Free A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden by Stephen Reid Page A

weekly visits to the prison, I hold her on my lap, and those wide brown eyes fix onto mine. Sophie needs to see me rise up again, return to her life. Though we are connected in unbreakable ways, I worry about her memories of a drug-addicted dad.
    So I pace, seven steps one way, seven steps back. And I write. The days pass. I sit on my concrete pad, cross my legs and begin to breathe. The darkness of my world melts away, and as I move towards the mystery I can almost hear those faint golden bells. Slowly I enter the heart of unknowing, without expectation, without heroin.

L EAVING T HEIR M ARK
    T HERE IS A SCENE IN Men in Prison where Victor Serge stares at an ostensibly blank wall, which, upon closer inspection, reveals a labyrinth of scrawls, etched there by generations of prisoners.
    Victor Serge’s wall is in a French prison, more than half a century ago, but if you walked into the Victoria city lock-up today, where no writing instruments are permitted, the first thing to strike you would be the amount of writing scratched on the walls, into the tabletops, and scorched onto the ceilings.
    There are odes to drugs, verses and curses, and scatological limericks aplenty. But, mostly there’s just a name, a date, and sometimes the sad reason:
    ANGEL — DEUCE LESS — B&E — APRIL/98 — FTW
    So perfectly minimalist is this story that Raymond Carver himself could have adopted the form if he’d thought his readers might understand the language of jailhouse graffiti. The story tells us Angel is young because he’s been sentenced to a reformatory term, and that he’s a repeater, because the judge gave him the maximum two years less a day for break and enter. It’s easy to imagine the rest, a young man lying on his bunk, freshly sentenced and awaiting transfer, trying to make sense of where he is, where he is going, and scratching words on the wall until it becomes real for him. Then, in an angry afterthought, adding the acronym. Fuck the World .
    Like Angel, prisoners everywhere have felt the need to leave to leave their mark. In Kingston Penitentiary a novel was written in berry juice, in the Russian gulags journals were routinely inscribed on cigarette papers, and the poems of war prisoners have been found carved in bars of soap. Lady Jane Grey, awaiting execution in the Tower of London, supposedly pricked tiny holes in a piece of paper to form the words to a poem.
    These voices come out of the dungeons and the labour camps and the penal colonies. This is writing from an experience, not about it.

C RIME AND P UNISHMENT ( 2000 )
    T HE SORRY STATE OF PRISON LITERATURE in North America is almost criminal. There has been scarce good writing, let alone any great writing leaping over the walls.
    In other times Solzhenitsyn was locked up by Stalin as Dostoevsky had been by the Czar; Hitler imprisoned Victor Frankel, amongst others. A communist regime placed Václav Havel in a cell and, on another continent, military juntas jailed and tortured Jacobo Timmerman.
    What’s wrong with this country? We fill our jails with junkies but have yet to produce one Genet. Maybe it’s time for a good old-fashioned purge of the intellectual class: the political climate seems to be ripening. Put a few writers down for a hard time. How would a sequel to Alias Grace read after Peggy did a stint in the Kingston Pen? Deprive Mordecai of his Bordeaux and bottle him up in the real Bordeaux, a two-acre jail in Quebec where the Anglais are literally an endangered species. Or handcuff John Ralston Saul and lead him away . . . no, no, the image of Her Excellency wrestling to open a can of Five Alive on visiting day is too painful to bear.
    If we don’t want to lock up intellectuals maybe we could slam down a few journalists instead. To what end I’m not sure. Christie Blatchford would probably spend more time in the weight pit than at her computer and get yet more tattoos. June Callwood would organize all