#40 MY DAY JOB

Five to six days a week, I think about prisons.

In fact, I go to a desk in an office, and sit down with a pile of mail sent from prisons around the United States (and sometimes from other countries as well).  I respond to help them with their lives, however I reasonably can, mainly through teaching them meditation and dharma.

As you might not know, the U.S. keeps more people in its prisons than any other country on Earth.  Currently we incarcerate around 1.8 million people a year with a population of 332 million.  China—no slouch in the policing and interdiction business—has an estimated 1.7 million people in its prisons, in a country of 1.4 billion.  They have almost five times as many people, and still imprison fewer of them.

Are the Chinese just better behaved?  Well, it’s possible.  I randomly saw a number of people get violent while I was in Beijing in the 90’s, if you want a counter-example

I don’t really know what makes America so big on imprisonment as a culture.  I often think it has something to do with the Old Testament God and His Wrath against sinners.  It’s our particular western theological inheritance that deems us the offspring of a divinity who creates us from nothing, puts us in variable and confusing situations on this planet, eyeballs us for infractions, and then, if we’re too inconstant with the rules or just plain stupid in our behavior, punishes us for eternity in a state of unimaginable suffering.

So—I guess?—we want to be on the side of the Big Guy up in Heaven (or simply comfortable in our living rooms), looking down on all the troublemakers and malcontents as they rightfully get theirs in our vituperative justice system.

I communicate, as I said, most of every week with these people on the receiving end.  They’re murderers, rapists, bank robbers, drug dealers, pedophiles, gang-bangers, thieves, brawlers, and abusers of all kinds.  I think it’s fairly rare that they get to prison without a good reason, although that definitely does happen.  They don’t have to learn about meditation or the bodhisattva path, they choose to do it–these very same people we’ve consigned to our institutional hell realm.

Buddhism doesn’t see people as condemned; it sees them as confused.  What are they confused about?  The nature of their own minds.

What do I do to help?

First of all, there’s a human voice outside the boundary of their incarceration.  With some people I end up just being a friend they can write to.  It buoys them up over the long years of having to live in that situation.  Basic humanity is a bottom-line of this work.

But most come with some motivation to work with their minds, and so they get someone who can instruct them about that.  A lot of what we do at my organization, Mindfulness Peace Project, consists of providing through the mail study courses.  We have dharma books we study, source books we give them with further material, and they have to answer questions our instructors comment on, writing them back a personal letter, which includes a comment sheet with standardized information on all the topics of that section.

In order for it to be personal instruction, it’s labor intensive on our part.  We really have to listen to how they’ve answered the questions to discern whether they’re getting the message or not.  Sometimes they have a pretty distant grasp of what they’re reading, and it takes the instructor’s effort and ingenuity to try and get it across to them. Sometimes they answer the questions better than we can ourselves.  In fact, it’s downright amazing how well they understand what the book is saying and how it might apply to their case histories and institutionalized lives.

That’s the thing.  Unless you start to understand yourself, your situation, how you got into that, and how it happens to work, there’s not much hope or dharma, as such.  But a regular theme I have read in inmate course work and correspondence over the years expresses the sense of inner freedom that can come despite outward imprisonment.  Here’s Carlos Lara, from one of our courses:

“This is a long sentence I’m doing now (37 years). At first, I was mad and had a lot of hatred – all I would do is think of ways to cause harm and pain to all those who betrayed and lied to me. But I’ve realized that I did everything to myself, and now I’m happy, and I have a spiritual path that I’m most grateful for. I had to be here to begin to be free.”

Jenny Bertram, Master of Divinity

This does, interestingly, echo the original Quaker idea that, in part, gave rise to our prison system.  The “penitentiary” was a place for penitence, to confess and purify one’s crime, as a more humane social response than corporeal punishment, like being left standing in stocks in the sun for three days or getting a requisite number of lashes.  Maybe you might prefer three days in stocks to the 37 years in prison.

But here’s why I can show up at my desk or take those long drives across Colorado to meet with a small group of inmates who want to practice Buddhism.  It’s samsaric mind that locks you in the fundamental manacles.  You’re in that bondage whether or not you’re formally imprisoned or ever will be.  It’s possible, as Lama Zopa put it, to “enjoy life liberated from the inner prison,” even while you may have to put up with the deprivations and theater–of-the-absurd qualities of an actual one.

I’ve known inmates who have gone from lives of violence to lives of compassion.  I’ve seen them struggle through their emotional reactivity to reach beyond that and touch the heart of another inmate who had harmed them.  I’ve known them to practice sitting meditation in the midst of intense chaos, and to find a way to communicate again with long-estranged family members.  They could do that because they found the dharma and turned its teachings into the path.  But more than this, they had the power to do so within them all along, and my organization just supported them in finding it and using it.  They do the work.  We just look for ways to help.

Mindfulness Peace Project has been revising its website recently.  We’ve had there a “blog” section, which really more amounted to a few links to prison articles.  No one had ever really written a blog for it, except Jenny Bertram, an MDiv student at Naropa and one of the great interns we’ve had from them over the years.  It’s an old blog covering maybe a half dozen visits we made together to a private prison in Hudson, Colorado, housing prisoners from Alaska, but they’re written with the fresh eyes of someone new to that world.  We still have that up on the site as a record of the kind of work we do and the experiences that go with it.

But if we were going to have a real, happening, live blog, it would fall to me to write it.  I didn’t think I could take that on, but I explored it a little in a bit I called “Some Thoughts on Prison as Spiritual Path.”  Doing so I realized that maybe after all these decades dealing with the dungeons of America, I had a lot to say.  We’re still in the first generation or two of Buddhists bringing dharma into prisons.  We’ve blazed our own path this way. We know a lot of stories.  We’ve seen a lot of shit go down.  We have a sharper than usual sense of the restrictions, horrors, and positive usages prisons involve.

So I’m taking on a second blog—a formal expression of MPP–devoted to recording some of this knowledge.  I’ll have to tone it down a little as spokesman rather than the far-ranging personality I am in this space.  But I have a feeling at this time in my life that some things need to be said that can only come out of all those prison visits and endless letters I’ve written.  It’s the effort at fulfillment of bodhisattva vows I’ve undertaken.  It doesn’t seem to matter all that much to whom or where you give your help.  There’s plenty of suffering at every level of human life.  But if Buddhism is going to matter, it has to find some place to enter and make a difference.  I can’t really wrap my mind around the suffering of the 1.8 million people in the American prison system, but I can wrap it around some inmate who wants to sort out their life and has enough guts and heart to try and do it.

Prison as path.