This anecdote is inspired by the acclaimed movie The Shawshank Redemption, the legend of a charismatic jailbird.

Fr. Perry was the parish priest of a remote church in a forgotten town in Wisconsin. He had few parishioners. He may as well have been talking to the wind. He was bored and falling into a prolonged depression. To solve his predicament, he got himself arrested and thrown into the toughest jail with the toughest jailbirds, to do his ministry there.

It was easy for him to get into jail. He simply pretended to be drunk, and floored the policeman who confronted him. In jail, he wore his Roman collar to “advertise” that he was a priest. Inmates called him the hoodlum priest, or “Hood” for short.

The Rosary Makers

Hood talked to the warden, who was a Catholic, and asked if he could start a rosary-making class. This was approved right away. He taught the first class of eight from the 250 inmates how to make rosaries. The warden supplied the special long-nose pliers and sacks of string, beads and crucifixes.

Hood sold the rosaries at $1 each to a fellow priest on the outside and gave the income to the rosary makers. One prisoner could easily make 20 rosaries or $20 a day.

Hood also started the praying of the morning rosary at the yard daily. Eventually, he was given permission to say mass at the yard under the sun. Even in the rain, the prisoners stayed for mass.

Anticipating future expenses, Hood kept 10 cents per rosary. When news got around how much the rosary makers were making, his class ballooned from eight to 64 overnight. The warden frowned on this as he said he could give only so much for the cost of the raw materials. When the 10 cents was not enough, Hood got funds from his priest-friend who allocated a portion from his parish Mass collections. When the offerings were good, he gave away rosaries to his parishioners in return. Hood used wooden beads imported from the Philippines to make his rosaries attractive.

With the available funds, he could expand at will. The class ballooned to 124 in the span of a week. They now called him “Robin Hood.” Robin Hood, the rosary czar, was idolized by many and was untouchable by bullies. The “rosary explosion” was publicized by the Wisconsin Daily, and other prisons across the entire American continent started their own rosary classes. It became a national movement. See how the Blessed Virgin works.

The problem was, when many prisons started churning out thousands of rosaries, there was a glut and prices started falling from $1 to 50 cents each. The hoodlum priest again came to the rescue. He arranged for the export of tens of thousands of rosaries to Catholic countries such as Guatemala, Venezuela and the Philippines. The price of the rosaries soared to $1.15 each, giving more income to the rosary makers.

Music Maestro

Then, every morning after Mass at the yard, a Mexican prisoner would play wailing blues with his harmonica to the delight of the others. One day, an inmate in a bad mood grabbed his harmonica and stepped on it just because the song irritated him, as it triggered bad memories.

Robin Hood got him a new harmonica through the priest from the outside. Then he had a fantastic idea. He asked the warden if the Mexican could play his harmonica “on the air,” meaning over the public address system of the entire jail. Now even the jail guards could hear the music. Harmonica blues echoed across the entire jail, healing the depression and loneliness, even of the guards. The soothing effect of the music translated to less violence and killings and less cruelty from the guards.

Two other inmates, a violinist and a guitarist, volunteered to form a prison band. Robin Hood of course supplied the instruments. They called themselves the “Ray Charles Band” in tribute to the great blues singer. They would play melancholy tunes at times, and violent blues at other times, which saw some dancing in the yard. Life was never the same again in that Wisconsin jail, thanks to the hoodlum priest. The band was invited by the Texas State Prison, and that was the beginning of the music movement in jails.

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