to preventing
delinquency and rehabilitation of the convicted kids. It was a scene
because a bunch (15) of teens were visiting (”dia de amistad”) and
performed some dances to entertain. I’m very sorry I didn’t have  videocam
permission–you have to imagine a bunch of kids trying to relate in a
cavernous 200-year old stone “hall” with an ancient, intermittently failing
PA system playing loud dance music to break-dancing choreographed
performance where the 14-15 year old girls were doing wildly sexualized
moves in front of a bunch of teen age boys, some convicted of
sexual assault??  One of the prisoners made a sermon-like speech about god’s
plan for each of them had been  ’saved’ from a
life of crime–apparently by jesus.”

Tags: Granada, Nicaragua, Spanish Classes, Spanish Language School, University of New Mexico, University Program, Volunteers

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 15th, 2009 at 1:49 pm and is filed under Casa Xalteva News, International Students, Student Excursions, Volunteering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.