This is a fascinating story of a man who never really had a chance at growing up to live in freedom. Not to excuse his crimes, but it helps one understand how generations of children are raised in an atmosphere of hopelessness, an environment that dares them to survive. How they have to do so naturally leads to a life that risks life and freedom.

For Jarvis Jay Masters, it was a series of experiences - an abusive father who disappeared early in life, an abused mother who was addicted to heroin, a group of siblings who had to help raise each other alone until they were placed in foster care. Foster care became even worse, moving from family to family - from one household that gave Jarvis a taste of actual love to one where he and other foster children were abused and kept only for the money they brought in to the cruel caretakers. He soon felt safer inside walls: a boys' home, a military academy for boys (where he was abused constantly as well), and eventually, prison.

He tells his story with heart and great detail. Once inside San Quentin as an adult, the story hastens through details of his conviction for a crime most believe he didn't commit (conspiracy to kill a guard), his conversion to Buddhism, and his experiences inside one of America's most notorious prisons. This is the only disappointment in an otherwise riveting book. I'd have loved to learn more about how he manages to sustain his practice inside a federal penitentiary, what death row is like for him, and how he is seeking to have his death sentence revoked. He touches on these in the final 50 pages or so, but after a riveting ride through the fine details of his life in the first 200 pages, it felt as if the rest of the book was edited down, or he just felt the story he needed to tell was what led him to this point in his life, rather than these more current chapters in his adulthood.

I'm grateful for his story. As one who volunteers with incarcerated youth - teaching meditation - it helps me understand just how traumatic the path is that leads many young people into detention centers. Masters helps me better understand how one's value of their own life - and the lives of others - deteriorates over time, slowly eroding through harrowing experiences of violence and cruelty, and how - for many - crime is the only way they can see to survive, to escape, or in many cases, the only behavior they've been raised to understand. When you're raised in darkness, it's hard for a child to understand the promise of light.

Through it all, Jarvis Jay Masters hung on to the tattered pieces of his humanity and found a way to reconcile the road he journeyed that led to San Quentin with how he could find the most hopeful approach to emotional and spiritual freedom, even in solitary confinement.

This is a very good book, told with no punches pulled. I'd have loved for more about Jarvis' life as an adult, an inmate, and a Buddhist, but perhaps it's more compelling to know about the years that brought him where he is today. ( )

tragic childhood, escalating criminal behavior