Oshan Cook is known in the San Francisco Bay Area as a peaceful promoter of wellness and community. He used to spend his free time doing things like volunteering for community gardens and sending books to prisoners; then he was sent to prison himself.

Oshan’s trade is tea. He’s the owner of San Francisco Teahouse Om Shan Tea, which hosted artists, teachers, and healers, as well as AA and 12-step meetings. The teahouse and the Om Shan Tea mobile tea service both promoted tea culture as an alternative to drug and alcohol abuse.

Oshan Cook was arrested on April 22nd, 2010, for allegedly distributing wholesale quantities of LSD and MDMA. After entering a plea of not guilty, his first trial was declared a mistrial; it was a hung jury. He was later retried and found guilty. He was denied an appeal in September 2015.

Originally sentenced to 12.5 years in prison, Oshan is likely to be released in January of 2020, having served about 7.5 years of his original sentence. He is currently held at Sheridan Correctional Camp in Sheridan, Oregon, near Portland.

In Oshan’s most recent open letter from prison, he writes about how he’s been spending his time there. Since he’s been incarcerated, Oshan has earned two Associate’s Degrees through a correspondence college, graduating with a 4.0 GPA. Oshan has taught both mystical poetry and restaurant business classes in prison and is lobbying to teach a nonviolent communication class.

Oshan has read over 350 books in prison, and quotes Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky while describing the task of mentally and emotionally surviving his experience:

“Nietzsche said ‘He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.’ I have a Why to live for — it pulses through my veins, glows in my heart, ripples across my mind. I often feel I will explode with all the energy I have stored up. My brain crackles with electricity, ideas sparking off of each other — sometimes I think they will catch fire. Like a bow pulled taut, quivering at the edge of myself, I yearn to fly forth into the world. ‘There is only one thing that I dread,’ said Dostoevsky, ‘not to be worthy of my sufferings.’ I truly hope that my suffering and experiences in here will in the end benefit all beings.”

This compassionate, creative man is not the person that most of us imagine when we picture a scary criminal. Are people like Oshan truly a threat to our society? Do they need to be locked away in cages?