Ray Olson: 09-17-2014: Help! Help! I Gotta Get Out of Here: Upaya and the Correction System

Summary: Episode Description: Armed with thorough facts, close acquaintance and prisoners' own words, Upaya's Ray Olson paints a startling portrait of U.S. prisons, which are criminal themselves in so many respects. He also offers an exact list of remedies. He shares his chaplaincy strategies, his vital ways of framing Buddhist practice to illuminate its relevance to prisoners. He wonders, can everyone be rehabilitated -- in light of factors like mental illness, cultural poverty and unpreparedness, empathy-deficient brain structures, genes...? In closing he challenges and invites each of us to volunteer in prisons and so experience firsthand how prisoners are our neighbors, are us. Bio: Ray Olson is an internist by training, was a longtime Professor of Medicine at the University of North Texas Health Science Center. He has been a Zen student for over 30 years and received Jukai in 1989. He was ordained as a Novice Priest by Roshi Joan Halifax in 2009 and was made a Dharma Holder at Upaya Zen Center in 2010. Ray serves as coordinator of Upaya’s Prison Outreach Program, and in that capacity he corresponds with many inmates in prisons around the country, offering spiritual guidance to the incarcerated. He also makes weekly visits to inmates in the high security units of the local state penitentiary. Ray is long-married to Nancy; they have three grown children and four growing grandchildren.