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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This is a generally incisive and hard-hitting review of what sounds to be a very good book on a subject dear to my heart…

America’s Prisons: Is There Hope?
By Helen Epstein
Dreams from the Monster Factory: A Tale of Prison, Redemption and One Woman’s Fight to Restore Justice to All
by Sunny Schwartz, with David Boodell

Scribner, 204 pp., $24.00

America’s prison system is in a dire state. Some 2.3 million people in this country are now behind bars, five times more than in 1978. Our incarceration rate is now higher than that of any other country in the world. Many, if not most, inmates probably should not be there. Sixteen percent of the adult prison population suffers from mental illness and should be in treatment; a similar fraction is made up of children under eighteen. Although there is little evidence that blacks are more likely to use drugs than whites, they are six times

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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 sometimes get some pretty crazy hate-mail on Wildmind, but I think the example below if one of the “best.” It was posted on a page that explains some of the prison work that Wildmind does — a page that needs to be updated, incidentally.

It doesn’t particularly bother me to read something like this because it’s just so extreme.

Well…this sickens me. The “man” that murdered my 89 year-old grandfather is doing time in NH and I can only hope that he’s forced to suffer through your Bullshit against his will, or is refused any contact with the outside world. For one, you are not Buddhists; you are fooling yourselves, and apparently Very few others, since the only ones that will suffer your company are in PRISON…
I see from your webpage that this is some kind of scam to make money (good luck! haha), and forgive me if I

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This is my first post created using Utterli, where I call a phone number and the message is automatically turned into an audio file that can be posted to my blog. It seems to have gone well, technically speaking, except that the email I sent with accompanying text didn’t make it into the body of the post. It seems that was my fault though, I posted from the wrong email account.

Update: For some weird reason the link to the post didn’t work. Utterli automatically gave the post the URL http://www.bodhipaksa.com/archives/1529 – but that came up as a broken …

We’ve been studying the karaniya metta sutta recently in my class in prison. In some ways it’s such a straightforward text that I imagined we might not find much to talk about, but as is often the case unpacking the text revealed it to have a fractal quality in which almost every word or phrase would lead to new topics, which would lead to yet more as we turned over the meaning of the sutta and connected it with our life experience.

The sutta begins:

Karaniya mattha kusalena,
Yan tam santam padam abhi-samecca

which is:

This what ought to be done by one who is skilled in discerning what is good,
who has understood the path to peace.

I took to the words “the path to peace” (which could also read “the path of peace”). I have trouble finding the right words to share what I think it is …