The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. In the beginning of 2004, the Bureau of Justice Statistics announced that there were almost 1.5 million people being held in state and federal prisons in the United States; others estimate that the total is now over two million. This means approximately 0.7 percent of the US population is incarcerated, compared to 0.117 percent of all Chinese. And just for the record, when our president, George W. Bush, was Governor of Texas, the rate of incarceration for that state was one percent of the population. Perhaps this is where we are headed. If so, it pays to be a Christian, for whom the Bush-backed  faith-based  programs are growing. Prison Fellowship Ministries, for instance, founded in 1976 by Charles Colson (who served prison time as part of the Nixon Watergate team), is gathering force. Their program, while certainly healing for many people, promises pizza, hugs, job training, and, best of all, salvation to those inmates willing to take Jesus into their hearts, or at least to say that they have. For everybody else in the prison population there is the fight for time, space, and recognition of the need to practice other religions.

In the 1980s an inmate at Green Haven in Stormville wrote to John Daido Loori, Abbot of Zen Mountain Monastery in Mt. Tremper. He asked Loori to grant him the outside sponsorship required to have a religion recognized in New York prisons. Several years and a court case later, Zen Buddhism was recognized by the State of New York as an official religion to be allowed in the prisons. This initial battle has blossomed into what is now called the National Buddhist Prison Sangha (NBPS), run by Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, a Zen teacher and Head of Operations at Zen Mountain Monastery.

NBPS is a national network of inmates who are interested in the teachings of Zen. NBPS has developed a series of training manuals which explain the basic teachings of Zen, instructions of zazen (meditation), liturgy, and how to work with the moral and ethical teachings of Buddhism, all directed toward those practicing in prison. Volunteers also make regular visits to local prisons for zazen, Buddhist holidays, and retreats.

Every week, approximately 20 letters are received by the monastery from NBPS inmates totalling over 1,000 a year. Each is answered individually either by Arnold himself or by students at the monastery who have been trained to do that work. The letters range from a barely legible, "Please help me. I am indigent,"  to long, detailed, and insightful descriptions of life in prison, life before prison, and what it is like to try to practice the stillness of Zen meditation in the midst of some of the most violent communities on earth.

The purpose of the correspondence is to help inmates develop a strong sitting practice, and to do what has been done for thousands of years, eye to eye, teacher to student: help people see the nature of their own minds, the ways they create their own suffering, and the way out of that suffering. These Zen students do not have the luxury of working with a teacher face to face, so the letters, often filled with desperate questions like, "Could I just be evil? And at the core unsalvageable?" are responded to with an image of the writer in mind, as though he or she were sitting in the room. And the fact that many of these writers have committed truly violent crimes makes this an additionally challenging practice, not just for the Zen students sitting in their cells, but also for those writing back who are living in a much different community, trying to identify with a very unfamiliar set of problems.

When asked to describe the letters' themes, Arnold mentions "the big three: past, present, and future." The idea of karma is at the core of the Buddhist teachings: "What you do and what happens to you are the same thing," as Daido Loori sums it up. This is a tough pill for anyone to swallow and truly digest. But for offenders wishing to turn their lives around, this idea is more urgent than it might be for many of us. Inmates need answers to questions like: "Why am I in this place, and why are other people?"  One particular inmate who asked that question went on to consider the future that would follow his release, and asked another question that most of us would not consider:  "How can I leave this place, with the knowledge that people are still here suffering?"

While the differences for those practicing Zen in and out of prison are obvious, the similarities are striking as well. In fact, Arnold says,  "their limits are the limits of anybody." Seeing the mind is often described as the most difficult thing a human being can ever do, and zazen as the great equalizer. Buddhism, and particularly Zen, is still only practiced by a handful of people both in and out of prisons, because, Arnold says, unlike the promises offered by some forms of Christianity, "Zen doesn't save you. The teachings are fundamentally difficult, and you have to work at it."

New York State houses over 70,000 inmates. It leads the country in the use of harsh solitary confinement, and still punishes (some say tortures) inmates with a restricted "loaf" diet consisting of bread served in a bag, raw cabbage, and water—tactics which most lawmakers see as simply being  tough on crime. Furthermore, many upstate Republican districts have been drawn to include prison populations as constituents, even though the census used for that purpose is supposed to count people in their residences, not in their cells. This means that the largely urban-based and Democrat inmates are being used for the purposes of Republican representation, but cannot vote. There is much more to the prison complex than meets the eye.

But in the face of this sad, overwhelming, and complicated situation, the National Buddhist Prison Sangha is part of a longstanding tradition of religious organizations hearing the call to work with inmates and to advocate for prison reform. They may not be able to change the political problems overnight, and as Arnold admits, "Our work has been the individual."  But in bringing an ancient tradition to those caught in a contemporary nightmare, they are, person after person, breath by breath, transforming the world.