THE FREEDOM TRUTH PROVIDES

EVERY so often, I get mail from brothers in prison. Sometimes I think about
what it would be like to be in prison.

(Oh, I've been in jail once for driving with a suspended license. But that's
not prison.)

The great Russian novelist Feodor Dostoyevsky (perhaps the greatest Russian
novelist) said that you can judge how civilized a society is by the way it
treats its prisoners.

We don't treat our prisoners very well in this potentially great nation of
ours, which is a good thing to those brothers and sisters who don't see
anything wrong with the insane Three Strikes law that states like California
have in place.

Last week, Supreme Court justices rejected the appeal of brother Michael
Riggs, sentenced to 25 years to life for stealing a bottle of vitamins from
a grocery store. He previously had been convicted eight times for four
nonviolent crimes and four robberies.

A California court called the crime "a petty theft motivated by homelessness
and hunger." But no matter. The Supreme Court rejected the appeal on the
procedural grounds, arguing that the case should be dealt with by the lower
courts.

God help us.

Prisons should be two things: a place where violent offenders of the law are
forced to live for a period of time (maybe for the rest of their life). This
is necessary in order to protect nonviolent citizens, increasing community
peace.

Prisons should also be a place where inmates are encouraged to own up to the
crime -- how it has affected the victim, the community and the perpetrator.
In other words, prisons ought to be a place where inmates can repair their
broken spirits.

Jesus, who had a few run-ins with the law, says it is God's will for us to
"visit" those in prison. Check out Matthew 25.

The Greek word used in Matthew is episkeptomai. It means "to look upon with
mercy; to look after, take care of," according to my Bible's lexicon.

Most Christians, of course, don't do this, which is why our prisons are
becoming slave labor camps that are occasionally visited by evangelists
looking to "win souls for Christ."

This column isn't a literal prison visit, but it is dedicated to all of my
brothers doing time. What follows is some food for thought that might help
some inmate stay sane and hold onto a little hope.

Incidentally, these intellectual tidbits may be of some use to those of us
incarcerated in our self-made spiritual cells. ...

Traditional African societies have a completely different concept of time
than we do in Western civilization. People in those societies are not
servants of time as we are.

For example, Brother A asks Brother B to meet him at sunrise. What is
important is the event; not the hour. So Brother A goes to the meeting spot
at 5 a.m. The sun rises at 5:45 a.m. and Brother B doesn't show up until
6:15 a.m.

Well, to Western eyes it looks like Brother A is wasting time. He's not,
according to the traditional African concept of time. Brother A is ahead of
time waiting for time to happen. They control time. Of course, it's not a
very efficient way of organizing society from an economic standpoint, but
imagine life with no "rat-race."

Another morsel: Think about eating. We put external pieces of reality into
our bodies and incorporate them into our very flesh and blood. "It is a
remarkable fact that we turn parts of external reality into our own
substance. We are least separate from the world in eating," Harvard
philosopher Robert Nozick reflects in his illuminating book "The Examined
Life."

Let me quote brother Nozick again. He's an eloquent thinker. "Breathing,
like eating, is a direct connection with the external world. ... Perceiving
one's physical being as a bellows, breathing the air in and out, enlarging
and contracting in reciprocal relation to the outside space, being a
container of space within a larger space, sometimes unable to distinguish
between the held-in breath and the held-out breath until you see what
happens next -- all this makes one feel less enclosed within distinct
boundaries as a separate entity.

'BREATHING the world, even sometimes feeling one is being breathed by it,
can be a profound experience of nonseparation from the rest of existence,"
Nozick says.

And if you have access to a library, check out Dr. Viktor Frankl's work
"Man's Search for Meaning" or "The Doctor and the Soul." The brother is
deep.

Of course, Scripture is an infinite source of insight and inspiration.

Genesis 1 says: "In the beginning God created ... " The Hebrew word for
"created" is bara, which means to create something out of nothing. So that
means, God can make a somebody out of nobody (like me).

If this helps, I'm happy. If not, toss this column out. Stay up. And like
Chuck D said: Brotha's gonna work it out!