My inspiration in these troubled times, my guide to the possibilities of peace on the inside, is my friend Joe Labriola. I visited Joe Saturday at the medium security prison in Shirley, Mass., where he was moved last year. He had been a few yards up the road at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center, a maximum security prison where he wanted to stay because it meant a cell all his own. In medium security, he has a cellmate.

And Joe is a very private man. He has spent more than 35 years in prison and he has spent a lot of those years in segregation for his inmate activism. He once formed a political action committee to support Massachusetts prisoners’ right to vote. He has been head of veterans groups inside the prison system.

Joe was twice shot out of Vietnam when he was there with the Marines in the Wild West days in 1965-66. We first connected when he wrote to me about a column I had written about my Marine drill instructor. We salute at the beginning of our visits. Then we have great conversations, surrounded by people trying to claim private moments in a crowded room.

There is a small circle of friends Joe calls his fire team, after the most basic of Marine infantry units. We visit, exchange letters, talk with him on the phone. And we draw on his spirit, on his enduring ability to go deep inside himself to find the things that take him outside the prison.

He is about books and newspapers and thinking about things. He has studied religion and philosophy. He quotes a lot of Shakespeare. He meditates, sitting “zazen” in his cell — or as close to the cross-legged position as the pain from his shot-up leg will allow.

He fixes almost all his meals in his cell, refusing to eat what he considers a pathetic excuse for food served in the prison mess hall. Over the decades, he has developed an ability to put together decent chow from small packets of ingredients bought at the prison store.

I have eight volumes of Joe’s diaries on my desk. I can pull out any one of them, flip it open and find something to consider:

“Saw a story on the news about one of the world’s oldest chimps in Australia dying at the age of 60. I wonder how long that poor bastard was in a cage. I’m going to see if I can find out. I wonder too if his life in captivity had better quality to it than mine.” (July 20, 2007)

He finds fascination in small things, such as the ducks visible from his cell window, the changing colors of the seasons, the play of light on a stretch of field.

Checking in with him in these messed-up times is a wonderful way of sorting things out. A couple of hours with Joe, a couple of hours among people trying desperately to keep relationships intact under the strain of hard time, can give a person a real sense of the way small things add up to good fortune. The plummeting 401(k), political madness, the intense, life-changing experience of digital TV — it can all seem as trivial as it should after considering a man who has maintained a sense of wonder, a thirst for knowledge and a hell of a sense of humor after three-and-a-half decades of having the Commonwealth of Massachusetts do everything it can to separate him from his humanity.

Obviously, the members of his fire team would like to see him a free man. He is in the process of applying for a commutation of his life sentence for killing a drug dealer in Dedham in 1973. He has always denied the murder.

The commutation is a long shot. Joe might never be free from his prison cell. But he has sure found a way out of prison, and his friends are grateful.

bkerr@projo.com