Activist nun held in 'unfair conditions,' supporters say

Meghan Rice, the 85-year-old nun who broke into a nuclear facility and was sentenced to nearly three years in prison last February on charges of interfering with national security and damaging federal property, is being held in “unfair conditions,” advocates say. Undeterred by the prison sentence, she has been continuing her activism from behind bars at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, according to a report by NPR, dedicating some of her time in custody to her fellow inmates.

In a December 2013 interview with Al Jazeera from a prison cell in Georgia’s Irwin County Detention Center, where she was then being held, Sister Rice blamed the federal government for not investing more in social services that could help the poor and working class. The Roman Catholic nun from the Society of the Holy Child Jesus drew connections between nuclear weapons and the poverty she said has landed many women behind bars.

"I don't see them as perpetrators but as the victims,” Rice said of her fellow inmates. “People are being warehoused in detention centers all over the country."

And it seems like she is being warehoused, herself. According to NPR, Rice has been stuck on the ninth floor of a high-rise Brooklyn detention center since her transfer from Georgia roughly a year ago — and the prison’s conditions are taking a toll. The octogenarian activist has to share bathroom facilities with more than 100 women at the facility and reportedly lost the cap to a front tooth, friends say.

Rice was due to be transferred to a women’s prison in Danbury, Connecticut, along with hundreds of other inmates, but the facility is being overhauled and her move has yet to be authorized, NPR reported.