The captive prisoner smiles as he notes he has been awaiting trial for two years now. The crime? Stealing a pack of gum. "I'm so very happy you've come to see me," he says to his American visitor. In the upper portion of this South American prison, where beatings and filth co-join as malevolent twins in a quagmire of bureaucratic arrest, the professor of criminology stares in awe at the man's happy demeanor. He notices the prisoner's Bible on the shelf of his cell, along with a picture of Jesus in a state of downcast agony, a head full of thorns with blood dripping down like sweat, and the deep lines of a worn, weary man etched into his face. "Not the handsome, happy, American Jesus," the professor tells the audience.
