[Buddha-l] Buddhism and Jail

[Michael J. Wilson]

There is quite a good book review about a prisoner on death row in San Quentin who became a buddhist.  The review is on the Journal of Global Buddhism:
  http://www.globalbuddhism.org/6/cunnell05.htm
   
  
 In 1997, The African-American writer, Buddhist, and Death Row prisoner Jarvis Masters published a book of personal essays and stories indicting the squalor, torture, masculine rage and unaccountability of authority in San Quentin prison, stories that are inscriptions of the multiple strategies of physical and spiritual renewal and resilience practised by men condemned to lifelong imprisonment and the threat of execution. The book was published under the title Finding Freedom: Writings from Death Row. Masters' writing is strongly informed by his discovery and practice while in prison of Tibetan Buddhism, and Finding Freedom is most obviously a text closely concerned with self-reflective discourse and spiritual practices designed, as Masters writes, to "take me out of prison even as I remain here."(3) It is then, only when he appears finally condemned, entombed, and discarded that Masters begins the processes that will lead him to a renunciation of the discourses and action
 of violent masculinity, those 'patriarchal notions of cool,' by which bell hooks argues young black men in particular are seduced; the "politics of being a gangsta
(the) invitation to embrace death as the only logic of black male existence, and towards a newly positive identity embracing reflection, selflessness, and compassion." 
  

One of my favorite poet, Jimmy Santiago Baca, spent some hard time in 
prisons in New Mexico and Arizona that he describes in his book "A 
Place to Stand". It you would like to know what life is like in a 
modern maximum security prison pick up this book:

http://www.jimmysantiagobaca.com/booksmerchandise.html or


I
		
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