The lecture last night in Shelton Auditorium was nothing short of fascinating, but also depressing. The keynote speaker, Fleet Maull, had an absolutely amazing story to tell full of tragedy and hope. It was interesting that he started off by saying that he spends one third of the year in retreat, yet does not feel very religious. He founded the Prison Dharma Network, which is a Buddhist program the offers hope to inmates and is in almost all fifty states. He started a small meditation group in the prison chapel while he was incarcerated for drugg-smuggling. The popularity grew so much and he completely changed his life around after serving over ten years in prison. He is even featured in the film Path to Freedom.
Something that Maull brought up struck me as true failure on behalf of the United States was that one in one-hundred Americans is in prison. The United States also has the highest incarceration rate in the entire world and the is going through the worst opioid epidemic in history. These are facts that are not acceptable that we need and can do better as a society to change. We should start by looking to Scandinavian countries for advice on prison systems that are based on transformative healing vs shame-based prisons, which are what the United States currently have. The prison systems’ philosophy hurts everyone involved from the inmates to the clerks to the parole officers.
One way this lecture related to class content was that one of the speakers talked about how we assign meaning to crime and that crime exists because we have created it. We give meaning to what “deviant behavior” means, and that often just unconventional behavior of marginalized populations can be see as “deviant”. This reminded me of our class discussion on Taoism and how a twenty dollar bill only has value because we assign it value.