Freedom within

New York State’s Longest Serving Inmate

In this memoir, James R. Moore writes about his fifty-six years in New York State prisons. He is currently the longest-serving inmate in that system. He was 29 years of age when he was convicted of murdering a 14-year-old girl. He is now 85.

Since 1982, Jim has gone in front of the parole board twenty times. On each occasion the commissioners have been unwilling to consider him for release based on the “horrific nature of the crime” – and on their insistent belief that he has “made no efforts to rehabilitate himself” and thus “poses a danger to society.”

Neither could be further from the truth!

A SYMBOL OF HOPE

For most of his years in prison Jim has been employed in positions of responsibility. And he’s been devoted to Buddhist practice since 1975, having run the Buddhist Zendo at Auburn Correctional Facility after the Supreme Court allowed prisoners to study religions other than Christianity, and having studied Tibetan Buddhism since the early 1990s.

Jim received five university degrees during his incarceration. He completed his associate degree in business administration in 1980; his bachelor’s degree in business administration in 1982; his master’s degree in American studies in 1984; his master’s degree in business administration in 1988; and his doctorate in business management in 1991.

Jim has more than succeeded in rehabilitating himself within a corrections system that is not conducive to human growth. He has become a symbol of hope for many of the inmates, many corrections workers and administrators, and indeed, those who have the ability to truly see who he has become.

In 1988, in a rare case of support, a parole board commissioner said, “You are a model for other inmates to aspire to! If every inmate inside could reach the heights you have reached . . . this would be a fantastic criminal justice system.”

“I AM AT PEACE”

As Jim says in the Prologue: “Viktor E. Frankel said, ‘Everything can be taken from a person but one thing, the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.’

“And, as Lama Zopa Rinpoche, my Buddhist teacher says, ‘We can learn to transform problems into happiness.’

“By going within, I have discovered who I really am. I have never denied my crime. I deeply regret the intense pain I caused for others – and the hell I created for myself. It is precisely because I have taken responsibility for all of this that I have changed.

“I’ve been transformed, and no matter what happens I am at peace.”