It’s hard to get a purchase on the reality of nearly two million people incarcerated in the U.S. on any given day of the year. It’s an American reality, and if it’s got two million people directly in its grip, how many more people become affected when their brother or father or son (it’s mostly males), their friend or cousin or coworker gets hauled off. There’s a ripple effect on other people that’s got to far surpass two million.
For the person behind bars, that’s part of the grief of it. Often, if they have young children, they feel the pain of them growing up without their father being able to mark their birthdays or see them learn to walk or start to play Little League. If he does get to see them, he’s shocked at how much they’ve grown and changed without him really knowing much about it. He’s become extraneous to their lives, even if he can talk to them once in a while on the phone. On the other end, inmates get the phone call that says a parent has died, but they can do little but fret on their bunk about not being there. Part of the prison experience becomes getting ripped from the fabric of a life you belonged in and from relationships that mattered.
Sometimes families wholly reject the inmate, refusing even to talk on the phone to them. They become shunned and abandoned.
Now, of course, this is all the outcome of karma, by which I mean, understandable, right in front of your nose karma, where said inmate acted illegally, got caught, and now pays the price: cause and effect. In general, people aren’t forsaken by their families without a lot of bad behavior leading up to that. Prison institutionalization puts up plenty of barriers to staying connected that go far beyond the razor wire, not the least being how inmates are moved around the prison system, and often they’re sent quite far from their home, making it hard for their families to go visit them. Then the inmate gets a number of years to stew in his grief about what he’s lost, what he’s separated from, and maybe most bitter, if he can get to it, what he’s brought upon himself.
The Buddhist tradition gets regarded as pacifistic. It definitely emphasizes not creating harm–not resorting to aggression in speech or physical violence. But anyone who’s spent real time on the meditation seat knows that aggression often shadows thoughts in some form or another. Over the decades you can see what a refined game it is. Even pretty subtle thoughts can arise purely for the sake of dodging your direct experience and any raw feeling that goes with it. There’s a fundamental aggression in discursive thought habituated to rejecting your own naked experience, and that tendency goes deep.
I remember as a teenager plucking a book off the rack–-something you saw everywhere back in the 70s, almost as ubiquitous as fat James Michener novels. It was called The Prophet. I opened it randomly and felt struck in the face by what it said: