posted April 28, 2012 05:53 PM            

According to the ACLU: "The sad truth is that debtors' prisons are flourishing today, more than two decades after the Supreme Court prohibited imprisoning those who are too poor to pay their legal debts. In this era of shrinking budgets, state and local governments have turned aggressively to using the threat and reality of imprisonment to squeeze revenue out of the poorest defendants who appear in their courts."

Some states also apply "poverty penalties," including late fees, payment plan fees, and interest when people are unable to pay all their debts at once, according to a report by the New York University's Brennan Center for Justice. Alabama charges a 30 percent collection fee, for instance, while Florida allows private debt collectors to add a 40 percent surcharge on the original debt. Some Florida counties also use so-called collection courts, where debtors can be jailed but have no right to a public defender.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/jailed-for--280--the-return-of-debtors--prisons.html

posted April 28, 2012 06:49 PM            

I loved this comment tho,

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Well shouldn't the American government go to jail then? Aren't they like 13 trillion dollars in debt?

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posted May 08, 2012 06:37 AM            

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Remember, love can conquer the influences of the planets....It can even eliminate karma.

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posted May 09, 2012 11:00 PM            

The following is a list of links to other websites of possible interest. Clicking on any of them will take you out of the HKF website.

Prison-related

Prison Phoenix Trust Our sister organization in the United Kingdom. They do beautiful work spreading meditation and yoga throughout the British prison system.

Prison Dharma Network A nonsectarian, contemplative support organization for prisoners and prison dharma volunteers.

Families Against Mandatory Minimums A wonderful organization working to reform unfair sentencing laws.

Project Return A group that works with inmates and ex-inmates, using education, skills training, counseling and other programs to try and reduce the recidivism rate.

Our Prison Neighbors An organization dedicated to bringing more volunteer programs to Massachusetts prisons.

The Engaged Zen Foundation A great Buddhist prison ministry.

Northern California Service League A group that provides in-jail and post-release support, skills training, job assistance, and much more to California inmates and families.

Prison Activist Resource Center Provides support and assistance to groups and individuals working to reform the prison system.

Other links of interest

Safe Passage A wonderful project working with kids who live in the Guatmala City garbage dump. Josh Lozoff has spent time volunteering there. Read an account of Josh's experience with Safe Passage.

Global Volunteer Network A great organization that offers volunteer opportunities in community projects throughout the world.

Zen Peacemakers Community A global society working for social transformation and practicing Socially Engaged Buddhism.

Neem Karoli Baba Ashram Bo's & Sita's guru

HeroicStories A little good news for a change.

Friends of Peace Pilgrim A little-known, and very inspirational American saint.

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posted May 09, 2012 11:03 PM            

quote:

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"The cause of all our personal problems and nearly all the problems of the world can be summed up in a single sentence:

Human life is very deep, and our modern dominant lifestyle is not."

-Bo Lozoff

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posted May 09, 2012 11:05 PM            

Can We Do Better Than Our Present Prison System?
by Bo Lozoff, Director

The primary work of Human Kindness Foundation is to offer spiritual support to people regardless of their circumstances. However, because we have been in so many prisons - I personally have visited over 600 institutions - we feel a responsibility to offer this brief statement into the widespread debate over crime and punishment, especially in the U.S.A. (most of the following can be applied to other countries as well).

The Mess We’re In Now

America locks up more of its population than any other nation on Earth, a rate five times greater than most industrialized nations. In 1970 there were fewer than 200,000 prisoners in the U.S.A. Now, less than thirty years later, California alone has nearly that many. There are nearly two million across the country. The states are spending an average of $100 million per year on new prisons. Prisoners currently sleep on floors, in tents, in converted broom closets and gymnasiums, or in double or triple bunks in cells that were designed for one inmate. For the most part, prisons are barbaric, terrifying places. Crime victims derive no benefit from this misery. We offer convicts no opportunities to learn compassion or take responsibility for what they have done, nor make restitution or offer atonement to their victims in any practical ways.

Approximately 240,000 brutal rapes occur in our prison system each year. Most of the victims are young, nonviolent male inmates, many of them teenaged first offenders. They are traumatized beyond imagination. Michael Fay’s caning in Singapore was child’s play compared to the reception he would have had in nearly any state prison in America. Contrary to political sloganeering, we are not soft on criminals. We are irresponsibly vicious.

Nearly 70% of all US prisoners are serving time for nonviolent offenses. Please let that sink in, because it’s probably not the image you’ve received from the media. We’ve been led to imagine a legion of heartless monsters plotting to get out and hurt us again. The truth is, most prison inmates are confused, disorganized, and often pathetic individuals who would love to turn their lives around if given a realistic chance. Unfortunately, many of those nonviolent offenders will no longer be nonviolent by the time they leave prison. Prisons are not scaring offenders away from crime; they are incapacitating them so they are hardly fit for anything else.

In other words, the criminal justice system that we’re paying for so dearly simply isn’t working. And yet we keep on throwing more money into it. So how do we start fixing what’s broken? Here are a few places to begin:

Compassion Versus Rage

There are simple universal laws of human life which cannot be violated without paying a painful price. Every great spiritual, philosophic and religious tradition has emphasized compassion, reconciliation, forgiveness and responsibility. These are not suggestions, they are instructions. If we follow them we will thrive, if not we will suffer. The socially-sanctioned hatred and rage which we express toward criminals in modern times violates these timeless instructions. We are breaking a fundamental spiritual law, and the price we are paying for it is increased crime, violence, depravity, hopelessness, and of course, more hatred and rage.

Our children inherit these destructive attitudes. Teen suicide has doubled and teen homicide has tripled in recent years. Many children carry weapons to school. Our children are absorbing the message that it’s okay to despise and harm people whom they perceive as enemies. That is not a mature or civilized philosophy. We are crossing a dangerous threshold of violence and ill-will. We have already crossed it in many movies and TV shows. Even at home around the dinner-table, children may hear words like "scumbag" and "animal" to describe criminals. They may hear jokes or celebratory remarks about the execution of a human being. Children cannot unlearn such views and behavioral patterns overnight.

We must change our attitudes toward those who wrong us. That doesn’t mean we allow people to hurt us or rob us or harm our communities. After all, we don’t allow our children to do cruel or immoral things as they are growing up, but when they do, we don’t hate them for it. We don’t punish them so viciously that they can hardly function for the rest of their lives. We don’t throw them out of our home and tell them to fend for themselves forever. Yet that is what we do in our criminal justice system. By venting our rage and hatred, we make things worse. We make people worse. We take many confused, mostly selfish young men and women, and we create bitter, violent career criminals out of them.

We must also bear in mind that many of the greatest saints and sages of all religions were once criminals, drunkards, prostitutes and even killers. St. Paul was once Saul of Tarsus, a vicious persecutor and killer of Christians. Religious history is filled with such redeemed, transformed sages. As we give up our belief in redemption and transformation, we are crossing another line, one of narrow-mindedness, which will render us poorer indeed. Some of the potential sages and activists of our times may be languishing in prison cells right now. We must seek to maximize rather than destroy such potential.

Drugs Are a Public Health Problem, Not A Criminal Justice Problem

Nonviolent drug addicts are clogging our nation’s prisons. Sixty-one percent of federal prison inmates are doing time for drug offenses, up from 18% in 1980. All this incarceration is doing nothing to solve the drug problem. Many wardens, judges, and other officials know this, but it has become political suicide to admit it publicly. We must insist upon a mature dialogue about the drug problem. Keep in mind that the high-level drug dealers aren’t cluttering up our prisons; they’re too rich and smart to get caught. They hire addicts or kids, sometimes as young as eleven or twelve, to take most of the risks.

We need to address these issues in ourselves, our families, our communities. And we must press for changes in drug laws -- not to legalize all drugs, because it’s not that simple. But we do have to decriminalize their use, treating the problem as the public-health issue it is. Without drug offenders, our prisons would have more than enough room to hold dangerous criminals. As a result, we wouldn’t need to build a single new prison, saving us $5 billion a year. If we spent a fraction of that on rehabilitation centers and community revitalization programs, we’d begin to put drug dealers out of business in the only way that will last: by drying up their market.

Separate Violent And Nonviolent Offenders Right From The Start

It’s inconceivable that we routinely dump nonviolent offenders into prison cells with violent ones, even in local jails and holding tanks. What are we thinking? I know one fellow who was arrested for participating in a Quaker peace vigil and was jailed in lieu of paying a ten-dollar fine. In a forty-eight-hour period, he was savagely raped and traded back and forth among more than fifty violent prisoners. That was twenty years ago, and since then he has had years of therapy, and yet he has never recovered emotionally. His entire life still centers around the decision of one prison superintendent to place him in a violent cellblock in order to teach him a lesson.

Most nonviolent offenders do in fact learn a lesson: how to be violent. Ironically, we spend an average of $20,000 per year, per inmate, teaching them this. For less than that we could be sending every nonviolent offender to college. We need to offer conflict-resolution training such as the "Alternatives to Violence" programs currently being conducted by and for convicts around the country. Such training should be required for all prisoners and staff.

None of us, including prison staff, should accept violence as a fact of prison life, and it would be easy not to. We could designate certain facilities as zero-violence areas and allow inmates to live there as long as they don’t commit — or even threaten to commit — a single violent act. The great majority of prisoners would sign up for such a place, I can assure you. Only about 10% of the prison population sets the terrorist tone for most institutions, and they are able to do that because the administration gives no support to the vast majority of inmates who just want to do their time, improve themselves in some way, and get out alive.

Join And Support The Restorative Justice Movement

For decades our justice system has been run according to the tenets of "retributive justice," a model based on exile and hatred. "Restorative justice" holds that when a crime occurs, there’s an injury to the community, and that injury needs to be healed. Restorative justice tries to bring the offender back into the community, if at all possible, rather than closing him out. Instead of "Get the hell out of here!" restorative justice says "Hey, get back in here! What are you doing that for? Don’t you know we need you as one of the good people in this community? What would your mama think?" It’s an entirely opposite approach.

I’m not saying that every offender is ready to be transformed into a good neighbor. Advocates of restorative justice are not naïve. Sadly, prisons may be a necessary part - a very small part - of a restorative justice system. And even then, prisons can be humane environments which maximize opportunities for the inmates to become decent and caring human beings.

What can you do?

First of all., if you become the victim of a crime, insist upon meeting your assailant. Insist upon being involved with the process of his or her restoration. Join or create a VORP (Victim-Offender Reconciliation Program) in your community. Tour your local jail or prison to see firsthand what your taxes pay for. Go in with a church or civic group to meet inmates. Become a pen pal to a prisoner who is seeking to change his/her life. Talk to your friends and colleagues about employing ex-cons (in nationwide surveys, most employers admit they won’t hire a person with a criminal record, so where are they supposed to work?). Reclaim your power and your responsibility, because the retributive system you have deferred to is not serving your best interests. Please take the issue of crime and punishment personally, because it is an issue which definitely affects you and your family and your descendants for generations to come.

posted May 09, 2012 11:09 PM            

Maybe it's television: always ragging on us about what we don't have, what we should have --- building frustration in those who are poor and unemployed. Maybe it is the daily news telling us about all the hot-shots who make themselves so very very rich with such apparent ease, those nattering articles in the newspapers about the former geek, Bill Gates, turning billionaire before our very eyes. In any event, some sociologists claim that the prison population is a metaphor for the society's inability to match desperate needs with a desperate need to survive. A fifteen-year-old in the ghetto has little chance to participate in the American Dream unless he becomes part of the most dangerous game going --- being drugs --- with its concurrent violence and opportunity for formidable prosperity, not to say a chance to become oblivious to the ghastliness of ghetto life.

§ § §
Prisons are the only institution in the country where the "victims" run the whole show. The aged and the poor have almost no say about the Social Security system. Children have little or no input into the public school system. You and I and Joe Blow have almost no influence on the local zoning laws that can destroy whole neighborhoods willy-nilly. But prisoners run the federal, state, and county prison systems, and no guard in his right mind would dare interfere with "prison justice." The administrators ride uneasily atop the angry mass that make up the 2,500,000 inhabitants of our prisons.

Prisoners are failures: they got caught at their chosen profession (crime). Their power when incarcerated is just that: naked, brutal power. The weak get eaten up, destroyed --- either emotionally or physically. Recent articles in the Los Angeles Times have proved what we suspected all along --- that civil wars between the races in jail are often fomented by the authorities in imitation of the style of the English in India during the times of the Raj --- a power system that kept the multitudes off-balance, at each other's throats, so the real locus (the state) is free of threat.

One of the least discussed aspects of The Joint is sexuality. Since the prisoners run the prisons, they determine its passion, and they have no choice. There are no women, so it has to be male love. (Celibates don't exist in prison. Virginity is rare except for the very old, the very ugly, or the very strong.)

Prison passion isn't what you and I think of as passion. Recent studies indicate that 75-80% of prisoners have some sort of sexual encounter --- usually violent --- between themselves and their fellow prisoners. Much of it is enforced pleasure, eg, assault. The irony is that it is considered by many street kids to be "manly" to serve time --- yet once behind bars, they either get raped by their fellow inmates, or become rapists. And not long ago, a series of articles in salon.com showed that violent sex becomes a means whereby the guards can punish the incorrigible. By putting intransigent prisoners in cells with acknowledged brutes --- violent and bloody rape becomes the punishment of choice.

In prison, sex becomes a commodity --- the same as cigarettes or dope. The young and the weak have to "marry" a stronger prisoner in order to survive. Men who are violent heterosexuals on the outside become violent homosexuals on the inside, and will fight (and die) to own the most desirable partners. In a strange twist, openly gay cons are scorned by the prison population: they are not considered to be manly enough for the violent prison love. They are often segregated with the child-molesters and the weak. The explanation: "They'd be murdered by the other cons."

Sexual activity in jail involves the physically impotent being dominated by the physically potent. Our prisons thus make for a strange philosophy of justice. This virulently anti-homosexual society has decided that the appropriate punishment for thieves, pimps, murderers, rapists, con men, forgers, check-kiters, and bank robbers is to make queers out of them. Passion is turned into punishment, and it is passion without tenderness --- which may be the worst punishment of them all. Coupled now with the new threat of AIDS, a night in a cell with a violent rapist might well turn into a death sentence for the young and the weak.

One of the few writers to write of the sexuality of prisoners with grace was the late Jean Genet. Because of his predilection for "rough trade," he once spoke of his return to a French prison in terms of one who was ennobled and anointed; saw himself as marching past the golden bars of the entryway with a chorus of angelic cons playing silver trumpets in harmony at his glorious return. The prisoners gathered on high to honor the return of their "bride" from the outside world.

§ § §
The American prison system works poorly, if at all. The rate of recidivism runs between 60 and 80% --- not because the cons are so enamored of prison life, but because their experiences outside the walls are so futile: employment is non-existent, and the prison schooling of technique becomes the only discipline that they can depend on. As one of the correspondents says in We're All Doing Time,

You can be in a year or ten years, it don't matter. You get out and you don't really know anybody, you don't know where to go, so you just start getting as many things as you can. And you start drinking and you get on the phone and call Joe Blow who's in the same predicament, and pretty soon you're sitting together somewhere half-drunk, and deciding that the only way to get ahead is if you just burglarize this place or rob that place, and neither one of you really wants to do it. Most people in prison just wanted to pull that one big score and then live like everyone else.

Most cons on the outside manage to break back into prison:

Hell, the worst that could happen is when you succeed. You don't know what to do with the money anyway. The easiest thing is you'll be back in the joint, listening for the door to crack, hanging out on the handball court. It's a slow suffocation, that's what it amounts to; you suffocate. The great majority of people who get out of prison, break back in.

Bo Lozoff has written a book for prisoners, and it is a good one indeed. The writing is simple, wise, direct; it overflows with honesty. The book came out of the Prison-Ashram Project started by Ram Dass --- and it is subtitled (correctly) "A Guide for Getting Free," and the freedom described can be within or without. It is in no way preachy, or arrogant, or "we're-up-here-and-we're-gonna-help-you-down-there." It is an honest recounting of the methods that one can use to get free while one is in the most unfree place in American society. It makes no excuses for the specific methodology it offers to those who are, after all, in a violent war zone:

Going to prison is one more opportunity to come closer to Truth, God, Self, Freedom --- whatever we want to call it. Prison life is so negative and intense, prisoners sometimes get the chance to work out karma and build strength in a period of months that might have taken fifty years on the streets, if they could have done it at all. What a blessing!

This is the tone of the whole book. Grace, godliness, and the topsy-turvy concept that being in prison can contrarily be considered "good fortune." After all, says Lozoff --- where else can we get all our bodily needs taken care of, and have a regular schedule each day to work on our spirituality. The assumption --- the key assumption --- of this book is the very existence of the holiness that each of us holds within ourselves. Such Grace is hidden from us by our ignorance, but it can be accessed by meditation, by touching "the blue pearl" within. As part of the process, one has to leave behind violence, hate, anger, superiority, cruelty. Once one has the courage to embark on such a course --- either inside or outside the joint --- freedom is one, but not the only, dividend.

We're All Doing Time is divided in three parts. The first is an overview of prison and spirituality. Number Two --- "Getting Free" --- introduces the reader to Yoga and diet and breathing and the chakras. Book Three consists of letters sent to Bo by prisoners all over the country. Lozoff has been working on this project for many years now --- and he publishes here material, including letters of praise, of questioning, of triumph, of hope, of hopelessness, of terror --- gathered from his correspondents.

And there are, too, the chilling letters:

In April of l974, eleven men entered my home in Portland, Oregon, raped my 17-year-old wife, who was three months pregnant at the time, then threw her four stories out our apartment window. You see, I had been running drugs and guns for some people out of Nevada. My wife had asked me to stop so I tried to get out but they said no. On my next run I kept the goods I was to deliver and told them I'd turn it over to the feds if they tried causing me any trouble.

They went to our house, after beating her and realizing she really didn't know where I put the stuff, they gang-raped her and threw her out the window. By some freak accident she lived for several months after that, long enough to tell me who most of the eleven were. She committed suicide while in a state mental institution, as her body was so crippled up from the fall, she had lost all hope and just wanted to die. In August of 1974, I went after the eleven guys who did it and caught nine of them in several different states. I was unable to complete my death mission and get the last two because I got caught here in Idaho...

Now, how would any human --- not to mention Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, you, me, Lozoff --- handle a letter like that, much less try to show such an angry man how to free himself from what had happened? That is the impossible task that the writer of this book has set for himself.

In reading We're All Doing Time, one comes up with not only a how-to-survive course, but a picture of a man named Lozoff who is trying to get prisoners free of the chains within their own heads. For instance, the key is not in atoning for "sins" (atonement being a self-destructive, blaming concept) --- but to grow through experience, to accept the nature of "karma," recognize it as an inevitable step in the human progression towards personal freedom. Lozoff says, in response to the letter above:

I don't mean to imply that you should look back and feel good about it [the murders], but just to try to understand that no accidents happen in this universe. Even the most horrible experiences are still steps along the way. And the pain which may still lie before you from the karma of killing nine people [is] just more of the same: Difficult, necessary steps on your path.

This is the work of a loving man --- a man who has chosen to work with prisoners because of his innate humanity, his willingness to serve. The Lozoffs of the world may well be the saints of our society, for they go to those who are trapped, and offer a message of freedom. It's a simple message: that all freedom lies within.

In prison, the daily dramas can get very heavy. Somebody comes up to start a fight, for example. If your own mind is centered and quiet, you see that they're just creating more karma for themselves, and that you're experiencing karma from your own balance sheet. If you can handle the whole thing without so much anger or fear...then you've begun to break the cycle, and have come one step closer to freedom --- internal, if not external.

Lozoff frankly admits there are some questions without answers. Should one fight if one is going to be raped? The answer --- there is no answer. He points out that the Chief of the Nez Perce would never permit rape because his body was sacred, and he had to protect it. On the other hand, Gandhi would have submitted because he considered his body to be dross, saying, as a good Hindu would, "I don't own this body; it belongs to God."

§ § §
This is a practical, how-to-survive book. It gives specific exercises to open the heart and quiet the babbling mind. The main message is: "You'll survive if you lay hate and vengeance aside. You'll contribute to your own spiritual growth --- and your survival --- if you let yourself grow into love." The Bureau of Prisons, if it had any sense, would be ordering these books by the gross, handing them out to their wards. For, after all, the message is one of peace, and acceptance --- or at least tolerance --- and non-violence.

Some people have claimed that the American prison system must perpetuate itself. There's a huge business in the processing, feeding, and keeping the cons off the market. As with most moral systems, it must ultimately pay for itself --- in fact, must yield a handsome dividend. (It isn't just chance that now some private contractors are anticipating fortunes with the privatization of prisons). The 2,500,000 Americans who are spending time in jail are a necessary function of the American economic and social system. The Christian idea of Sin gets raised to an operational level: we all sin; it is the devil in us; we must be punished for those sins; jail is the best way to punish the devil within. And we all get to "pay" for it.

A huge, overcrowded and arbitrary apparatus of prisons is not peculiar to America. There was another prison system in the world as large and as ugly as our own. You guessed it: it was in Stalinist Russia. Which all says a great deal, perhaps too much, about the similarity of governmental processes, our standards of justice, our mutual concepts of "wrong." It demonstrates a similar willingness to purge the body politic by putting away so many anti-social elements. Punishment in both countries was and is built on intolerance and dehumanization.

posted May 09, 2012 11:24 PM            

quote:

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America locks up more of its population than any other nation on Earth, a rate five times greater than most industrialized nations. In 1970 there were fewer than 200,000 prisoners in the U.S.A. Now, less than thirty years later, California alone has nearly that many. There are nearly two million across the country. The states are spending an average of $100 million per year on new prisons. Prisoners currently sleep on floors, in tents, in converted broom closets and gymnasiums, or in double or triple bunks in cells that were designed for one inmate. For the most part, prisons are barbaric, terrifying places. Crime victims derive no benefit from this misery. We offer convicts no opportunities to learn compassion or take responsibility for what they have done, nor make restitution or offer atonement to their victims in any practical ways.

Approximately 240,000 brutal rapes occur in our prison system each year. Most of the victims are young, nonviolent male inmates, many of them teenaged first offenders. They are traumatized beyond imagination.

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posted May 09, 2012 11:28 PM            

quote:

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Nearly 70% of all US prisoners are serving time for nonviolent offenses. Please let that sink in, because it’s probably not the image you’ve received from the media. We’ve been led to imagine a legion of heartless monsters plotting to get out and hurt us again. The truth is, most prison inmates are confused, disorganized, and often pathetic individuals who would love to turn their lives around if given a realistic chance. Unfortunately, many of those nonviolent offenders will no longer be nonviolent by the time they leave prison. Prisons are not scaring offenders away from crime; they are incapacitating them so they are hardly fit for anything else.

In other words, the criminal justice system that we’re paying for so dearly simply isn’t working. And yet we keep on throwing more money into it. So how do we start fixing what’s broken? Here are a few places to begin:

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