A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden

"One of the ironies about prison literature is that the most ubiquitous prison books are often written by the sorts of people you wouldn’t usually find on the landing. Most people in prison are from the working class and the underclass. Many have a limited ability to write and don’t have the social capital that you often need to publish a book. So we read about the experiences of intellectuals in prison like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Nawal El Saadawi , or from upper-class people like Jeffrey Archer , but very rarely get books from people who are inside for shoplifting, drugs, or killing someone whilst they were drunk driving, etc. Yes, there is a genre. Absolutely. Erwin James’s Redeemable and John Healy’s The Grass Arena are other examples. I love these books, but perhaps one thing to note is that they are so often redemption stories. They’re about people who came out the other side and who have, through art or chess or becoming a prison reformist, found salvation. But the book I’ve chosen is more a kind of de -habilitation story. It’s by Stephen Reid and it’s called A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden . Reid was a serial bank robber. He was known as ‘the stopwatch bank robber’, because he always wore a stopwatch around his neck whilst he was robbing a bank. He believed in getting the job done within two minutes. He was asked how it was that he was so efficient and would reply, ‘robbing a bank is not rocket science.’ When he’s in prison, he starts writing. He meets a creative writing teacher who is a famous novelist, gets out, marries her, has some beautiful kids and a stable home. Thirteen years after his release, he’s living life as a publicly redeemed figure and he’s written critically acclaimed novels. Then, he robs a bank, only this time he’s off his game and he’s there for over four minutes. It ends up in a shoot-out and Reid shoots at a police officer and a civilian. He finds himself going back to prison and that’s when he wrote this book. He robbed the bank during a relapse into heroin and coke. Later in the book, Reid tells us about how when he was 11 years old, an older man who was a doctor invited him into his car, injected him with morphine and sexually abused him whilst he was high. Reid spent the next four decades chasing after that high, whilst also trying to run away from that trauma. He did some crazy things in that turmoil. He says he wishes he could give a meat cleaver to a metaphysical butcher who would just cut out the 5% of him that was violent and dangerous and leave him with the sane, caring, good-natured parts of himself. Instead, he must sit in prison, a man unredeemed and “all out of illusions.” Boethius tells us that remembering reason can console us, but it’s Reid’s irrationality that makes me open my heart to him. Many people who keep coming back to prison have similar stories of self-destruction. When my brother was in his late 20s, he was in the throes of a drug addiction. When he took heroin it subtracted all the fear from his body. But when it wore off, the fear had multiplied. He had some very debilitating OCD habits: washing his hands, opening and closing doors three times, when he changed the volume on the TV he had to go up and down according to particular patterns. One night he was robbing a sixth form college, and he was upstairs with a mate getting all the DVD players that they were going to take to a pawn shop. When he came downstairs, there were two police officers waiting for him. He dropped the DVD players and legged it through the corridor, pushed open the fire escape and ran outside. A few seconds later, he realized he hadn’t opened and shut the door three times. He turned back and, as he got to the door, the police officers pushed him to the ground and arrested him. ‘For fuck’s sake!’ my brother said. “There’s a phrase I’ve heard on the landing of almost every prison I’ve worked in: ‘Keep your head in jail’” In prison, I see a lot of people frustrated with themselves like Reid and my brother were. In my classroom, we talk about Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a mountain and watch it roll down to the bottom and push it back up again and watch it roll back down and so on into eternity. A lot of prisoners relate it to themselves, how they get out of prison, resolved that they are never coming back, but then do something impulsive, irrational and self-destructive and are back inside again a few months later. I had one student recently who has been re-convicted after only being out for two weeks. Like Reid, he’s a very self-aware and smart person. When he came back, I saw him on the landing and nodded at him. He looked down at his feet, embarrassed. But I felt humbled by him. He’s lived through so much of our human frailty and fallibility. Reid isn’t trying to sell us anything. He’s way past spiels about rebellion, redemption and pity. Camus says we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Reid doesn’t ask us to imagine that he’s either happy or miserable. In his case, what doesn’t kill you makes you stranger. He’s in Vancouver Island prison—which is unfenced on the side that faces the sea—and Reid describes combing the beach and looking for little objects that have washed up, like chip packets, a baby’s car seat, a broken piece of plywood with the words FORBIDDEN ZONE written on it, and making stories out of how they got there and who they belonged too. He finds a small pink vibrator which he takes pride in cleaning up, sourcing a battery for from another prisoner and making it work again. That probably wasn’t the sort of ablutions the judge had in mind for him when they sent him to a correctional facility. I’ve always agreed with Jean-Paul Sartre when he said that Stoicism keeps both master and slave in their places. But when I started teaching in prison, I met a man who loved Epictetus and tried to live by his ideals. He said to me, ‘I’m in prison but I’m free in my mind. People on the outside are not free in their mind. I’m more free than they are.’ That didn’t change my position that Stoicism keeps the oppressed oppressed. But it did give me more admiration for the focus that Stoics have. I think some people in prison put a lot of faith in personal agency. Once, I was talking to them about Gregg Caruso’s free will scepticism and his idea that we should see crime as a public health issue rather than looking at it with the lens of moral responsibility. A lot of them reacted by saying ‘No, I’ve put myself in prison, I can get myself out.’ To me, the evidence suggests that we are unlikely to have free will. If we do, it is only in rare moments of herculean strength or at times when our environmental conditions are on our side. But, like you, my concerns with free will scepticism is what it would do to our motivation and view of the world if we really took it into our ethics. What would we gain and what would we lose? In prison, I see people who embody that Stoic detachment. It’s impressive and maybe even optimal in that setting, but I suspect that self-tyranny comes with a cost. But I think that’s what’s so compromising about being in prison—the things you use to protect yourself damage you in their own way."