Amnesty International refers to the degrading conditions of incarceration including: severe overcrowding, frequent rapes and beatings, prolonged and arbitrary use of solitary confinement, grossly unsanitary living conditions and deprivation of elementary medical care. In terms of public safety, these practices (and policies that allow them to flourish) are "no-win" solutions for all.
In his groundbreaking book Violence, Reflections on an American Epidemic Gilligan states that as a nation we seem to have lost sight of the fact that punishing a criminal in this way does not protect the public; instead, it runs the serious risk of releasing a human time bomb back into the community - a person ready to explode the moment he or she leaves a prison setting.
Gilligan cites a 1980 court-ordered investigation of conditions in one Florida prison, which found that: "assaults, rapes... and stabbings were commonplace... So prevalent was the issue of sexual assault that one correction officer quoted... said that a young inmate's chances of avoiding rape were... almost zero... 'He'll get raped within the first twenty-four hours to forty-eight hours. That's almost standard.'"
This is the retributive approach to "justice", which operates somewhat like a re-tooling machine, the idea being that "offenders" who need to be in the "corrections systems" are akin to errant machine-parts: "misfits" that are "malfunctioning" in the social order.
The solution is to "make them miserable enough," "teach them a lesson," and "grind them down"; perhaps, then, they will learn how to "fit into society." Inaccurate or illogical as this notion may seem, its prevalence as a guiding principle is attested to in the words of an articulate teenager, interviewed in a television Nightline special on juvenile offenders. Here this young man shares his views regarding the likelihood of his returning to the community to prey on others: "They're just teaching me the tricks of the trade for when I get out. People come out the same as they went in. The [prison] authorities act like: 'I'm going to hammer you down until you become a good person.'" (Nightline, 2/29/2000)
The Prison-Ashram Project
Into the belly of this beast - like some mythical knight of old, Bo Lozoff spent over 30 years teaching yoga and meditation, giving talks, making music, writing books and exchanging letters with inmates (which he published in his books and newsletters with their permission).
But Bo was far different from a typical jailhouse preacher. He had given years to meditation and the practice of a variety of other spiritual disciplines.
At the time the Prison-Ashram project originated he had been living in an ashram, where he ate meals in groups, did yoga and meditation, had a job, wore a uniform, and had time for study, contemplation, and silence.
Well, many of these circumstances were precisely the situations in which inmates found themselves!
His goal was re-frame the prison experience as a fire of transformation. Suffering can motivate some people to go within themselves to seek both psychological and spiritual truth - especially when they cannot travel forward or backward (due to prison walls!).
So, he gave incarcerated persons a choice: they could continue to see themselves and operate as "cons" - or they could choose to view themselves as monks or nuns in an extraordinary and difficult situation, yet in a place where they could devote themselves to spiritual practices and self-transformation. It was up to them.
I, partly inspired by the Prison Ashram Project, also, went into the belly of the beast - men's and women's prisons and jails - as a psychotherapist (or as inmates called us, "Psyches"). In addition to individual therapy, I designed and led groups. None were mandatory (although they were an excuse to get out of one's cell!). My goal was to create a sense of fascination and fresh awareness.
Among them was a highly successful group focused on genograms (family trees); another, called, "Taking care of your four bodies" (I made it clear that the class was not for serial killers!) allowed us to spend a month on each of their physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual "bodies" - focused on self-care.
Yet another group (of men) were provided with an opportunity to contemplate the four Jungian male archetypes - King, Warrior, Magician, and Lover (and their shadows). Two other groups of women utilized videos by Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh and charismatic motivational speaker/talk show host, Les Brown, who himself had worked with prisoners. I showed up as authentically as possible (which included a certain amount of self-disclosure), at the same time paradoxically using humor and the "confusion technique," originated by Milton Erickson, to shake inmates out of their habitual mental set and hopefully, nurture openness.
There was a subtle, but important difference between the emphasis of my work and that of Lozoff. I focused first on the psychological dimension of inmates' distress - within a spiritual context, where Lozoff focused primarily on the spiritual context of inmates' lives, secondarily adding a psychological dimension.
However, this set of articles and particularly the next, focuses not primarily on my own, but rather on Lozoff's work.
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