Most of us have changed with the times, often in increments too slow to recognize until something brings us face-to-face with something we once believed or accepted and now no longer do. We as a society seem unequipped to recognize transformations, just as we lack formal processes - other than monetary settlements - for those who have harmed others to make reparations as part of their repentance or transformation. It’s not just prisons and the criminal justice system. To this day, it seems poorly equipped to recognize when those transformations have taken place, unless it’s in a parole hearing, and people sentenced to death don’t get that. Prisons have long used language such as “correctional,” “reformatory” and “penitentiary” that suggest they are committed to changing their inmates, but in the tough-on-crime era, the prison system focused on punishment rather than reform. (After his incarceration for armed robbery, he was convicted of conspiring to kill a prison guard and sharpening a weapon that others used to murder him in 1985.) In the years since his metamorphosis, he has often defused potential violence and offered solace and a trustworthy ear to the sorrows of those around him, both guards and fellow inmates.īut the legal system shows little interest in the strong case for his innocence on the charges and seems to see him as only the surly young Black man it locked up all those years ago. Masters has been in San Quentin for 41 years, most of that time on death row for a crime I and many others believe, based on careful review of the case, that he did not commit. He became a devoted meditator, then a renowned Tibetan Buddhist practitioner and peacemaker. He embraced what she offered, and it changed him.

Melody Ermachild Chavis, an investigator working on his case, was making her own first forays into Buddhist practice. My friend Jarvis Masters entered San Quentin prison in 1981 as an angry teenager guilty of numerous counts of armed robbery, and then, with help from a friend on the outside, a new set of ideas and values came his way.

Rebeccas solnit