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There is something ugly about incarceration. Over 2.2 million people are locked in jails and prisons in the united states; $60 billion a year is spent to support this effort. But there is also the old comparison of the prison with the monk's cell, a place of contemplation and self-reflection, and Jean Genet's sense of “a close relationship between flowers and convicts” (9). As a probation officer I know likes to remind me, “If you want to find Jesus, just go into the prisons. He is always there.” In any discussion of prisons, there are always opposing terms to consider: incarceration and freedom, body and consciousness, the hard core and the vulnerable, mind-forged manacles and visionary imagination.

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