After seeing the inside of 500 prisons, after hearing thousands of firsthand tales of downward-spiraling violence, Bo Lozoff has observed something about crime and punishment in this nation. It reminds him of milking of a cow.
A cow can be a frightening thing, seen up close. When Lozoff first tried to milk a cow, he was struck by how massive the brute was, and what large hooves it had available to express its displeasure.
His natural response was to sit as far away as possible from that threat. The farmer who owned the cow took one look at Lozoff, perched at arm’s length from the cow’s udder, then hauled off and socked Lozoff in the arm.
“How’d that feel?” the farmer asked. It hurt, Lozoff replied, or words to that effect.
The farmer then put his fist right up against Lozoff’s biceps and pushed.
“How’d that feel?” the farmer asked again. Not so bad, Lozoff admitted. Over time, he realized what the farmer was getting at.
“You’ve got to get right up close, press yourself into the cow’s flank when you are milking,” Lozoff explained this week. “That way, you can feel the twitch of its muscle before it kicks, and get out of the way. And even if you can’t get out of the way, it’s not going to hurt nearly so much.”
Lozoff’s tale is a pleasantly bucolic way of saying that Americans have spent much of this century trying to push criminals further and further away from society; without understanding why, we keep getting kicked harder and harder.
That is part of the message Lozoff will deliver Friday and Saturday at the Chicago Theological Seminary, where he is speaking at a conference called “From Prison to Community: The Interreligious Challenge.”
The conference, co-sponsored by the United Church of Christ seminary and the 6-year-old World Institute for Spirituality housed there, is to include nearly 100 social workers and pastors, who have paid $95 apiece to talk about one of organized religion’s least popular messages: compassion for prisoners.
Think about it. Of the Christian gospel’s admonitions to feed the hungry, care for the sick and visit those in prison, the last one gets the shortest shrift, especially at election time.
Lozoff says that similar messages of compassion can be found in all of the world’s major religions, and he has personal experience with most of them.
Born a Jew, Lozoff converted to Christianity as a teenager, discovered meditation as a young adult and has worked his way through most of the world’s faiths since then, arriving at what he calls “a Hindu practice too esoteric to bother explaining.” More important, he says, is what organized religions have in common.
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“All religions are about our depth, the depth of life,” he explained. Evil is, in large part, a failure to recognize or honor that depth, he came to believe, so in 1975 he formed the Prison-Ashram Project.
An Ashram, in Sanskrit, is a place people go to live simply and concentrate on their inner lives. His idea was to help prisoners make use of their time behind bars to develop a deeper understanding of life and spirituality, whatever kind of faith they might follow.
As he visited prisoners over the last quarter-century, Lozoff became convinced that society’s failure to recognize that deeper meaning to life has much to do with its failure to address violent crime.
Conservatives, he said, want to ignore criminals’ humanity altogether and wreak vengeance. Liberals, he said, hope that a little job training will make the problem go away.
As you might have guessed from his background, Lozoff leans closer to the liberal side. He believes that rehabilitation, combined with spiritual development and a dose of compassion, is the best answer for all but the most dangerous criminals now behind bars.
But in many ways, the core of his message is shared by many conservatives. Sociologist John Dilulio Jr., whose get-tough approach to crime made him a favorite on Capitol Hill, often calls for more, tighter prisons. Over the long term, however, he has written that the structure and morality of organized religion provide the best hope for stemming violent crime.
What those two and thousands of other people who know the prison system agree on is that we can’t build enough prisons to make all the bad guys go away. And if we can’t push them out of society, we had better find a way of making them fit in.
It is a message that dovetails with those uncomfortable passages in various religious scriptures that call upon people to show compassion in the face of evil. Compassion doesn’t mean ignoring the evil, Lozoff argues; it means summoning the courage to face it and grapple with it.
“You’ve got to take more risks in the beginning, it’s true,” he said, “but you’ve got to get closer.”
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