“Buddhist Ministry and the Prison-Industrial Complex” — A New UWest Course I’m Co-Teaching with Jane Naomi Iwamura

This semester, as part of my fall course load at University of the West (where I am an associate professor and Chair of the Buddhist Chaplaincy Department), I’m co-teaching a brand new course with my fellow associate professor and Chair of the Religious Studies Department, Jane Naomi Iwamura. This is has been an exciting development, not only because of a great group of enrolled students and the opportunity to work with a most admired friend in Jane — whose recent interview on New Books in Religion you shouldn’t miss, by the way — but also because of the subject: “Buddhist Ministry and the Prison-Industrial Complex.”

Recently, UWest has begun offering classes for prisoners in California facilities. With encouragement and support from our Emeritus President Lewis Lancaster, and under Jane’s careful leadership, some of our Chaplaincy and Religious Studies students are running a course at both Chuckawalla Valley State Prison and Calipatria State Prison based on a recorded lecture series by Dr. Lancaster. Other courses will follow soon.

In addition to the classes for prisoners, I thought it might be a good idea to run a course at UWest for our Chaplaincy and Religious Studies students on prison issues. The result was “Buddhist Ministry and the Prison-Industrial Complex.”

In the course description, Jane and I write:

The course examines the historic participation of Buddhists in ministry activities within the prison-industrial complex. Most of the focus will be on the United States, but India, Great Britain, and other countries will receive some attention as well. Through their in-depth look at a ministry setting in which Buddhist Americans have been particularly active, students will gain a robust knowledge of both operating within specialized care settings and justice issues within the U.S. prison system.

In addition to the reading and multimedia material will we will be exploring, we will host guest speakers in person and via Skype, visit LA’s Homeboy Industries, and (hopefully) visit our member of Congress to discuss an issue near and dear to the Chaplaincy Department’s heart: the fact that (at the moment) Buddhists (and others) may not be employed as full-time, paid chaplains at California state prisons. Also, just this week, Jane and I took the students to the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in downtown Los Angeles as part of a protest against SB 105.

Among their assignments for the class, the students will produce a white paper proposing solutions to issues of particular concern to them, as well as an internet “meme” of some kind of that same issue or another.

Jane and I have received a number of inquiries about the content of the course, and so I felt it might be a good thing to share our syllabus with you all here at this blog. Below you will find our fifteen-week plan for the semester, complete with assigned readings (with links wherever possible).

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Introductions

• “Help Thy Neighbor and Go Straight to Prison” by Nicholas D. Kristof for the New York Times (August 10, 2013)
• “The Caging of America” by Adam Gopnik for The New Yorker (January 30, 2012)
• “The Top 10 Most Startling Facts About People of Color and Criminal Justice in the United States” by Sophia Kerby for the Center for American Progress (March 13, 2012)
• “We Need to Talk About an Injustice” by Bryan Stevenson for TED (March 5, 2012)
• “Religion in Prisons – A 50-State Survey of Prison Chaplains” by the Pew Forum’s Religion and Public Life Project (March 22, 2012)
• “Prison Inmates Go Zen to Deal with Life Behind Bars” by Stephanie Chen for CNN
• Doing Time, Doing Vipassana (1997), dir. Eilona Ariel and Ayelet Menahemi

Contemporary Prison Issues (I)

• “For Lesser Crimes, Rethinking Life Behind Bars” by John Tierney for the New York Times (December 11, 2012)
• “Prison Population Can Shrink When Police Crowd Streets” by John Tierney for the New York Times (January 25, 2013)
• “Prison and the Poverty Trap” by John Tierney for the New York Times (February 18, 2013)
• “Banking on Bondage: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration” by the American Civil Liberties Union (November 2, 2011)
• “Louisiana Inc/arcerated: How We Built the World’s Prison Capital” series by Cindy Chang, Scott Threlkeld, and Ryan Smith for the Times-Picayune (May 2012)
• “One of the Darkest Periods in the History of American Prisons” by Andrew Cohen for The Atlantic (June 9, 2013)
• “Why Are Prisoners Committing Suicide in Pennsylvania?” by Matt Stroud for The Nation (May 7, 2012)

Contemporary Prison Issues (II)

• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

Buddhist Ministry and the Prison-Industrial Complex (I)

• “Angulimala: A Story of the Power of Compassion” in Love in Buddhism by Walpola Piyananda Thera
• selections from The Edicts of King Asoka by Venerable S. Dhammika
• “The Angulimala Lineage: Buddhist Prison Ministries” by Virgina Cohn Parkum and J. Anthony Stultz in editor Christopher S. Queen’s Engaged Buddhism in the West
• Sitting Inside: Buddhist Practice in America’s Prisons by Kobai Scott Whitney

Buddhist Ministry and the Prison-Industrial Complex (II)

• Prison Chaplaincy Guidelines for Zen Buddhism: A Sourcebook for Prison Chaplains, Administrators, and Security Personnel by Kobutsu Malone
• The Prison Dharma Network Volunteer Training Manual by Kate Crisp and Fleet Maull
• “Prison Chaplaincy” in Benefit Beings!: The Buddhist Guide to Professional Chaplaincy by Danny Fisher

Buddhist Ministry and the Prison-Industrial Complex (III)

• “The Ancient Heart of Forgiveness” by Jack Kornfield for Greater Good (August 23, 2011)
• Be Free Where You Are by Thich Nhat Hanh
• “A Meeting of Hearts: Eighteen Former Prisoners Meet His Holiness the Dalai Lama in New York” in Liberation: Magazine of FPMT’s Prison Liberation Project (December 2003)

Interlude: A field trip to Homeboy Industries

• “Compassion and Kinship” by Fr. Gregory Boyle for TED
• “Nurturing Hope at Homeboy Industries” by Jim Newton for the Los Angeles Times (April 23, 2012)
• “Homeboy Industries Overview 2009” by Homeboy Industries

The Voices of Buddhist Prisoners (I)

• Razor-Wire Dharma: A Buddhist Life in Prison by Calvin Malone

The Voices of Buddhist Prisoners (II)

• This Bird Has My Wings: The Autobiography of an Innocent Man on Death Row by Jarvis Jay Masters
• “Death Row Practice: Walking the Last Mile” by Kobutsu Malone for the Engaged Zen Foundation

The Voices of Buddhist Prisoners (III)

• Dharma in Hell: The Prison Writings of Fleet Maull by Fleet Maull

The Voices of Buddhist Prisoners (IV)

• The Dhamma Brothers (2007), dir. Jenny Phillips

Buddhist Approaches to Healing and Restorative Justice

• Path of Freedom (2012), dir. Emmanuel Vaughn-Lee (short film)
• “The Farm: Celebrating the Prison Hospice Volunteers at Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary” by Fleet Maull for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review’s official blog (September 14, 2010)
• “Discovering Ethics: A Path to Virtue – A Study Guide for Inmates (For Use with the book Ethics for the New Millenium by His Holiness the Dalai Lama” developed by the Radiant Heart Sangha of Incarcerated Buddhists
• “Buddha Would Probably Like Restorative Justice” by Loreen Walker for Shambhala Sun Space (March 21, 2013)
• “How to Reform a Serial Killer: The Buddhist Approach to Restorative Justice” by David R. Loy for the Journal of Buddhist Ethics, No. 7 (2000)

What’s Happening in California, and What We Can Do (I)

• “The Effect of Immigration Detainers in a Post-Realignment California” by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice (August 6, 2013)
• “The Budget for Humanity: Addressing California’s Prison and Budget Crises” by Californians United for a Responsible Budget (Second Edition, April 2012)
• “California’s Great Prison Experiment” by Tim Stelloh for The Nation (June 24-July 1, 2013)
• “California’s Continuing Prison Crisis” by the editorial board of the New York Times (August 10, 2013)
• “Inside California’s Color-Coded, Race-Based Prisons” by Christie Thompson for Mother Jones (April 12, 2013)
• “Reviewers Critical of Salinas Prison for Deaths, Drug Diversions” by Paige St. John for the Los Angeles Times (August 23, 2013 )

What’s Happening in California, and What We Can Do (II)

• “What You Need to Know about California’s Prison Hunger Strike” by Sarah Hashim-Waris for the Los Angeles Times (July 12, 2013)
• “California Inmate in Prison Hunger Strike: ‘Each Minute Has Been Torturous’” by Rory Carroll for The Guardian (August 9, 2013)
• “Hunger Strike in California Prisons Escalate” by Jesse Strauss for Al Jazeera English (August 21, 2013)
• “Prison Hunger Strike: Medical Chief Says Order Allows Key Decisions” by Paige St. John for the Los Angeles Times (August 20, 2013)
• “Exclusive: As Judge OKs Force Feeding, California Prisoner on 47-Day Hunger Strike Speaks Out” by Amy Goodman for Democracy Now! (August 23, 2013)

Conclusions

• handouts / links to stories, reports, essays about more current prison issues

Addendum: Recommended Reading

• The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society by Norval Morris and David J. Rothman
• Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California by Ruth Wilson Gilmore
• Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison by Lorna A. Rhodes
• Down in the Chapel: Religious Life in an American Prison by Joshua Dubler
• Prison Religion: Faith-Based Reform and the Constitution by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan
• Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account Of The Death Penalty In The United States by Helen Prejean
• We’re All Doing Time: A Guide to Getting Free by Bo Lozoff
• Ministry to the Incarcerated by Henry G. Covert
• The Little Book of Restorative Justice by Howard Zehr
• Frontline episode “The New Asylums”
• Frontline episode “The Released”