Working with People in Prison

In early 1996, when I was editor of Mandala, the magazine of the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition, in Santa Cruz, California, I received a letter from a young Mexican-American, Arturo. He was incarcerated at Pelican Bay, a top-security prison in the north of the state, in his cell 23 h a day. He told me that he’d read a book by Lama Thubten Yeshe and that he was “moved by the teachings on compassion” and wanted to know more about Buddhism. …