{"id":1378,"date":"2010-05-06T12:53:33","date_gmt":"2010-05-06T16:53:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.therowboat.com\/?p=1378"},"modified":"2010-05-08T14:39:37","modified_gmt":"2010-05-08T18:39:37","slug":"captive-meditation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/2010\/05\/captive-meditation\/","title":{"rendered":"Captive Meditation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Prisons in the United States are a profound kind of disaster, and lately I and some friends have been doing some thinking about how the conversation can be changed, away from the self-defeating logic of “tough on crime” to something that will actually, well, be tough on crime<\/em>, rather than simply tough on the bodies and souls of criminals\u2014and, by extension, a mark of shame on our whole society.<\/p>\n

Hear, for instance, last week’s discussion hosted by Killing the Buddha<\/em>, The Prison-Spirituality Complex<\/a>. Also, in the current issue of Tricycle<\/em>, I review a new book by one of the panelists at that event, Yale professor Caleb Smith. Since Tricycle<\/em> is a Buddhist magazine, I took the opportunity, also, to interview and discuss Buddhists who are involved in prison work. (Unfortunately the review is available online only to subscribers<\/a>. Buy it at your local Whole Foods!)<\/p>\n

\"\"Solitude can be a vehicle for liberation, or it can tear a person apart; the American cult of reclusive individualism, after all, has given us wise men, intrepid pioneers, and mountaintop transcendentalists, but also desperate housewives and deranged unabombers. Caleb Smith, a professor of English at Yale, reveals in \u201cThe Prison and the American Imagination\u201d that nowhere is this contraditction better and more brutally expressed than in our penal institutions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Since the opening of Philadelphia\u2019s Eastern State Penitentiary in 1829, the corrections business in this country has carried on a love affair with isolation. Though well after passing from the control of its Quaker founders, the city ensured its flagship prison was suffused with their theology of the Inner Light. Inmates lived alone in cells lit by a single skylight\u2014the \u201ceye of God\u201d\u2014where they ate, slept, worked at handicrafts, and waited. The intention was that a man would drift into reveries of meditation, coming face to face with himself and the divine spark within. Prison, said one of Eastern State\u2019s founding documents, will \u201cteach him how to think.\u201d Reformist hopes also took on the transformative language of born-again evangelism. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, imagined that upon an ex-con\u2019s release people would proclaim, \u201cThis brother was lost, and is found\u2014was dead and is alive.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My instinct is that, with religion so centrally a part of the birth of the American prison disaster, religion will somehow have to be part of the solution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Prisons in the United States are a profound kind of disaster, and lately I and some friends have been doing some thinking about how the conversation can be changed, away from the self-defeating logic of “tough on crime” to something that will actually, well, be tough on crime<\/em>, rather than simply tough on the bodies and souls of criminals\u2014and, by extension, a mark of shame on our whole society.<\/p>\n

Hear, for instance, last week’s discussion hosted by Killing the Buddha<\/em>, The Prison-Spirituality Complex<\/a>. Also, in the current issue of Tricycle<\/em>, I review a new book by one of the panelists at that event, Yale professor Caleb Smith. Since Tricycle<\/em> is a Buddhist magazine, I took the opportunity, also, to interview and discuss Buddhists who are involved in prison work. (Unfortunately the review is available online only to subscribers<\/a>. Buy it at your local Whole Foods!)<\/p>\n

\"\"Solitude can be a vehicle for liberation, or it can tear a person apart; the American cult of reclusive individualism, after all, has given us wise men, intrepid pioneers, and mountaintop transcendentalists, but also desperate housewives and deranged unabombers. Caleb Smith, a professor of English at Yale, reveals in \u201cThe Prison and the American Imagination\u201d that nowhere is this contraditction better and more brutally expressed than in our penal institutions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Since the opening of Philadelphia\u2019s Eastern State Penitentiary in 1829, the corrections business in this country has carried on a love affair with isolation. Though well after passing from the control of its Quaker founders, the city ensured its flagship prison was suffused with their theology of the Inner Light. Inmates lived alone in cells lit by a single skylight\u2014the \u201ceye of God\u201d\u2014where they ate, slept, worked at handicrafts, and waited. The intention was that a man would drift into reveries of meditation, coming face to face with himself and the divine spark within. Prison, said one of Eastern State\u2019s founding documents, will \u201cteach him how to think.\u201d Reformist hopes also took on the transformative language of born-again evangelism. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, imagined that upon an ex-con\u2019s release people would proclaim, \u201cThis brother was lost, and is found\u2014was dead and is alive.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My instinct is that, with religion so centrally a part of the birth of the American prison disaster, religion will somehow have to be part of the solution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[63,56,101,87,19],"class_list":["post-1378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-design","tag-human-rights","tag-imagination","tag-memory","tag-metaphor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1378"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1382,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1378\/revisions\/1382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}