They say you can’t find atheists in fox-holes. You find even fewer in jail. A soldier can try to leave the battle-field; inmates have no such option. It’s a cliche and hardly admirable, but jail often cultivates “belief” in a power greater than one’s own.

Avoiding prayers to Jesus and other expressions of piety on the prison bus to Niantic, Connecticut, one snowy Friday night in December 2007 seemed neatly impossible. I was riding with twenty other women, whose heads all seemed bowed in prayer. They had traveled this way before and had the routine down pat. But it was my first trip, and my eyes and thoughts were focused elsewhere. I had just been convicted of identity theft and illegal use of a credit card, and was being shipped to York Correctional Institution. So 1 was searching for whatever reasonable options were left to me to get out of this mess.

God is not supposed to be the last resort, I reasoned. You shouldn’t summon his power only after you’ve landed in prison. I had never been a friend to God, and it’s wrong to treat him like a waiter, hovering there until you need your glass refilled. So praying for deliverance on the way to jail would have made me feel inauthentic; 1 would have been a user, not a believer.

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By: Chandra Bozelko

‘I was trying to convey to them there’s a way to be free, in a sense, even in prison’

-Kevin Brien, Washington College philosophy professor

Inmates at the Jessup Correctional Institution attend a class on ethics in art history, taught by Donald McColl of Washington College. Thirty-two inmates, the majority serving life sentences, were involved in the program, the idea of a Washington College student.

College student’s philosophy program brings Plato and Buddha to a Md. prison

College student\’s philosophy program brings Plato and Buddha to Jessup prison

When former pharmaceutical executive Andrew G. Bodnar pleaded guilty to white-collar crime in 2009, the judge didn’t throw the book at him—he ordered him to write one.

Reflect upon “the criminal behavior in this case so that others similarly situated may be guided in avoiding such behavior,” said the judgment from U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina in Washington. And make it 75,000 words.

The finished book, written during Dr. Bodnar’s two-year probation, has been submitted into the court record. His lawyer—who says he had never heard of such a punishment for a crime—says the former Bristol-Myers Squibb executive has now completed his sentence, in a case in which he was accused of providing false information to regulators. The charge stemmed from negotiations with a generic drug company seeking to copy Bristol’s blockbuster blood thinner, Plavix.

Dr. Bodnar, 64 years old, didn’t serve any jail time. He was ordered to pay a $5,000 fine and serve two years of unsupervised probation, with a “special condition” that he write the book.

Upon reflection, the former Harvard English major isn’t so sure his experience could serve as a cautionary tale for others.

“This hell is so particular, that no judge’s order could ever generalize it,” writes Dr. Bodnar in his tome.

Setting out to tell his tale, he contemplated the literary works of several greats. In a prologue he writes that he considered “Call me a Schlemiel.” Or, “It was the worst of times,” as opening lines.

In the book, Dr. Bodnar describes reading Dickens’ “David Copperfield” as a child. At Harvard, he wrote his honors thesis on “The End of Life in Dickens.” Other literary influences, says his lawyer, include Dostoevski, Joseph Conrad and John Updike.

The sweeping 253-page manuscript details Dr. Bodnar’s life from his escape from his native Hungary after the Soviet invasion of 1956, to his dust up with law enforcement over Plavix’s patent.

The Justice Department had a “mistaken belief that I had made a statement to the government that I knew to be false,” wrote Dr. Bodnar, who declined to be interviewed for this article. He wrote that the Justice Department “was not averse to destroying an innocent life.”

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on the contents of Dr. Bodnar’s book, or to say whether prosecutors had read it.

The book includes colorful characters like “a tough U.S. Attorney” named Chris Christie, who questioned Dr. Bodnar in connection with the Plavix case. The exchange took place just a few years before Mr. Christie would rise to national political stardom as the governor of New Jersey. Dr. Bodnar describes undergoing “animated and intensive questioning” from Mr. Christie.

A spokesman for Mr. Christie said Dr. Bodnar’s description of their interaction was accurate.

The book is told in a series of third-person flashbacks to his immigrant success story—as an eight-year-old he hid in a hay cart and dashed across a bridge to escape Hungary to Austria—juxtaposed with a first-person, behind-the-scenes account of the Plavix case.

The manuscript was electronically entered into the court docket in October, making it available through the federal court system’s Public Access to Court Electronic Records.

Dr. Bodnar currently has no plans to find a publisher, according to his lawyer.

It isn’t uncommon for judges to mete out unconventional sentences.

Since the 1990s, a municipal judge in Fort Lupton, Colo., has sounded off on teenagers accused of blasting too-loud music. His prescription calls for them to listen to the ballads of crooners like Barry Manilow.

Still, compelled authorship strikes some legal experts as highly unusual. “I’ve never seen anyone be ordered as a condition of probation to write a book,” says Brien O’Connor, a former federal prosecutor who is now a white-collar criminal defense attorney. Mr. O’Connor, who isn’t involved in Dr. Bodnar’s case, sees an element of “public shaming” to the sentence.

Judge Urbina declined to comment.

Plavix, used to ward off heart attacks and strokes in people with cardiovascular disease, is one of the best-selling drugs in history. The drug’s $6.8 billion in U.S. sales last year, as tallied by IMS Health, ranked second behind Pfizer Inc.’s Lipitor cholesterol pill. But Plavix will lose U.S. patent protection on May 17, which will trigger competition from generic drug makers.

Dr. Bodnar’s story hearkens to a time when Plavix’s success was in peril.

Another drug maker, Apotex, wanted to sell a generic copy of Plavix years before the patent was to expire. Dr. Bodnar, then a senior vice president at Bristol-Myers, helped negotiate a proposed agreement of patent litigation in 2006.

But the deal required antitrust clearance from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and state regulators. That is when Dr. Bodnar entered a new chapter of his life.

Dr. Bodnar signed a certification verifying with the FTC certain aspects of the proposed settlement. Later the Justice Department alleged Dr. Bodnar had made oral representations to an Apotex executive that weren’t spelled out in the written agreement—contradicting the signed certification.

In the book, Dr. Bodnar writes that he learned during a business trip in July 2006 that FBI agents were raiding his office at Bristol-Myers’s Park Avenue headquarters.

“Chaos reigns but, as I will soon learn, this is as nothing compared to the vacuum that is about to suck the air from my every breath for years to come,” Dr. Bodnar writes of that day.

A Bristol-Myers spokeswoman declined to comment on the contents of Dr. Bodnar’s book. An Apotex spokesman also declined to comment.

The proposed Plavix patent settlement fell apart. Dr. Bodnar left Bristol-Myers in 2007, shortly before the company pleaded guilty to providing false statements to the government and paid a $1 million fine.

In 2009, Dr. Bodnar pleaded guilty to providing a false certificate to the government.

Dr. Bodnar reiterates in his book that he believed the certification to be true at the time he signed it.

The process of writing the book triggered “intensive introspection” for Dr. Bodnar, says his lawyer Elkan Abramowitz.

Indeed, the last line of the book flirts with destiny: “I have my brief ready for submission to my next judge.”

By: Peter Loftus

Antron McCray climbed on stage in a Manhattan theater one night last week and stepped into the kind of spotlight that, until now, has almost always meant trouble for him.

Exiled from New York, his hometown, Mr. McCray was last seen in public two decades ago as a skinny 16-year-old, practically drowning in a suit that he wore to the Manhattan courthouse where he was tried on charges that he was part of a mob that raped a jogger in Central Park and beat her nearly to death in April 1989. In the television news footage, he often held his mother’s hand as he walked past screaming demonstrators.

With four other Harlem boys, all of whom refused plea bargains, he was convicted of attacking the jogger and sent to prison. More than a decade later, the convictions of all five were overturned. Another man — a serial rapist and killer who was unknown to any of the five — had convincingly implicated himself as the sole attacker of the jogger. DNA evidence backed his story.

This Friday, “The Central Park Five,” a documentary film on the case by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon, opens in three Manhattan theaters.

Alone of the five, Mr. McCray declined to be interviewed on camera for the film, unwilling to lift the veil. Instead, his recorded voice is heard. As soon as he could after prison, Mr. McCray moved to the South. He works as a forklift operator, is a father, pays his taxes.

He stepped back into the public eye last Thursday for a screening of the film at the closing night of the Doc NYC festival.

The audience that had just seen him as a boy — in a baseball uniform, in a police precinct station house being interrogated, in the too-big suit going to court — and had listened to his voice throughout the film could now see him as a man. At 39, his shoulders were broader, and his waist a bit thicker.

There was something he wanted to tell the audience about his anonymity.

“Here’s the reason why I escaped New York: I just had to get away,” Mr. McCray said. “Start a new life.”

That logic took him to a shocking place.

“Actually, uh,” he said, “I don’t even go by Antron McCray no more.”

Saying that out loud seemed to take even Mr. McCray by surprise, a sudden tolling of what he lost. Words thickened in his mouth. On either side of him, two of the other men, Kevin Richardson and Yusef Salaam, squeezed his shoulders and patted his back.

The film lays out the intricacies of the case, the sights and sounds of a brittle era; it will be full of revelations for those who never knew about the crime and how its life-bending effects were multiplied as the wrong people were prosecuted while the right man continued to maim, murder and rape on the Upper East Side.

The filmmakers follow the story far beyond the procedural failures identified by journalists interviewed in the film, including me. Kharey Wise, by far the scrawniest of the group, happened to be the only one old enough to spend all his time in adult jail and prison. Raymond Santana said he cursed God and lost his faith.

With Mr. McCray, they tunnel into Shakespearean territory.

“I thought he was like a superhero,” Mr. McCray said of his father, Bobby. “He coached all of my Little League teams. He was a great teacher.”

By the time of the trial, though, the man Mr. McCray had idolized had abandoned him and his mother.

“I couldn’t understand,” he said. “And I just, I hated him after that. Me and my mother started going to court by ourself. Demonstrators, you know people just shouting, you know, ‘Rapist!’ ‘You animal!’ ‘You don’t deserve to be alive.’ It just felt like the whole world hated us.”

His parents reconciled, but when Mr. McCray came home from prison, he would not accept his father’s apologies, even as his father grew ill and died.

“Seeing him laying there, it just hit me. You know, he used to be my best friend.”

Offstage last week Mr. McCray said: “I wish I had forgiven him. Me being older, and me being a father.”

He told the audience it had taken him a long time to decide to give the filmmakers a chance.

“Like Ray said in the film, I lost my religion, I don’t believe in anything, I’m by myself,” Mr. McCray said. “But tonight — I think that might change.”

He wiped his face, then smiled.

“I may be 39,” he said, “but I’m still kind of shy.”

Most Americans forty or older will recall the 1989 case of the young woman brutalized by a rampaging mob of teenagers while jogging in Central Park. Coming amid soaring crime rates, the attack spawned a scary neologism, “wilding,” and mass public revulsion that took on a racial tinge when five black and Hispanic teenagers quickly confessed. I recall the news images of teenaged males being hustled out of police stations, heads down; like nearly everyone else, I shook my head at how depraved they were, and how guilty.

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A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.

That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded. “Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards,” Dylan sings, and while it isn’t strictly true—just ask the prisoners—it contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too. As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.

For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

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By: Adam Gopnik

Get to know the man behind the collar in this special edition episode!

Walter Ciszek, SJ: A Jesuit On The Frontiers

Books, videos and more information can be found below!

Father Walter Ciszek Prayer League

Surrender is the true story of the vocation of an American Jesuit priest, accused by the Soviet era K.G.B. of being a Vatican spy, who survived fifteen years of hard labor in Siberian prison camps. Father Walter Ciszek not only survived but learned to surrender to God’s Providence.

Surrender is a narrative digest book based entirely on Father Ciszek’s two books: With God in Russia, (1964), published one year after his release from Russia, and his second book, He Leadeth Me, (1973), published nine years later. Surrender interweaves these two books and telescopes the most dramatic events of Father Ciszek’s vocation and steadfast fidelity to that calling through the crucible of unjust imprisonment following the end of World War II.

The profound insights of Father Ciszek’s second book illuminate the grim facts of his first book. Surrender attempts to highlight the evolution of spiritual wisdom in He Leadeth Me, embedded in the harsh events depicted in With God in Russia. Hopefully, through the relative brevity of Surrender, the major chords of Father Ciszek’s heroic embrace of God’s Providence in the most extreme conditions will resonate. The reason why Father Ciszek’s cause for Canonization, the process of declaration of Sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church, is currently proceeding should be abundantly evident.

Surrender describes not the triumph of human will-power but the freedom of total dependence on God. The paradox of power to love is only born in the powerlessness of surrender of self-will to God’s Providence.

Written by: Seamus Dockery

In the New Yorker, author Adam Gopnick discusses the prison epidemic that exists in America today and goes into detail about how this epidemic should and how it can be stopped,which would result in beneficial outcomes for America and the goevrnment in reducing crime. According to Gopnick, he says that during the 60s and 70s, many believed that imprisonment was the best answer to reducing crime on the streets. Resulting in jailing numerous people for smaller offenses like drug related crimes and ponzi schemes. This idea proved not to be effective and has lingering effects today, costing the country millions of dollars and has left America with the highest incarceration rate in the world with nothing to show for it.

Gopnick says that rather trying to curb crime through incarceration and changing social patholgies, it must be done through “erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.” This is not the cure, however, but this “intercession of thousand of smaller sancties” who reduce both the rate of imprisonment and the plague of crime.  

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik?currentPage=all

Stephanie George, sentenced to life in prison for possession of half a kilo of cocaine, is interviewed in an article written by John Tierney that questions what drug crimes should deserve prison time, as incarercation rates are increasing with no affect on the crime rate. 

“Over the past three decades of stricter drug laws, reduced parole and rigid sentencing rules have lengthened prison terms and more than tripled the percentage of Americans behind bars.” This state spending on corrections and prisoners is cutting into other important state budgets such as higher education. What are state officials doing to decrease crime but also reduce the incarceration rate? Tierney goes into depth about what state officials are working on to correct this problem.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/12/science/mandatory-prison-sentences-face-growing-skepticism.html?pagewanted=all