FREEDOM BEHIND BARS

Michael Ryan

(Excerpted from Anthology 2021: The St. Joseph’s Orphanage Restorative Inquiry Writers’ Group)

As a young adult, I had problems with authority figures. The orphanage staff had raised me to have no other choice. You had four kinds of staff. Some were there for a paycheck only and had no care for children or for their concerns.You had some who were very cop-like and authoritative. There were some who treated children as if they were toys. They were joyful and they laughed a lot, but this was always at the expense of a child. They would incite the children to bully one another. Finally, there were the young adults who had gone through college with plans to go into social work. They believed they had good places in their hearts for children. Fresh out of school, they had lots of ideas on how children should be raised. But those theories worked on paper and not in person.

After my orphanage experiences, I traded one form of institutionalization for another by joining the navy. I enjoyed the work and the traveling but, ultimately, because of the way I’d been raised, I was not a good candidate for military service. After three and a half years I was discharged for swearing at a superior officer. I received an-other-than honorable discharge. This was just a foretelling of what was to come.

When I got out of the navy, I began using marijuana to self-medicate, and to support this addiction I started to deal. For about a year, I was making a living; I was under the radar. Then a customer gave me the runaround over a thirty-dollar bag of pot; he kept saying he’d pay me. This went on for about a month. I finally managed to track him down. It was at that moment that my life changed. (2 mins)

“Henry” was waiting for me as I sat down to order. While we were eating, I asked him what was up about the money he owed to me. He told me he had no intention of paying and there was nothing I could do about it. I instantly felt a raw heat and picked up my steak knife. I stabbed him in the side of the neck.

He went into shock, ran out into the parking lot and collapsed. I went into instant disbelief. I hadn’t known I was

going to do it until I’d already done it. I waited, in shock myself, in the parking lot until the police arrived. They placed me in the back of the squad car. This was routine for them, just another day at the office. That night was the first night among many I would spend behind bars.

I was initially charged with attempted second-degree murder,then was offered a plea deal of aggravated assault. I took the deal. I was to serve four to ten years, with the four only if I stayed out of trouble and completed drug rehabilitation and anger management classes. Needless to say, I did not stay out of trouble or even start my mandatory programs. I even held the record, for a short time, for days spent in “the hole.”

I was of course denied parole after four years.

Being in prison, there is not much to do. There was reading, which I took complete advantage of, classes of all sorts, most of which I found to be uninteresting. I played a lot of cards. Sports and weightlifting were also available, so I did a lot of training as well. In that time, I had to learn on my own how to deal with my own anger. Mostly I did this through avoidance, keeping myself out of any situations in which I would be

forced to be angry.

Five years into my sentence, I met a guard who was a practicing Buddhist. He was very self-possessed and quiet. He didn’t make an issue of things. He would just let you know what you needed to do, and you would listen. For him, his job was not a power or control type of situation. He would discuss different Buddhist writers with very eclectic teaching styles such as D. T. Suzuki, Walpola Rahula, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Ajahn Chah, who is a particular favorite of mine.

The thing that struck me about him was how he embodied the Buddhist concept of right livelihood. I thought that being a prison guard made this concept questionable, but he made it an honorable profession. This guard would talk to me about the four noble truths of Buddhism and help me understand them. These are: the

truth of suffering, the truth of the cause of suffering, the truth of the end of suffering, and the truth of the path that leads us out of suffering.

He also taught me the Noble Eightfold Path: 1) Right View (all actions have consequences), 2) Right Intention (the intent to follow the path of the Buddha), 3) Right Speech (no lying, no rude speech, no gossip), 4) Right Conduct (no killing or injuring, no taking what is not given), 5) Right Livelihood (no unwholesome jobs), 6) Right Effort (working on clearing the mind of negative thought), 7) Right Mindfulness (being mindful of the teachings, not being absent-minded), and 8) Right Concentration (in meditation and all things). I was intrigued; all of this got me thinking of how I wanted to live, which way I was headed, and if this was how I wanted to live my life: through a revolving prison door. I resolved to take drug rehabilitation and anger management classes

and completed them. After I had been out of trouble and compliant, I was moved to a minimum-security facility and spent my last year there.

I wish I could remember his name. I’m sorry I can’t. I guess I remembered the teachings though. He had a very stoic personality. He was a Marcus Aurelius kind of guy. He was very straightforward in everything he did. His kindness towards me was almost impersonal. You know how Buddhists are very neutral. He didn’t play favorites, yet he spent time with me when he could have ignored me. I do remember the moment it all became clear to me. I was walking back from the library and all of a sudden, a lightbulb flickered on in my head. That’s when it dawned on me that there had to be a better way than the road I had taken. I resolved then and there to turn my life around, and that’s what I did.