bodhi tree swaying

From the Boston Globe:

Prison, engine of crime
The incarceration rate in this country quadrupled between 1975 and 2005. Notwithstanding the controversy surrounding the reasons behind this surge, the assumption all along has been that prison does what legislators and judges expect it to do: reduce crime. However, a new analysis challenges this assumption. While prison tends to reduce crime by keeping dangerous people off the street and deterring future crime, most inmates get released back into the community, where they may have trouble reintegrating, leading to more crime. The question is whether the number of crimes averted by the incapacitation and deterrent effect of prison is greater than the number of additional crimes caused by inmates after their release. Indeed, the analysis finds that prison is a net creator of crime, especially violent crime.

DeFina, R. & Hannon, L., “For Incapacitation, There Is No Time Like the Present: The Lagged Effects

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I got this message from Kathy Rowe on Facebook recently and thought I’d share it more widely. Jarvis is a Buddhist inmate on death row, and a talented writer.

I spoke to Jarvis again recently and we talked about this facebook group. He was excited to know of all the people here showing support and taking an interest in him. I also read out the personal messages people have sent and he was moved by them and told me he felt blessed.

He wanted to offer something to you all and asked me to send you this piece of writing he did, called ‘No Bars to Love‘ 

We were also talking about his new book being published by Harper Collins in September and he told me that it’s possible to order it on Amazon.com now and it’s about $9 cheaper to

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I find this graph quite staggering. Until the early 1980s there had been a slow growth in the New Hampshire inmate population, which is not surprising given that the population of the state was increasing. Then in the early 1980s there’s a massive explosion in the prison population, which continues to this day. The 80′s rise was due to an increase in the severity of sentencing, following a late 1970s crime surge (burglaries, for example were up to over 12,000 in 1980, compared to 1,100 in 1960). More people are staying in jail for longer. Crime rates have fallen since the 1980s, but the state of New Hampshire is actually having to close one prison in order to cut costs. How can we continue to incarcerate more and more people without spending money on new facilities? And are severely overcrowded prisons going to make inmates …

I decided to give the possible troll the benefit of the doubt, and wrote a response to her comment here.

But I may as well post my response here too, to save you from having to navigate to another site:

If your grandfather was indeed murdered (and you’re not one of those obnoxious trollers just trying to provoke a response) then you have my full sympathy. You ask about empathy for victims. I also work with the victims of crimes. There have been days when I’ve worked with child-rapists and with the victims of sexual abuse, so I know about crime from both sides.

You seem be be regarding the work we do as some kind of reward for people who have committed crimes. I don’t see it that way myself. People are capable of change, and we help give people access to tools, like meditation, that can help them become better

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I was a witness in the court case referred to in a recent Boston Globe story. I’d been asked by the Corrections Department to be an “expert witness” in a case where a Buddhist inmate had not been allowed to have a vegan diet and had not been allowed to have a meditation mat and cushion.

I was pleased that the judge upheld the inmate’s right (which he’s been pushing for over a ten year period) to have a vegan diet. Whether, as a Buddhist, one is a vegetarian, vegan, or meat-eater is a question for the individual’s own conscience, but there’s a perfectly valid case for sticking to a vegan diet as an expression of “ahimsa” or non-harm.

I was more surprised with the decision over the cushion.

Prison officials … testified that the cushion and pillow could be used to hide contraband. They also said that they give Buddhist

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From the New York Times:

For the first time in the nation’s history, more than one in 100 American adults are behind bars, according to a new report.

Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing it to almost 1.6 million, after three decades of growth that has seen the prison population nearly triple. Another 723,000 people are in local jails.

The number of American adults is about 230 million, meaning that one in every 99.1 adults is behind bars.

Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36 adult Hispanic men is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 adult black men is, too, as is one in nine black men ages 20 to 34.

It’s pretty disturbing reading:

The United States imprisons more people than any other nation in the world. China is second, with 1.5 million people behind bars. The gap is

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Glenn Greenwald makes a scathing comparison between how Barack Obama has been publicly forced by the media to disavow Louis Farrakhan’s unsolicited support, and John McCain being given a free pass for welcoming the support of John Hagee, who likes to call the Catholic Church “The Great Whore,” who thinks that the US should invade Iran in order to help bring about Armageddon, who believes that God flooded New Orleans because he was pissed off about a gay parade, and who believes that Muslims have a scriptural mandate to kill Christians and Jews. (And that’s not to mention his view on the Harry Potter books, the “whole purpose” of which “is to desensitize readers and introduce them to the occult.” The Harry Potter books are always a good touchstone of religious sanity.)

In a follow-up post Greenwald reports on a conversation he had with Catholic League President, Bill Donohue …

As part of the ongoing response to 9/11, inmates in Federal Prisons are now finding their access to religious books severely curtailed. The Department of Justice doesn’t want literature advocating violence to get into the hands of prisoners, but the sledgehammer being used to crack that particular nut has been a wholesale clear-out of prison libraries.

Only 150 Buddhist titles have been approved for use in prisons, despite the fact that Buddhism is one of the least likely faiths to advocate terrorism. If prisons happen not to have those 150 titles then inmates’ access to Buddhist titles will be next to impossible. It’s quite possible, for example, that some prisons have ended up with no Buddhist books at all, and that entire libraries, in many cases built up by donations from volunteers, have been entirely discarded.

I’ve been told by the chaplain of a Federal prison that he has no budget …

The Bush administration’s kowtowing to the religious right has resulted in Christian groups being paid to proselytize prison inmates, according to this New York Times article.

There’s not much in the way of content there yet, but I just created a new site for people in the FWBO who work in prisons, so that they can share that aspect of their practice with the world.

I tried to go for a design that was rather different from any of the other sites I’ve made. I was striving for minimalism, but that’s, I discovered, is a hard path; minimalism can look very cold and stark, yet a touch of color can propel it into the realms of the garish or kitsch. I’ll probably look for another background image: a line drawing of the 1000-armed Avalokitesvara would be idea if I can find one.

Incidentally, the site looks best on anything but Internet Explorer 6. IE6 is now five or six years old, horribly insecure, and lacking in the most basic features like tabbed browsing and popup blockers that

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I was at a retreat in prison yesterday, at which there were some relatively new guys who haven’t been to the regular weekly meditation and Buddhism group, and a handful of guys I’d never seen before.

One of the questions that came up was how vegetarianism fits into Buddhist practice. This is something I’m especially interested in discussing since I wrote a book on the relationship between Buddhism and vegetarianism. There was a lot of passion around the subject one way or another, although the discussion was always harmonious and respectful, and even humorous.

One of the volunteers in attendance said that in his view Buddhist ethics involved trying to live compassionately and avoiding causing harm, something I happen to agree with. That’s why I’m a vegetarian and have been since the fall of 1982.

One of the inmates pointed out that the Buddha and the early …

An interesting article from the Cibola County Beacon in New Mexico:

Here are some extracts:

Inmates can practice various forms of meditation and courses are taught in acupressure, writer’s meditation, prayer meditation and Qigong (similar to Tai Chi). Heart Mountain volunteers visit once a month to provide guidance in meditation and yoga.

Frank Marquis, who is an inmate from Santa Fe, has been in the meditation program since its inception. “At first I thought of the program as something that would look good to the parole board, but now I don’t care about that,” he said.

Reportedly the pod resulted from a recommendation from the wife of then-Governor Gary Johnson.

The inmates’ day starts with yoga and a verbal check-in, followed sometime during the day with Tai Chi or Yoga in the pod and two hours of quiet time, when loud televisions and radios are prohibited. Occasionally there is a daylong retreat in

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The nonprofit that I set up and that I run, Wildmind, has produced an audiocassette of guided meditations that are available free of charge to inmates.

Most prisons don’t allow CD’s to be used by inmates for fear that they will be used as weapons, and often place restrictions on the kinds of cassettes that they can use. Generally, suitable cassettes have to be prerecorded (in case they contain escape instructions or the like), and the cases must be transparent (so that inmates can’t hide things in them), and free from screws (I’m not entirely sure what the problem with 1/10 inch screws is, but I’m sure that some creative inmates have managed to use them for nefarious purposes in the past). Wildmind’s cassettes meet those criteria.

As mentioned, the cassettes are available free of charge to any inmate who requests one, or to prison volunteers or chaplains. Any interested inmate,

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Tomorrow I head up to Concord, NH, to meet the group of Buddhist inmates I’ve been working with for about two years now. They really are a great bunch of guys, with a very sincere approach to their practice.

Here’s a story:

Kenny is a funny guy. Funny ha ha. He looks like Robin Williams and if you put him on a stage he’d be just as entertaining. One day he’s walking across the prison yard. It’s been raining and there are worms all over the paths.

Kenny’s taking this odd route, weaving along the path, taking long steps and short steps, and another inmate who happens to be passing says, “What the hell are you doing, man?” Kenny tells him that he’s trying to avoid stepping on worms. Now there are a lot of the inmates in this prison who like to eat worms, and that’s taken as normal behavior

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