Praise for The Buddhist on Death Row

“This book shows vividly how, even in the face of the greatest adversity, compassion and a warm-hearted concern for others bring peace and inner strength. The Buddhist on Death Row is a true source of joy.”

—HIS HOLINESS THE DALAI LAMA

“I’m a friend of Jarvis Masters, so I know the truth of this book, but I want to hail its power. I believe it will encourage many people to examine their own lives and their unrealized potential for awareness, generosity, commitment, and courage.”

—REBECCA SOLNIT, author of Men Explain Things to Me

“This book celebrates a liberation not gained by guns and gangs, prison breaks and murder, but by sitting with one’s breath and believing in the perfection of the universe and all who strive and suffer within it. The Buddhist on Death Row is a deeply useful reminder that we can all be free regardless of where we are placed.”

—ALICE WALKER, author of The Color Purple

“This profound, gorgeous book displays the miraculous human capacity to find redemption, and even joy, no matter who or where we are. Jarvis Masters’s story proves that we are all united by our suffering and by our potential to help others who suffer.”

—HELEN PREJEAN, author of Dead Man Walking

“I’m grateful to be Jarvis Masters’s teacher in part because he has taught me so much. I have rarely encountered anyone who expresses the essence of Buddhism in a clearer, more moving way than he does, and I deeply admire how David Sheff has captured that hard-won wisdom in this book.”

—PEMA CHÖDRÖN, Buddhist teacher and author of When Things Fall Apart

“This is a beautiful, profoundly spiritual book, and a page turner. Jarvis Jay Masters’ transformation from an unloved child of violence and poverty to Buddhist teacher on Death Row, is thrilling. Reading it changed me, threw the lights on, opened and gentled my heart. I’m going to give it to everyone I know.”

—ANNE LAMOTT

“An inspiring book about how meaning can be found even in—perhaps especially in—adversity. It’s a study of Buddhism, of criminal justice, of the ways people connect with each other, and it’s written with deep feeling and verve.”

—ANDREW SOLOMON

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2020

Copyright © David Sheff 2020

David Sheff asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Ebook Edition © August 2020 ISBN: 9780008395452

Version 2020-07-13

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For Pamela Krasney, who inspired us with her moral courage as she fought for criminal justice reform and an end to the death penalty. Pamela made the world a better place for her family, friends, and countless others.

Cage an eagle and it will bite at the

wires, be they of iron or of gold.

—HENRIK IBSEN

Contents

Cover

Praise

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

Epigraph

Author’s Note

Introduction

Part One

The First Noble Truth: Suffering

1. Born Useless

2. Breathing, Sitting

3. Scars

Part Two

The Second Noble Truth: The Cause of Suffering

4. Condemned

5. Awakening

6. Taking Refuge

7. The Only Way Out

8. Karma

9. Kill the Buddha

Part Three

The Third Noble Truth: The End of Suffering

10. Connection

11. Forgiveness

12. Another Way

13. Warrior

14. Compassion

15. Walking on the Grass

16. Presence

17. The Sound of Life

Part Four

The Fourth Noble Truth: The Path

18. Hope

19. Letting Go

20. Enlightenment

Epilogue: Living With an Open Heart

Postscript

Acknowledgments

About the Publisher

Author’s Note

Some of the names and details in this book have been changed at the request of participants concerned about their privacy or, in some cases, their safety.

Introduction

Isit in a molded plastic chair on one side of a small table opposite a man named Jarvis Jay Masters. I tell him I’m considering writing a book about him and ask what he thinks of the idea. I emphasize that if I go forward, I’ll report what I find, both the good and the bad.

“I can’t be painted worse than I’ve been painted,” Masters says, and I guess that’s true for someone convicted of murder.

“I mean,” he adds, “look where we are.”

Where we are is in a closet-sized cage among a dozen similar cages in a visitation hall reserved for the condemned at San Quentin State Prison.

I follow Masters’s gaze as it sweeps the other cages in which convicted killers sit with family members or attorneys. Ramón Bojórquez Salcido, convicted of murdering seven people, including his wife and daughters, sits with his lawyer in a cage opposite ours. Nearby, Richard Allen Davis, who raped and killed a twelve-year-old girl, munches Doritos. In the cage on the end, near a bookshelf lined with board games and Bibles, Scott Peterson, convicted of murdering his eight-months-pregnant wife and their unborn child, sits with his sister.

Peterson looks relaxed and fit, but some prisoners appear tense, agitated, or sullen. And then there are guys—diminutive, bespectacled, innocuous—who look like tellers or, in one case, John Oliver. Their looks deceive, Masters says. Over the years, he’s been surprised when he’s learned about the crimes committed by the meekest and politest of his death row neighbors. “Some of them have perfect manners, place their napkins on their laps, but half of Iowa is missing.”

In 2006, my friend Pamela Krasney, an activist devoted to prison reform and other social justice causes, told me about a death row inmate who, she claimed, had been wrongly convicted of murder. He was unlike anyone she’d ever known—more conscious, wise, and empathetic “in spite of his past.” She corrected herself. “Because of his past.”

Introduced by Masters’s friend, the famed Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön, Pamela had been visiting Masters regularly for years. She belonged to a group of supporters devoted to proving his innocence. They called themselves Jarvistas.

Pamela told me that Masters had written a book, numerous articles, and a poem for which he’d won a PEN award. He’d converted to Buddhism and studied with an eminent Tibetan lama, Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche, who proclaimed him a bodhisattva, “one who works to end suffering in a place drowning in suffering.” Indeed, Pamela claimed that Masters had become a force for good in San Quentin, teaching Buddhism to inmates and even thwarting violence.

Encouraged by Pamela, I arranged a visit to death row, arriving at the former Bay of Skulls on a fogless morning, a steel wind blowing in through the Golden Gate. White sailboats floated like lotus petals on the bay. Tugboats pushed barges, hydrofoil ferries glided by, and the Richmond—San Rafael Bridge glistened. After my identity was verified, I passed through a metal detector and, as instructed, followed a painted yellow line along a rocky embankment. Overhead, armed guards watched from a tower that looked like a lighthouse.

Masters was housed in the ominously named Adjustment Center, the solitary-housing unit—“the hole”—once described by a San Quentin administrator as a “contained, enclosed unit for the vicious, violent, insane—men society doesn’t want to exist.” He’d been in the AC for two decades.

I was led to a chair that faced a smeared glass partition. After several minutes, a door opened on the other side, and a guard escorted Masters in. He was tall and clean shaven, with neatly buzzed hair. Reading glasses hung around his neck.

When he was unshackled, Masters sat, and we picked up cracked handsets. His voice was muffled, as if we were talking through tin-can telephones.

Masters had clear brown eyes, a sweet tenor voice, and a quiet charisma that the glass couldn’t obstruct. We talked about Pamela, Pema, writing, the news, and a recent lockdown after a stabbing. I asked questions about guards, inmates, and his Buddhist practice. Masters was articulate, thoughtful, and funny. After an hour and a half, a guard signaled that the visit was over. He led Masters away, and I left the cellblock, emerging into the cold bay air.

I ruminated about the meeting. Masters seemed open and earnest. I glimpsed what his friends described as something indefinably special about him, but charm does not equal innocence. We’ve read about vicious yet charismatic murderer: Truman Capote’s Perry Smith (Capote even grew fond of his accomplice, the far more pitiless Richard Hickock), Sister Helen Prejean’s Elmo Patrick Sonnier and Robert Lee Willie, and Norman Mailer’s Gary Gilmore (as Mailer portrayed him, Gilmore was callous and remorseless but had a keen mind, wit, and allure).

Was Masters a killer? His friends swore that he wasn’t. Had he been framed, as his lawyers argued? Or was he a skilled manipulator, a con artist taking advantage of trusting, good-hearted people like Pamela and Pema?

Even if Masters was innocent, I didn’t know what to think about the claims that he was, as his supporters described him, an enlightened Buddhist practitioner who had changed and saved lives. There are Buddhists in many prisons. For that matter, there are born-again inmates of every faith. There are prison writers, poets, and others who’ve been singled out as unique. Was Masters truly different? I refrained from judging him either kindly or harshly. But he continued to intrigue me.

In the years that followed, Pamela kept me abreast of events in Masters’s life. In 2007, after twenty-two years, he was released from solitary confinement and moved to a less restrictive death row cell-block. The following year he married in a ceremony presided over by Pema Chödrön. In 2009, Pamela asked me to provide a blurb for the second book Masters wrote. She also told me about the ongoing appeals process. There was no question in her mind that he’d be exonerated; it was only a matter of time.

Then, in 2015, Pamela died of a rare blood disease. Pema conducted a Buddhist funeral, during which she read a letter from Jarvis. The memorial was held in Mill Valley, California, across the county from San Quentin. As Pema read Masters’s eulogy, I thought of him in his death row cell a few miles away. I also thought of Pamela’s deep connection with and devotion to Jarvis and recalled her claims that he inspired and helped countless people inside San Quentin and beyond its walls. Soon after I left the memorial, I decided to investigate her claims.

I spoke to people in San Quentin and some on the outside. Pema told me she’d read Masters’s book, wrote to him, and then visited. They developed a close friendship. She admired his ability to bear weight that would crush most people and the joy he exuded in a joyless place. His interpretations of Buddhist teachings inspired her, and his insights helped her achieve a deeper understanding of Buddhist concepts she thought she knew.

I read letters from others who’d also read his books and were inspired to write him about hardships they faced: abusive relationships, losses of loved ones, illness, and depression. Several wrote about suicide attempts. Masters responded to all those letters, and their authors wrote back to thank him for the solace, guidance, and hope he’d given them.

There were letters from “troubled” teenagers who had been given his book by counselors or teachers. High school teachers who had assigned Masters’s book in their classes sent packets of letters from students he’d inspired. A librarian in Watts said that his book was stolen more than any other on her shelves.

More remarkably, I was able to confirm that Masters had defended prisoners who were vulnerable to attack because they were gay, were suspected of informing on other inmates, or had otherwise run afoul of prison’s cruel norms. Even more extraordinary, he averted potential attacks by prisoners on correctional officers (COs). I spoke to people, including a guard, who said Masters had prevented their suicides. The CO told me that his young son was gravely ill, that he and his wife were fighting constantly, he was drinking heavily, and he loathed his job. The guard admitted he treated inmates like scum, which was how he viewed them. He confessed he had planned to kill himself.

One early morning, Masters called out to the officer, who was walking the tier. Jarvis said he’d noticed that the man seemed stressed and down and wanted to make sure he was doing all right. The guard wasn’t one to open up about his personal life to anyone, least of all a con, but “something about Masters” caused him to confide in him about his son and problems at home. The conversation led to months of predawn talks at Masters’s cell door, during which Jarvis helped the guard face his son’s illness, support his wife, and enter a program to stop drinking. The officer no longer thought about taking his own life; instead, he embraced the life he had.

The CO said that his job became meaningful when Masters helped him realize he could help people who desperately needed it; he no longer saw it as herding cattle but as an opportunity to treat the suffering with compassion. His attitude transformed because “Masters showed me that most of the cons just were dealt a raw hand. They’re just people, some more fucked-up than others, some no more fucked-up than people on the outside. They all had miserable lives—and they all have souls.”

These and similar stories convinced me to go forward with this book.

In the four years since then, I’ve made more than 150 trips to death row and recorded more than 100 hours of conversation. I’ve also spoken with Masters for untold hours by phone. I supplemented our conversations with his writings—his books, letters, journals, and short stories—but I mostly relied on Masters’s own memories and prison stories. He spoke candidly, but he was cautious when it came to guards, and he was protective of other inmates. However, he was unsparingly candid about his own life. He spoke extensively about the violence in his past, and he teared up when he talked about his victims.

I struggled to determine if I could rely on Masters’s recollections of events, including some that had taken place more than fifty years ago. Many of the people described in this book are dead or locked away and unable or unwilling to talk to me. (Some couldn’t be dissuaded of their belief that I was police.) Unsurprisingly, few guards and inmates agreed to talk, and of those who did, most spoke under the condition that they wouldn’t be identifiable. In the end, I found that Masters’s stories that could be independently verified proved to be accurate.

Over our hundreds of hours together, Jarvis and I talked about many subjects, but most of our conversations wended, by way of curves, spirals, and trapdoors, to questions of being: if and how people can change their nature and how we can find relief from pain and meaning in our lives.

As I pieced together Masters’s journey, I saw how he found the answers to these questions through meditation and Buddhism.

I’m not a Buddhist, but as I learned how his faith helped him, I discovered how its tenets and practices can help others—believers and nonbelievers alike. I learned that people can change and how but also that transformation comes in fits and starts. The journey forward isn’t linear but cyclical, and it’s hard. I learned something else that was even more profound: that the process and goal are different from what many of us expect. Instead of working to change our true nature, we must find it. Instead of running from suffering, we must embrace it.

Masters never claimed to have seen a light or been born again. He dismisses those who speak of him as a teacher. He cringed when I told him that people described him as enlightened. “I don’t even know what that word means,” he objected, and he emphasized that he’s “the last person” who should be considered a spokesperson for Buddhism, admitting that his form of the faith is ramshackle and geared toward the particular challenges presented by life on death row. However, as Masters surmounted internal and external obstacles, he gained insights into issues many of us struggle with, and over time I learned why people said he inspired them.

Set in a place of unremitting violence, insanity, confusion, and rage, Masters’s story traverses the haunted caverns and tributaries of loneliness, despair, trauma, and other suffering—terrain we all know too well—and arrives at healing, meaning, and wisdom. Again and again, I have felt deeply Masters’s power to inspire, and I hope I can share some of that power in the pages that follow.

Part One
The First Noble Truth
Suffering

Hurt people hurt people.

—“Warlock,” former Crips shot-caller,

in a GRIP (Guiding Rage into Power)

class at San Quentin State Prison

1
Born Useless

In the spring of 1986, Melody Ermachild ventured inside the imposing brick-and-stone edifice of San Quentin State Prison to meet her new client, Jarvis Jay Masters, a twenty-four-year-old African American kid from Harbor City, California. Masters had arrived at San Quentin five years earlier after being convicted of thirteen counts of armed robbery and sentenced to twenty years in prison. He’d subsequently been charged with conspiring to kill a prison guard and making the knife used in the murder. He had been moved to the Adjustment Center—solitary confinement—and was now on trial. If he was found guilty, he could be put to death.

Masters wore a navy blue knit cap pulled down to his eyes. He leaned back in his chair, arms folded across his chest, and barely acknowledged her. She explained that she was a criminal investigator hired by his legal team to write a social history of his life. If he was convicted, they hoped her report would help his lawyers convince the judge and jury that he should be spared the death penalty. To prepare the report, she would need to interview him, his family, his foster parents, and others who’d known him.

When she mentioned his family, Masters broke his silence. “Keep them out of it,” he growled. His eyes, cold and blank until then, were blazing. “They have nothing to say about me.”

He said no more during that meeting, and he kept his sullen silence throughout a dozen more visits during which Melody reviewed the case against him and tried to get him to open up.

One morning, Melody showed up in the visiting booth on crutches. She’d been rock climbing and had fallen, rupturing her Achilles tendon.

As usual, she pulled out files and notebooks. Also as usual, Masters regarded her with disdainful silence.

Suddenly Melody snapped, “Do you think this is a joke?”

He was startled.

“They want to kill you!” she said, her voice rising.

She had never blown up at a client before, and she immediately apologized.

“It’s not just my leg,” she explained. In her distress, she set aside her usual professional demeanor and poured out the reasons for her despondency. “I had a baby when I was a teenager, and I was forced to put him up for adoption,” she said. “I never got over it. After twenty years, I just heard from my son and we met.”

Jarvis stared.

“It was wonderful meeting him, just what I’d always wanted, but it stirred up a lot. I’ve been spending a lot of time crying.”

After a pause, she added, “I’ve been thinking a lot about my childhood. My father died when I was little. My mother was depressed, and she would”—Melody stopped and inhaled—“she would beat us. Later I got pregnant, and they threw me out. I found a home for pregnant girls, where the baby was born. I thought about killing myself. Many times.”

Jarvis spoke for the first time. “That is some fucked-up shit.”

His perfect summation made her smile.

Their eyes met briefly; then he looked away.

Jarvis was less hostile after that. Sometimes he arrived in the visiting room as taciturn as ever, but other times he was less guarded. He began to consider her questions seriously and answer them honestly. They talked about the case and his past, though the conversations sometimes stirred up painful memories and he would shut down. Ultimately, though, he agreed to let her interview his family.

Melody flew to Los Angeles to meet his mother, Cynthia Campbell, whom Jarvis hadn’t seen for seven years, since the day of his arrest that landed him in San Quentin in 1981. After he was implicated in a string of armed robberies, police issued an APB for him, and Jarvis hid out at one friend’s house after another, no place more than a couple of nights. One afternoon he was at his sister’s apartment. A police scanner was on, and he heard them coming. But there wasn’t time to run. A voice from a bullhorn told him to come outside with his hands up.

An officer pinned Jarvis down on the hood of a squad car and cuffed his hands behind his back. Cynthia, who’d been staying downstairs at the apartment of Jarvis’s other sister, ran outside. Sobbing and screaming, she attacked an officer, punching and clawing him. Jarvis watched the police wrestle her to the ground.

When Melody met Cynthia in her shabby living room, she seemed frail and sad. There were remnants of beauty in her face but it showed the pall of decades of addiction. Cynthia’s honesty surprised Melody. In a raspy smoker’s voice, she said she’d become a mother at sixteen. She’d had eight children in all. She admitted, “I left Jarvis feeling like he was a motherless child, but I couldn’t do any better.”

Before she left, Melody asked Cynthia if she’d consider visiting Jarvis—“I think it would do him good”—and Cynthia agreed to come.

Back in the prison, Jarvis wanted to hear every detail about the visit. As Melody talked, he pictured his mother. He remembered her beauty and gentleness but also her absence and volatility. He recalled sitting with her watching TV, and then she would get up and disappear. After a while he’d go look for her and find her passed out on the toilet in a heroin stupor. He would try to wake her up and get her to bed. Every time, he was afraid she might be dead.

He also remembered the men who came and went. He ran into a stranger in the living room, and Cynthia would say, “Give Jarvis some money, Daddy.” Then to Jarvis, “Run down and get some candy.”

Though he’d been only five, Jarvis vividly recalled the day police came to the house and found him and his sisters living in squalor. Social workers took the children to Child Protective Services, where they were separated. Jarvis was taken to a small room with two gentle-seeming women. One lifted him onto a table and removed his shirt. They looked in horror at the bruises and scars that covered his body.

Jarvis shook that memory aside and instead looked ahead to his mother’s visit. He thought of the things he wanted to tell her most: he missed her, and he loved her.

Jarvis put his mother’s name on his visitors list, and he eagerly awaited her arrival. But she never showed up. One morning, through the bars of his cell door, he saw the prison chaplain approaching. Inmates knew that the chaplain didn’t come around just to chat. His visit meant bad news.

The chaplain told Jarvis that one of his sisters had called with a message. Their mother had a heart attack. She didn’t make it.

The chaplain said, “I’m sorry, Masters,” and left the tier.

Jarvis began trembling, and then his shock morphed into fury. He pounded his fists into the cell wall until his knuckles bled.

For weeks, he remained distraught over his mother’s death and fuming because he wasn’t allowed to attend her funeral. He paced his cell, refused yard time, and cursed out a guard who, in response, slammed him into a wall.

Meanwhile, Melody continued to interview people for her report, and she was delighted when she could bring news that might pick up Jarvis’s spirits. She’d been in touch with his younger sister, Carlette, who planned to come up from Los Angeles to see him.

Jarvis added another name to his list of approved visitors, and this time it was not in vain. On the morning of the visit, he was escorted to the visiting hall where his sister waited on the other side of a Plexiglas window.

Carlette began crying when she saw him. Finally she collected herself enough to speak his name: “Jarvis.” She stared at her big brother and said it again: “Jarvis.”

Jarvis responded without emotion. He gave a slight nod before asking, “What’s up, baby sister?”

She asked, “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” he said flatly.

“What’s it been like in there? Are you okay?”

He shrugged. “What do you think?”

She repeated, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he said. “No big deal. Motherfuckers fighting, stabbing.”

She looked alarmed.

“Don’t worry about me, little sister,” he said. “No one will fuck with me.”

Carlette noticed faded tattoos on her brother’s temple and wrist, the number 255, and asked about them.

When they were children, they lived on 255th Street in Harbor City.

“What made you get that?” she asked.

“It was something I’d seen on a homeboy lying in a coffin.”

Carlette was aghast.

When a guard came by with a five-minute warning, Jarvis asked Carlette if she could put money in his trust account so he could buy cigarettes.

She said okay, and she left.

It was an expensive ordeal for Carlette to travel by car from LA, but she returned a month later, this time with her young son, who sat on her lap. Once again, Jarvis regaled her with prison stories. It saddened her that he acted as though prison were a joke, and she was disgusted when he boasted that he was feared and envied as a “warrior” in some revolution.

The third time Carlette came, Jarvis started up again, talking about the race war in San Quentin—in which black inmates were defending themselves against attacks by Mexican and white gangs—about crooked guards selling drugs and guns, and about a stabbing, as if these horrifying events were amusing.

Carlette burst into tears.

Jarvis stared. “What are you crying about?”

She blurted out, “What about us?”

He didn’t understand.

“You’re always telling me about your life like you’re a hard gangster, some revolutionary, all that bullshit. You never ask about us. Why should I even come see you? What about me? What about your nephew? You know what he said after last time we saw you? ‘Mama, I wanna be just like Uncle Jay.’ What am I supposed to tell him?”

She cried harder, but Jarvis just rolled his eyes.

She continued, “You think when your homeboys get out they’re going to send you money? You think they’re going to write you, send pictures of their children? Do you even think about us? Who are you trying to impress? What is wrong with you?”

Still sobbing, she picked up her son and left.

Jarvis sat fuming. What was wrong with him? What the fuck was wrong with her? She had no idea who he was. She had no idea where he was. His sister was a fool, and he didn’t care if she never came back.

In his cell that night, Jarvis tried to put the visit out of his mind, but he kept thinking about something Carlette had said. Many of the men he knew in prison were in for life, but some would get out eventually. Would he hear from them? Would they write? Would they send money or pictures of their children? Would they visit?

Not a chance.

What had he been trying to prove? Who was he trying to impress?

Even harder to ignore was her other question: “What is wrong with you?”

He tried to blow it off, but he couldn’t. He huddled in a corner of his cell. He felt … he didn’t know what. Something he didn’t want to feel.

Jarvis had often contemplated death, having seen it from a very young age. He’d imagined being shot like many of the boys he knew in his neighborhood. Other times, he saw himself going out in a blaze of gunfire like in a movie. Sometimes he even looked forward to death. It would be a relief.

Throughout that long night, he confronted a thought he’d never let himself think before: He wanted to get out of prison, to reconnect with his family, to be his sister’s big brother and his nephew’s uncle. He wanted to live.

Using the only writing implement he was allowed—the insert of a ballpoint pen (a pen could be a weapon)—he placed a sheet of paper on his bunk, using it as a desk, and wrote to Carlette. He thanked her for her help, her letters, her visits. He wrote that he was proud of the woman she’d become and her beautiful son, and he apologized for never asking about her life; he wanted to know everything about it.

He feared that he’d never see her again. And he still couldn’t get her question out of his head: What is wrong with me?

Jarvis was nineteen when he arrived at San Quentin. When he went out to the yard for the first time, he saw men playing basketball on courts with sagging, netless rims. Other cons lifted weights, sat across from one another on benches and played checkers or cards, or clustered in groups talking. Races did not mingle.

When a stranger approached, Jarvis was wary until the man dropped the name of Halifu, an inmate he’d met at Los Angeles County Jail. Halifu was physically imposing but spoke like a professor. He was some kind of revolutionary. He bent Jarvis’s ear, talking about the historical oppression of African Americans, quoting W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Angela Davis, and Malcolm X and educating Jarvis about the Black Panthers and an “organization” called the Black Guerrilla Family. Halifu said the BGF, cofounded by W. L. Nolen and George Jackson, had been created in response to a spate of killings of African American inmates in US prisons. He said that Jarvis needed to join the revolution and began calling him Askari, the Swahili word for “soldier.”

Later, when Halifu learned that Jarvis was heading to San Quentin, he sent word to “comrades” there, including the man who approached him on the yard. The prisoner, whose Swahili name was Fuma, had been in the San Quentin contingent of the Black Panther Party when Jackson was killed in the prison in 1971. Fuma introduced Jarvis to other “revolutionaries,” including teachers responsible for educating “kezi,” the men who aspired to join the BGF. A blackboard was set up on the yard and classes of sixty or so kezi gathered for instructions. Those who’d never gone to school were taught to read and write, and all of them learned about black nationalism and the class struggle.

That political education justified and focused Jarvis’s rage. Angry and alienated, he was primed for radicalization—and to connect to something bigger than himself. In the name Black Guerrilla Family, “family” was the operative word for young men like Jarvis, as its members embraced them like fathers and brothers.

Jarvis and the other kezi knew that only a handful of them would be accepted into the BGF. They were told, “Many are called but few are chosen.” Jarvis was determined to be one of the chosen few. He trained with diligence and commitment, and, as a former BGF member recounted, Jarvis was among a handful of dedicated soldiers who made the cut. They were initiated in a solemn ceremony at which they were given pins with the five-pointed red Communist star to wear on their lapels. Then they were awarded “fraternal membership” in the gang. A commander said, “There are new dragons among us. They have risen into the ranks of jamaa (family).”

Two years later, in 1985, a BGF member broke from the organization’s leadership and planned a series of attacks on guards. Court records show that the first target was to be a veteran sergeant, thirty-eight-year-old Howell Dean Burchfield, who was rumored to be supplying weapons to the Aryan Brotherhood, a rival prison gang. According to multiple BGF members, Jarvis wasn’t told about the plot because of a rift he’d had with the planner of the attack. As a result, he didn’t know what was coming the night of June 8 of that year: Sergeant Burchfield was taking the nightly prisoner count, a mundane chore that he’d repeated hundreds of times. An inmate called to him and asked for a light for his cigarette. When Burchfield approached the man’s cell, the prisoner stabbed him with a makeshift spear, severing his pulmonary artery. By the time help arrived, the guard was dead.

That night and the following day, those suspected of involvement in the killing were moved from South Block’s C-section, where they’d been confined, to the Adjustment Center. Jarvis apparently wasn’t a suspect, because he was left alone. Prior to the murder he’d had unusual freedom of movement as a “tier tender,” and that privilege continued. When other prisoners in the block were locked in their cells, Jarvis swept and mopped tiers, delivered dinner trays, and scrubbed supply room walls.

Six months later, Jarvis and other inmates were watching a football game when another prisoner yelled out for Jarvis to switch to a news channel. When he did, he saw his face alongside those of two other BGF members. A newscaster reported that the killers of the San Quentin correctional officer had been identified.

The next morning, Jarvis was moved to the AC, and a guard delivered a notice informing him that he was being charged with participating in the Burchfield murder. He suspected that he’d been framed by the same renegade gang member who planned the murder, because Jarvis was known to be a loyal soldier who wouldn’t break the BGF code, which forbade speaking about any of the organization’s members or activities. The price he paid for his loyalty was a charge for a crime with “special circumstances”—the killing of a police officer—that could result in his execution.

The murder trial began in 1989. On the mornings court was in session, Jarvis changed from prison denim into an orange jumpsuit. He was shackled with leg irons, handcuffs, and a chain around his waist and moved from his cell to a California Department of Corrections van, which took him to the blue-domed, Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Marin County Civic Center. He sat alongside his lawyers in a wood-paneled courtroom.

In preliminary hearings, Jarvis’s attorneys filed a series of motions, but Marin County Superior Court justice Beverly Savitt ruled mostly against him. Then came jury selection, which was also inauspicious. Jarvis’s attorneys quickly used up all their peremptory challenges. In the end, all but one juror was white, and all of them supported the death penalty.

Jarvis hunched in his chair while lawyers and witnesses talked about him as if he weren’t there. Sometimes he looked up at the judge and saw kindness, almost motherly concern, but other times she looked right through him. He told Melody that the trial felt like “one nail in my coffin after another.”

2
Breathing, Sitting

After months of work on the mitigation report, Melody brought Jarvis a draft, which he read that night. When he finished, he was livid.

He wrote Melody a venomous diatribe: “You smile to my face and write about me like a dog. The police basically would have written the same things you wrote.” He told her he never wanted to see her again.

Jarvis couldn’t believe he’d trusted Melody. How many times did he have to learn he couldn’t trust anyone?

Still boiling with rage, he picked up the report and read it again the next day. The further he read the worse he felt—hotter and angrier and sicker. Then, midway through, he had a horrifying epiphany: Melody hadn’t turned against him. She’d done her job. She’d pieced together an accurate account of his life and reported the truth. The truth was what enraged him.

Melody described his mother as a prostitute who’d had men come to the house; her neglect; his father’s violence, and then his father leaving. She reported his stepfather Otis’s frequent beatings and the unremitting physical abuse Jarivs had endured in foster homes and state institutions.

Where was he in those stories? He’d been passive, hiding, afraid.

He’d spent his whole life proving that he wasn’t a victim, but Melody’s report showed that that was exactly what he was.

Jarvis sat on the bunk, reeling and nauseous. Then he thought about the vicious letter he’d sent Melody.

He wrote her again. “I have a tendency to react,” he said. “Historically these kinds of reactions have been the worst mistakes I’ve made…. I’m fucking up. I apologize.”

“I have a lot of trust in your better nature, Jarvis,” Melody responded. “Your true self will always arise and open your heart. I know you’ll be mad at me again—there are hard times coming—it’s a hard and scary case. But if you stay committed, I will. I will never let you down.”

Melody’s letter calmed him. He was also relieved when he heard from Carlette. She, too, accepted his apology and said she’d visit soon.

Jarvis’s relief was fleeting. The trial dragged on, and not only did he worry about the eventual judgment but also, every day, his survival. On the tier, he was vulnerable to the whims of guards, who weren’t waiting for a verdict to punish him; they considered the charge enough proof that he’d been involved in the plot to kill their colleague. Guards ransacked his cell, ostensibly conducting random searches, and confiscated his few possessions. Once, an officer escorting Jarvis to the showers pushed him down a flight of stairs, professing that it was an accident.

Melody visited the day after the guard’s assault, and she saw the anguish in Jarvis’s eyes. She said to herself, “There has to be something I can do.”

Back when Melody tore her Achilles tendon, a doctor recommended she try meditating to ease the pain. She attended a class and found that it did help. And something unexpected happened: memories of her troubled childhood flooded her mind. She recalled her mother grabbing her and shaking her violently. She relived losing her child and thought of her beloved baby sister, who had inherited the worst of their mother’s depression. In spite of her own trauma, Melody had pulled it together, but her sister never did. One day while she was drunk, she fell, hit her head, and died. Melody never recovered from the loss.

Melody confided all that to a teacher at a Berkeley meditation center who taught her a technique he said could help her face her childhood trauma, accept her sister’s death, and move on. He told her to meditate on the experiences from a safe distance and imagine them unfolding before her eyes. He told her to repeat the meditation often. “Over time, the memories lose their power,” he promised.

Each morning when Melody meditated, she used the technique, and a lifetime of repressed grief erupted. She felt her sister’s death and other losses. She watched her mother’s violence. Over time, the memories did lose their power. Meditating helped her face and release the anger, guilt, and resentment she’d carried since childhood.

Recalling her experience, Melody suggested that Jarvis try meditating with her. “It’s helping me,” she said. “Maybe it’ll help you.”

Jarvis looked at her in disbelief. “That’s what you got for me? In this place? They’re trying to kill me, and you want me to meditate?”

They let the subject drop, but on another visit, Jarvis looked fatigued and miserable. He stared down at his hands, balled into fists. They sat in silence for a while until Jarvis spoke so softly that Melody could barely hear him. He looked at her and asked if she really thought “that meditation shit” could help.

“It might,” she said. “I think it can. As I said, it’s helping me. Can we just try?” She instructed him: “All you do is sit quietly with a straight spine, close your eyes, breathe, and pay attention to your breath as it flows in and out. That’s all. Just feel your chest rise when you breathe in, and feel it fall when you breathe out. When your mind wanders, return your attention to your breath.”

Jarvis looked up at her with fire in his eyes. “Sit? Close my eyes? Are you out of your goddamn mind?”

She didn’t understand.

“If you want to survive in here, you don’t close your eyes,” he said. “You want to see everything. Your life depends on it. And you do not sit. On the yard, you are always ready to defend yourself. When you’re sitting, you have no legs.”

“I get it,” Melody said, “but no one will know. You’ll be hidden in your cell.”

He countered, “You don’t understand. This isn’t just about where I am but who I am. I do not sit. I do not close my eyes.”

She let him calm down for a moment, and she said, “Maybe you can try. Just try. We’ll sit here for five minutes. That’s all. Just breathe deep and slow, slowly in, and slowly out.”

He was no less comfortable closing his eyes, but he wanted to please Melody, because he still worried that she’d abandon him. He didn’t say anything, but he did close his eyes. He opened them and looked around warily, then closed them again and took a breath.

Nights were hardest. “Sleep doesn’t come when you live surrounded by wall-to-wall enemies and the threat of poison gas filling your lungs,” he wrote Melody.

When he did fall asleep, Jarvis had nightmares. In one dream, he was in the gas chamber. He’d seen pictures of the room, steel like a diving bell or space module, sea green, with hermetically sealed hatches and thick glass portholes. He was strapped down and awaiting the poison. Petrified, he looked over at the executioner. Jarvis focused on the man’s face. It was his own.

Jarvis tried to meditate in his cell. There wasn’t much space in the four-and-a-half-by-ten-and-a-half-foot rectangle, but between the bed and toilet he found room to place a folded blanket on the floor. He sat straight with his legs crossed, closed his eyes, and breathed. When his mind wandered, he brought it back to his breath. He was unsure if he was doing it right. In spite of the blanket, the floor was hard and cold.

He was distracted by the noise on the tier and the chatter in his head. What were the cons shouting about? What slop would be served for dinner? He fixated on the trial: he envisioned being convicted, sentenced, and executed.

When Jarvis described the experience to Melody, she repeated advice from her teacher that had helped her: “When those thoughts come, gently push them away.” Jarvis tried that technique. He had a literal image of pushing the bad thoughts away. “I don’t need you,” he said as he swept one aside. “I don’t need you,” when another came. He made it through five minutes. Then ten. He tried it the next morning and the next.

He found that meditation calmed him. However, sometimes when he meditated, instead of serenity he felt panic. His heart would pound, and his breathing would quicken. Sometimes he saw and felt things like in a nightmare. Monsters, roaches, and the screams of deranged cons filled his head. He thought of the men in San Quentin—his neighbors. He thought of their crimes. They were men who’d lit their parents on fire, raped, cut up victims. He was almost choking, gasping for breath.

He decided to quit. But he didn’t. He tried again. He breathed in and breathed out. At first he did it for Melody, but he continued for himself. He was scared and enraged—and desperate—and he didn’t know what else he could do to try to cope.

Melody repeated another instruction from her teacher: “When you begin to panic, picture the upsetting events and feel the uncomfortable feelings from a safe distance. Instead of being inside them, you can watch them come. If you watch them come, you can watch them go.” The teacher had said to remember that “fear is a thought, and thoughts can’t hurt you. Thoughts can’t kill you.”

Sometimes Jarvis glimpsed the profundity of that advice, but holding on to it was like trying to hold on to water. Melody assured him that understanding would come, and her prescription was always the same: practice.

He did practice. He’d go to a dark place—his chest would pound—but if he remembered to concentrate on his breath, his heart slowed. When fear flooded him, if he recalled the teacher’s words—“Fear is a thought, and thoughts can’t hurt you”—the fear lessened.

Occasionally Jarvis emerged from meditation feeling energized. It made him feel … what? It made him feel—the thought startled him—better than he’d ever felt before in his life. He was on trial for murder and could be condemned, yet he felt a lightness and optimism that would last throughout the morning.

And so he kept going.

Every morning. Roused himself. Folded the blanket and placed it on the floor. Sat with his legs crossed. Corrected his posture, straightening his spine.

Inhaled.

Slowly.

Concentrated on the air as it filled his lungs, and, when his lungs were full, held in the air, feeling it swirl inside, and then, slowly, slowly, let it flow out.

Sometimes he tried to meditate but couldn’t concentrate on his breath or still his mind. Then anger welled up inside him again: the unfairness, the betrayal, his inability to speak out.

He sometimes felt like a fool to even try. Once he thought dismissively, “I may be sentenced to death, and I’m sitting here breathing?”

But he pondered that notion for a moment more, and it transformed itself in an extraordinary way: I may be sentenced to death, and I’m sitting here breathing! He felt something like hope.

But the hope would inevitably evaporate. Awful thoughts beset him: terror about the result of the trial and fear of reprisals by guards. Jarvis viewed depression as a weakness—it was a word he’d never abide—but he fell into depression so deep and dark he felt he’d never emerge.

Melody passed along more advice from her teacher: “Remember, Jarvis. None of that is today. Come back to now. You can control your mind.”

You can control your mind. Those words triggered a memory of the time he’d heard them before.

“We will train your body and train your mind.”

That’s what Jarvis was told once he’d been inducted into the BGF.

There was boot camp—like physical training that included calisthenics, jogging around the yard, and martial arts. The soldiers spent hours marching. As they did, they repeated in marching cadence a drill instructor’s words. The instructor yelled, “Can’t stop,” and the recruits repeated, “Can’t stop!”

It continued:

“Can’t stop.”

“Won’t stop!”

“Never cop.”

“Never cop!”

“Never drop.”

“Never drop!”

“Who say?”

“We say!”

“Machine.”

“Machine!”

“Machine on the move.”

“Machine on the move!”

“Machine we never lose.”

“Machine we never lose!”

“Over the wall.”

“Over the wall!”

“Freedom call.”

“Freedom call!”

The voices of sixty black men yelling those words echoed throughout San Quentin—in the chow hall, on the north and south yards, and up in the warden’s office.

The training intensified. Jarvis practiced taking dictation in Swahili and English and learned how to fashion knives, zip guns, and explosives. His responsibilities included copying and delivering kites—coded messages—from one BGF member to another. He was charged with monitoring the tier and passing contraband between members.

The instructors also trained his mind. He was schooled in the history of the BGF, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party. He studied BGF doctrine, its constitution, and its code of conduct.

Jarvis told Melody that the training had succeeded in politicizing him and giving him purpose he’d never had, but it also trained him to feel nothing. He’d been hard, but it made him harder.

Jarvis became lost in thought. When he spoke again, he said he realized that his training for the gang had actually begun at birth. Throughout his life, he’d been taught to take punishment and give it while silencing his conscience, concealing his fear, and suppressing his will. But now he was engaged in an utterly different type of mental training, and he was starting to feel its effects. He felt a chill travel through his body when he realized he was twenty-four years old, in prison, facing a murder charge that could result in his death. But he was in training again.

3
Scars

Besides writing for her job, Melody wrote essays about the criminal justice system for magazines and journals. On one visit she showed Jarvis a story she’d written about children visiting their parents in prison. He responded thoughtfully, and his reaction gave her an idea. She was continuing to flesh out the report about his life and asked if he’d help her by writing answers to questions she would provide.

Jarvis had never learned to read or write well, but when he was twelve or thirteen years old, a teacher at a program for juvenile offenders had him write a story and told him that he had a talent for writing. Other than in letters, he’d never written for or about himself. He was insecure about his limited vocabulary and poor grammar, but he agreed to try. He took Melody’s questions to his cell and answered them truthfully.

When she read his responses, Melody saw his talent, too.

She was in a women’s writers group in which she and friends did writing exercises, and she suggested that they do a couple of those exercises together. They agreed on a theme—“rain,” for instance, or “a conversation overheard.” She took off her watch and lay it on the small shelf between them in the booth. “All right,” she said. “Ten minutes. Go.”

She took his exercises to her writers group’s meetings, and she returned to San Quentin with the other group members’ feedback. Jarvis became a de facto member of the group, the only male and the only prisoner.

Jarvis began writing in his cell. He wrote with the Bic pen insert, which was, he told Melody, his most valuable possession. Not having a table or desk, he rolled up his mattress and stuffed it in a corner, then sat cross-legged on the floor, placed a sheet of paper on the stripped concrete slab that was his bed, and wrote feverishly for hours. Paper was at a premium; in order to get as many words on each page as possible, he developed a tiny, even script that looked almost like typing. Sometimes he wrote all night. He never imagined there was something he could be good at, a talent, and being inspired to do something constructive—being inspired at all—was a new feeling. Writing gave him a different kind of power than came from knives or guns—subtler but no less palpable.

“You meet a whole new person when you start writing about yourself,” he wrote Melody.

Writing opened him to strange feelings and memories he’d lost, including many he didn’t want to remember.

“I see how messed up I was, believe me,” he told her. “Some of my past experiences were like a horror movie.”

Writing not only made Jarvis remember more, it made him notice more. He felt the wind on his skin when it found its way to him through a broken window across the walkway from his cell. He heard the sorrowful cries of gulls, and he relished the soothing warmth of the sun on his face when he was on the yard for the all-too-brief three hours, three times a week he was allowed outside. He noticed light and shadows moving along his cell walls and floor. He eavesdropped on conversations among inmates and guards. He studied their accents and vernacular, and he recorded their dialogue.

Jarvis noticed sounds he’d lived with but never heard: the scrape of a food cart’s wheels along the corridor, the jangling rhythm of keys and handcuffs clanging off the belts of guards who passed his cell, the scurry of a mouse, and the babel of radio stations tuned to country, metal, and blues, wailing preachers and NPR.

That heightened awareness filtered into his meditation. He noticed his surroundings: feelings, noises, smells. But even more intensely, he felt a new world of sensation inside his body. He discovered the tightness in his belly, the alternating tautness and slack of his lungs, the stress that throbbed in his temples, the pulsing weight of anxiety in his chest.

When he described those sensations to Melody, she said he was discovering mindfulness, a form of meditation. “You become fully present in the moment. Experience it. When your mind wanders, return to your body, what you sense outside and inside you, and breathe.”

Jarvis’s self-imposed training began each day with two hours of meditation followed by exercise. He recorded his progress on a calendar he’d drawn. Four hundred sit-ups, five hundred push-ups, five hundred or more burpees, and again. Next he walked up and down the length of his cell 520 times, which was a mile. That or he ran in place until the guard came by with the food cart with breakfast: cardboardy pancakes or powdered scrambled eggs, a couple slices of bread, and a packet of instant coffee that he mixed with lukewarm water from the sink.

On weekends or other times court wasn’t in session, the morning routine was followed by writing letters and responses to more of Melody’s questions, games of chess with other cons on the tier (they yelled moves, which they tracked in their respective cells), and reading. The few cherished hours he was allowed outside, he went to the yard to breathe clean air.

One day, Jarvis was on the yard, watching a group of shirtless men lifting weights. Though it was a common sight, he’d never paid attention to it before. He’d never noticed how their bodies were marked with scars, the evidence of whips, belts, chains, knives, bullets, and fire. It reminded him of slaves’ scarred bodies, which he’d seen in old photographs in books, and of his own scars.

With sadness, he realized that all of those men had endured abuse and pain like his, and some had survived far worse. When he was alone with them on the yard, he cautiously asked them about their scars. Some shut him down, but others talked openly. One told him about how his father thrashed him with a steel rod. Another’s father used a tire iron.

Jarvis’s own scars had mostly faded, but one on his left forearm was prominent. Back when he was a teenager in a lockup for juvenile delinquents, counselors put lit cigarettes on boys’ arms and bet on which of them would let the cigarette burn the longest without pulling away. Losers were beaten.

Later, when Jarvis told Melody about his conversations on the yard, she encouraged him to write them down.

He huddled over a sheet of paper and scratched a line at a time. “Deep sadness came over me as I watched these powerful men lift hundreds of pounds of weights over their heads,” he wrote. “I looked around the yard and made the gruesome discovery that everyone else had the same deep gashes—behind their legs, on their backs, all over their ribs—evidence of the violence in our lives….

“The histories of all of us in San Quentin were so similar, it was as if we had the same parents.”

A few weeks later he gave Melody a half dozen pages and shifted uncomfortably while she read.

She marveled at his story. Beyond the solid writing, she saw it as a remarkable testament to how far he’d come since they’d met. Then he’d had no self-awareness, never mind the ability to see others. He cared about no one and nothing but himself. Now he recognized others’ suffering, responded with compassion, and connected others’ pain with his own.

Melody had a thought that made her smile. On his own and without knowing it, Jarvis had arrived at the heart of Buddhism.

Many prisoners find solace in religion, but Jarvis was disdainful of it after a lifetime of abuse in the name of God. He did have one positive memory of faith because of his first foster parents. When he was five years old and separated from his family, a social worker took him to live with Mamie and Dennis Procks, an elderly, childless couple who greeted his arrival with joy. They showed him around their freshly painted home on a quiet, tree-lined street where kids played and rode bikes. He was stunned when they showed him his room. When he lived with his mother, he shared a tiny room with his siblings and slept on a pee-stained mattress. At the Prockes’ he had his own room, a dresser stocked with clean clothes, a closet full of toys, and his own bed with ironed sheets.

Every night before bed, Mamie made him pray. When she had him pray for his mother, Jarvis asked why. Mamie said his mother loved him, and it was hard for her to be separated from him. She got Jarvis talking about Cynthia, what he missed about her. Mamie told him to pray for Cynthia because she’d been through hard times. He missed his mother and sometimes felt angry that she wasn’t around. He didn’t understand why she left or where she had gone. When he thought about it, he felt sorry for himself. But Mamie made him feel sorry for her.

Whereas the Procks embodied generosity and Christlike goodness, Jarvis’s subsequent foster parents proselytized about Jesus’s love and dragged him to church, meanwhile beating and starving him. Judges invoked Christ as they issued cruel sentences. One exhorted him, “Look to Jesus in your heart,” before sending him to a youth detention center “to get some discipline,” which apparently meant being burned, beaten, and forced to fight other kids.

Melody and Jarvis had discussed religion, and she knew that he had good reason to be wary of it. She’d felt the same way until her meditation teacher helped her face the hurt she’d suffered because of her violent parents and the loss of her sister. Learning from Buddhist stories didn’t require belief in the faith’s core tenets, such as reincarnation and karma, but the parables inspired her. Along with meditation, studying Buddhism helped her heal.

Jarvis appreciated that Melody wasn’t a blind follower, and he was intrigued when she said that Buddhist parables “make us think in new ways and break us out of the thought patterns that cause our suffering.”

She sent him a book about Buddhist philosophy. One night he picked it up and read about the Buddha’s previous life as a young prince named Siddhartha Gautama, who, walking in a forest, came across a tigress who was starving and couldn’t feed her cubs. The prince gave his body to the tigress to save her and the cubs from dying.

The story’s moral of compassion and generosity didn’t quite resonate with Jarvis. He thought, Now, that’s some stupid shit. He died to save some tigers?

As the trial continued, Melody encouraged Jarvis and the lawyers reassured him, saying the truth would come out, but whatever optimism and bravado he had was fading. He tried not to think about the worst of the possible outcomes of the trial, but he couldn’t keep them away. Forget about getting out and going home, having a normal life. Forget about being with Carlette or his other siblings and their families, watching their children grow up, having Sunday dinners with them, having his own family. The possibility of a murder conviction was sinking in, and so was the fact that he could die here. One of those nights spent awake, freaking out, scared, careening from hopelessness to panic to rage and back, he imagined himself being locked in the gas chamber. His temples pounded so hard he thought he’d pass out. Meditation helped him find moments of relative peace, but it wasn’t enough to pull him out of waking nightmares like that one. He fell deeper into depression, feeling he’d never get out. In the morning he wrote Melody and admitted that he sometimes contemplated suicide. “I won’t do it,” he wrote. “Don’t worry. But you couldn’t be in here and not think about it.”

Guards continued to provoke him. He knew they hoped he’d fight back so they’d have an excuse to beat him. Most of the time he was able to restrain himself, but sometimes they pushed him too far. Once he cursed at a pair of guards and was dragged to the end of the tier and thrown into what the prison called a “quiet cell.” Behind two steel doors, the section housed some of San Quentin’s most violent and insane prisoners and was like a lockdown ward in a mental hospital. Prisoners moaned, wept, howled, and screamed all night long. Jarvis felt like screaming along with them. Lying on his bunk, he held his hands over his ears and fought the urge to cry.

Meditation provided some relief from the horrors of the quiet cell. Jarvis also bided his time exercising maniacally and, when he could concentrate, writing letters and reading, until he was moved back to his previous Adjustment Center cell three months later.

Late that spring, the jury began deliberations. While waiting for a verdict, Jarvis was kept in a holding tank near the courtroom. One day when Melody visited, she gave him a pamphlet with a picture of an ancient man on the cover. He had a wizened face, a long, wispy mustache and beard, wild wiry eyebrows, and eyes that seemed to stare directly at him. The accompanying text offered free writings by the “lama” Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche. Jarvis wrote to the address and requested them. In a note, he described himself as a prisoner who’d been accused of a murder he hadn’t committed. If he was convicted, he could be sentenced to death. He said he’d been meditating regularly but admitted that with the trial hanging over him and his having to watch out for threatening guards, he was struggling to continue.

That evening when Jarvis was back in his cell, he handed a guard the letter to be mailed, and he didn’t give it any more thought. At the time, he was trying not to think, especially about the pending verdict. He tried to remain positive—he was innocent, so of course he’d be exonerated—but he’d sat through damning testimony and tried to brace himself in case the news was bad.

The trial continued for two agonizing years. Finally Jarvis was told that the jury had reached its decision, and he was led from the holding cell to the courtroom.

He appeared stoic when he and his lawyers were told to rise, and the judge asked the foreman if the jury had reached a verdict. The foreman said they had.

They’d found him guilty.

Jarvis had rehearsed the moment in his mind, but it still didn’t seem possible.

The judge announced that the trial would next move to the sentencing phase, and Jarvis was taken back to his cell, where he lay down and closed his eyes. When he opened them, he spiraled downward into a black rage from which no amount of meditation, no teachings, no parable could lift him.

The penalty phase began and, as expected, the prosecution argued for Jarvis’s death. His lawyers used witnesses Melody had tracked down in their presentation, determined to convince the jurors to spare his life. They hoped that the testimony of those who knew Jarvis when he was young, the accounts of the violence and abandonment he’d endured as a child and teenager, would convince the jury that he shouldn’t be executed. It would also be the first time Jarvis would speak in court.

Prepared by the lawyers, he read a statement Melody had helped him compose. When he finished reading it, he answered lawyers’ questions about his years of incarceration. He was forthright except when asked about the Black Guerrilla Family. The BGF code of conduct didn’t expire, and Jarvis remained loyal and refused to speak about the gang. When he declined to debrief about the BGF, Judge Savitt ordered that his entire testimony be stricken from the record and that the jurors disregard what he had said.

After he testified, Jarvis was consumed with guilt over what he’d revealed about his mother’s neglect and abuse. He felt he’d betrayed her by telling family secrets. Though Melody reassured him that he’d done the right thing, he was still distraught.

Melody thought it might help him if he wrote Cynthia a letter. She knew, and Jarvis did, too, how writing could clarify one’s thinking. Though Cynthia was dead, Melody suggested that Jarvis write to her as if she were alive.

“Dear Mama,” he wrote, “[In court,] I did what I know you would have wanted me to do, which is held my head up as I told what I had been through. If I said anything that hurt you more than it hurt me, then I am sorry that your rest is still with pain.”

He listed ways she had hurt him, how she’d used him to “jack up the price for sex” by telling men “I gotta take care of my kids” and never thought about the fact that he and the other children heard her with men in the bedroom. He asked why she didn’t intervene when Otis [his mother’s boyfriend] hit him and his siblings.

Jarvis asked, “Did you love Otis more than us … even when he pimped you like a dog?”

Jarvis wrote about how he felt when she was high: “I used to watch you lying on the bed…. I always felt like you were Mama when you were asleep and a stranger when you were awake…. Mama, we all were scared of you. Nobody knows how you whipped us. Nobody knows the many things drugs made you do.”

But then he softened: “Sometimes my thoughts tell me that I should hate you too, but life showed you so much hate that when I look into your eyes in my memories of you, you were like a little girl needing someone—needing a father just like we all did.”

He concluded, “Mama, I have to confront these memories—they’re killing me…. I will hate everything that killed you. We share the same hurt, Mama, but I just can’t grow old hurting the way I do. I have to surrender to it—let it go, make sense of it all. Mama, I know you loved me and I swear I love you. Please forgive me and [don’t] hold me to blame [for what I said in court]. It’s not a secret when horror lives and exists in the mind. But shit, now I’m scared of you and this feeling of guilt is why I write to you for your forgiveness.”

He signed it “JJ—3:58 AM.”

His letter broke Melody’s heart. Jarvis was apologizing to his mother, but what he needed was an apology from her, something he would never get.

The penalty phase continued for three weeks. Besides Jarvis, relatives, former counselors, and foster parents spoke about his difficult early life, testimony meant to induce the jury’s sympathy. However, the prosecution argued that Jarvis’s life history didn’t excuse his criminality; it documented it.

Prosecutors once again emphasized Jarvis’s long record, his violence at LA County Jail, and his write-ups in San Quentin for fighting and other crimes for which he’d never been charged or convicted. Unlike in the guilt phase, they were allowed to raise unsubstantiated accusations; the innocent-until-proven-guilty presumption had ended when he’d been convicted. They portrayed him as coldhearted and unremorseful, but it was still shocking when the jury sentenced him to death.

The final stage of the trial came next. Judges in death penalty cases can affirm or modify juries’ recommendations based on their own evaluation of the evidence.

Jarvis’s legal team believed that his life would be spared, especially since the lives of the other convicted defendants—the man who stabbed the guard and the one who ordered the killing—had been; they’d been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Judge Savitt spent a month completing a review before summoning Jarvis to court to hear her decision in July 1990.

Michael Satris, a renowned criminal lawyer, made the final plea. He stood and spoke with somber eloquence as he implored Judge Savitt to try to “live the experience of Jarvis Masters … to walk the life that Jarvis did: be shaken in the womb by the violence that literally was awaiting his birth, and to be born in that brutality, and be abandoned, and be rejected, and be in the ghetto, and feel that pain, and feel that shame.”

He asked the judge to consider Jarvis’s life from there, after being removed from his mother’s custody and separated from his sisters, who were the only consistent family he’d had, “to be isolated, and cry those tears.”

Satris described Jarvis’s entry into foster care; after the Procks, it was a “world of violence and crime,” which in turn led to one cruel institution after another.

And then to San Quentin and solitary confinement. “We know what the conditions of that confinement can do to a person.

“What’s remarkable,” Satris continued, “is the way that he has been able to break through that violence even with the limited resources and opportunity he’s had. And he has broken through. And there is the evidence which supports the long-standing program of maturation, rehabilitation, development, whatever you want to call it, that has allowed Mr. Masters to break through that. And how strong, how invincible is the human spirit that any of us, our children, that we can have such confidence that we would have been able to withstand the conditions, the effects of Mr. Masters’s upbringing on him any better than he has been able to do?”

Satris closed by imploring the judge to “reach as deep” into herself as she could to modify the jury’s sentence and spare Jarvis’s life.

Next, the prosecution argued that the evidence of mitigation was outweighed by the “evidence for aggravation.” Once again the prosecution listed the armed robberies for which Jarvis had been convicted and claimed that he’d participated in the violent crimes they’d raised earlier, and then its presentation ended. It was Judge Savitt’s turn.

The judge began by admitting that there had been “fleeting” moments during the trial when she had asked herself why she had taken on the case in the first place. She also stated her opposition to the death penalty but said she was charged with applying the law whether she agreed with it or not. “It’s my duty.”

She then addressed Satris directly. “You’ve turned Mr. Masters … into a human being,” she said. “He was born into hell. He was born for reasons that are almost impossible for me to comprehend. If people don’t want children, they shouldn’t have them. Apparently, his mother didn’t know how not to have them.”

Savitt acknowledged that it had been a tragedy when Jarvis was taken away from the Procks. That was when “he gave up on himself,” she said, “and that is when he became a very destructive person.” Then he entered the prison system, “another hell.”

Savitt took a breath. When she continued, she said something that stunned Jarvis. She claimed that she understood him to a large degree, “the best that one who was raised white middle-class can understand,” and then proceeded to address the aggravating circumstances.

As evidence against him, she cited violence in Jarvis’s past, including the robberies. She also cited his refusal to debrief about the BGF, believing that his refusal contradicted his claims that he’d renounced the gang.

“Mr. Masters,” she said, “will you please stand.”

Jarvis stood.

Over the previous two years, he had sometimes glimpsed warmth in the judge’s face. Now whatever sympathy he’d seen or imagined was replaced by hardness.

“It is the order of this court that you shall suffer the death penalty,” she said. “Said penalty to be inflicted within the walls of the state prison at San Quentin, California, in the manner prescribed by law.”

Part Two
The Second Noble Truth
The Cause of Suffering

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

—C. S. Lewis

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