"They don't give us a second chance, they don't work hard for it. We are simply locked up. I don't think they do the things they should to give us the opportunity to rehabilitate," inmate Steve Corson, detained for more than a year, told EFE.

In his meeting with the inmates at the prison gym, the Pontiff lamented prison systems "which are not concerned to care for wounds, to soothe pain, to offer new possibilities."

Corson says in U.S. prisons, no one helps in overcoming drug or alcohol addiction and neither are the inmates educated to counter poverty, incarceration and illiteracy that leads to so many repeat offenders.

"The first thing I'm going to do when I leave is hug my son. I miss my family, I'm going to work hard and return to the Church (...). The Pope has given me hope. I was not going to church and I think I will go to church now. Pray for mercy," said Corson, who returned to his cell after the Pope's visit.

For Chemarris Rodriguez, 37, convicted of drug trafficking, who has three granddaughters and had lived on the streets for seven months before she was imprisoned, the most moving part of the Pope's message came when he recalled the Gospel scene where Jesus washes the feet of his disciples at the 'Last Supper'.

"Living means 'dirty feet' by the dusty roads of life and history. We all need be purified, to be washed," said Francis, who became the first Pope to choose prisoners to perform the rite of washing feet.

The pope's message comes at a crucial time for U.S. prisons with President Barack Obama and a group of Democrat and Republican congressmen pushing for a penal reform that offers a better life to prisoners, reduce levels of recidivism and reduce government expenditure.

With 2.2 million people behind bars, United States has the highest imprisonment rate in the world, four times higher than that of China and higher than that of the 35 most important European countries together, according to the White House.

The objective of this penal reform is also to influence the lives of communities and families of the 700,000 people who leave prisons each year.

Obama and the Congressmen do not have much time to promote their special penal reform project in Congress, which is the only institution with the power to change prisons.

Prison reform, a much-debated topic in the run up to the 2016 presidential elections, also faces the power of two largest private prison companies nationwide, GEO and Corrections Corporation of America, who clock billions of dollars in profit annually, thanks to the long and harsh sentences given out to inmates.

Father Francis urged the United States Congress Thursday for the "global abolition of the death penalty" and Sunday, with his advocacy of prisoner rehabilitation, questioned the bases of a criminal justice system that for years has been deaf to the pain and desire for change of its millions of prisoners.