Why this award-winning prison volunteer feels compelled to help
Queen's student Alicia Mora won national award for work in Kingston area
The winner of a national award for volunteering in prisons said she's seen first-hand that people can change and that inmates can benefit from a little kindness.
Alicia Mora, a third-year psychology student at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., won the Correctional Service of Canada's Taylor Award last month.
You're not just helping the offenders, you're also helping the community in the long run.- Alicia Mora
She helped start the Queen's Correctional Services Volunteers group, and for the last three years has led art, writing and resumé workshops at three local correctional institutions.
"If you enter it feeling scared, you're not going to accomplish [as much as] if you go in feeling confident and knowing that you're there to purely try to make a difference," she told CBC Radio's Ontario Morning Wednesday.
"You're not just helping the offenders, you're also helping the community in the long run. Most offenders are released, and so it's what happens in an institution that can change their rehabilitation and reintegration."
Mora is now the president of the prison volunteer group and manages its 24 other members.
People have an idea of what prison is like from pop culture, she said, but she's learned when you sit down with someone the environment is quite different.
'People do change'
"People can make mistakes — some really big, some really small — and people do change," she said.
"I did a program for about a year, and seeing that progression within some of the offenders, how their feelings and aggression at the beginning slowly diminished over time … is really rewarding."
Mora, 21, said her late grandmother did similar work in Belgian prisons and she was one of her inspirations.
You can hear Mora's interview starting at 2:56 in the audio player.