Calvin Malone is nearing the end of a 20-year prison sentence. He’s also a practicing Buddhist. Oddly enough, it was in prison that Malone learned about Buddhism, and it’s the one thing that’s kept him going. Some of the stories he tells in Razor-Wire Dharma are hilarious, some are harrowing, but all express Buddhist wisdom as vividly as any practitioner could hope to do. This is true Buddhism: Malone is living it, and in the unlikeliest of places. For him, the choice between staying true to his principles of altruism, compassion, and nonharming — or just choosing to cast a blind eye — often requires that he quite literally jeopardize life, limb, and the few small comforts available to him to try to do what's right. If he can do it in jail, he can do it anywhere. And as his book in all its gritty beauty makes clear, so can we.
