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who have been lost to our human family.
There is virtually no healing or hope in our nations' prisons. Society has fearfully, hatefully, or sorrowfully abandoned those who commit crimes. yet, most who fill our prisons are the poor, the undeducated, the addicts, the minorities, the mentally ill, the brain-damaged, the lost, the unloved, the mentally deficient, and the pathologically angry. they need more than locked cells.
They need our help.
It is understandable how our first emotional response when we are urged to support prisoners is to close down. Why is this? We all despair at the toll that crime and violence has taken on our lives and on our society. It is hard to feel compassion towards those who commit such horrible deeds, much less want to support the possibilty of their transformation. Yet - something must be done or most of those violent men will be back on our streets. There are virtually no rehabilitation programs in our prisons, so we at Dharma Friends Prison Outreach Project are doing something. We have life story after life sotry where change is happening to our Dharma Friends newsletter readers. And, each individual who becomes more peaceful and kind becomes a change agent and a force in the healing of others in his or her prison. Each inmate who becomes more peaceful and kind will walk out of prison with the potential to be a good citizen rather than more violent and equipped with a PhD in hate.
We receive letters every day from prisoners thanking us for Dharma Friends, free books, and our support. They say that they look for the newsletter each month and read it cover to cover, and then read it again. Some say it keeps them alive - literally. Healing is happening for our recipients. We get new requests for our newsletter every week and we need your help to continue to fill these requests. We need you to help us in helping them.
Our vision also includes community education and planting seeds for society to look differently at what is now a very broken criminal justice system. It is tragic that so many do cause so much suffering for innocent people. Violent people need to be prevented from causing more harm. But we must look at the bigger picture which is the cradle to prison trajectory that exists for so many who fall through the myriad of cracks in our social structure. Many of those who end up to be violent, or who end up as addicts that break our drug laws, were infants with various disadvantages that had obvious symptomatic behavior and escaped notice. They were funneled almost directly into juvenile justice and then into prisons with little or no chance to find a successful life. My experience is that those in prisons have had one or many interwoven obstacles: they are often impoverished, mentally ill, below normal in intellectual functioning, have suffered great prejudice or ridicule, are addicts of some substance or behavior pattern, suffered significant abuse themselves, grew up enculturated in a violent and antisocial subculture, or are, in fact, innocent of the crime charged them and unable to afford a good defense. Many non-violent offenders and those released after serving their time but with no rehabilitation for their violent behaviors too often travel right back into the prison industry - often for the rest of their lives. Of course, safety for all is crucial, but our prisons and society need to provide new paths for people before incarceration, during, and after.
We isolate people in ways that end their hope - from womb to incarceration. In this system, innocent families and children also suffer - and many of these children become the next generation of prisoners. The tragedy is that people can and do have the capacity to heal and change. Compassion Works for All and the Dharma Friends Prison Outreach Project is dedicated to bringing about these changes with deep love for all beings.