The Peace People

News - Mairead Corrigan Maguire in Kalamazoo

15 April 2005

Mairead Corrigan Maguire was the guest for the 2005 Great Lakes 2005 Peace Jam Youth Conference held at Michigan University on April 9th-10th, 2005. Mairead spent two days working with several hundred youth, university mentors, and teachers, from Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio mutually sharing perspectives on nonviolence and the human family. Youth participants had the opportunity to dialogue with her, and she participated in a public March in Kalamazoo City Centre with the Mayor of the City, and participated in a television debate with an American Senator.

Mairead also spoke on "Building a New Culture of Nonviolence for the Human Family" to several hundred at the Western Michigan University.

Before leaving Mairead also visited a Juvenile Detention Centre. She met 40 young people (from 14-17 boys and girls from diverse cultural backgrounds) who were incarcerated for limited periods of time for misdemeanours. The youth presented Mairead with gifts and work they have done for peace.

After leaving the Centre, Mairead expressed her shock at seeing these young people locked up and for such minor offences. She felt that this practice of locking up young people (from age 14 in Michigan State, and age 10 in Texas!) would damage their self-esteem and confidence, and felt that this was punitive and counter-productive. (In America, the three strikes system (3 offences) can lead up to 30 year prison sentences. Two million prisoners, the highest number in the World, 4 times the number that were in American prisons when Dr. King was killed, 70% of them people of colour.) She offered her support for those working for alternatives to such punitive prison systems against people particularly youth.