Vipassana Behind Bars Inside a maximum security Alabama penitentiary inmates break out of the prison of their minds

By MICHAEL PANCOE
with SYD BAUMEL

Every now and again I would laugh at the improbability of the situation – me, a suburban Winnipegger, blissfully incarcerated in a maximum security Alabama state prison nicknamed The House of Pain.

No, I hadn’t been locked up for a violent crime. I was there to help a small group of inmates break free, without breaking out. Indeed, many of these determined convicts would rarely leave a single room during my entire ten-day visit.

Last spring, out of the 1500-plus inmates at the W.E. Donaldson Correctional Facility in Bessemer, Alabama, 19 volunteered to take the second Vipassana meditation course ever to be offered in a North American maximum security prison. It wasn't intended to be a picnic. For ten days the men would forgo even the few permitted comforts and liberties of prison life – cigarettes, books, conversation, TV – and spend up to ten hours a day in silent meditation.

The first course had been held just a few months before at Donaldson. Both were the culmination of over two years of planning and organizing by Alabama state corrections staff and Massachusetts representatives of a global Vipassana prison outreach initiative that had begun over 25 years earlier in Gujarat, India.

The contrast between the humane mission of the course – to teach hardened convicts to see through the tangle of mental complexes at the root of their troubles – and the harsh setting couldn't have been more striking. As Bruce Stewart, an assistant teacher during the first course at Donaldson, later put it, the penitentiary "had a reputation of being Alabama’s most violent and brutal prison. It’s considered a dead end for most of the inmates incarcerated there, many of whom are serving life sentences without parole." Some are on death row.

By the time we arrived, that reputation had mercifully begun to change. Staff and administration were trying to make Donaldson a place for rehabilitation, not just incarceration. The Vipassana course was a product of that process. Having myself recently helped at a Vipassana course for a very different clientele – upscale business and community leaders in Lenox, Massachusetts – I was asked if I'd like to help with food preparation and setup at Donaldson too. I jumped at the opportunity.

In Pali – the language of the Buddha – passana means "seeing in the ordinary way, with one's eyes open." Vipassana means to see things as they really are, insight. The purpose of Vipassana, or insight, meditation is to recognize and overcome the causes of one's suffering (and the suffering one causes to others) through patient and penetrating self-observation – no mantras, rituals, or even gurus required. 

S.N. Goenka, an 80-year-old retired Indian industrialist, is perhaps the most active teacher of Vipassana meditation in the world today. A student of the late Sayagyi U Ba Khin, since 1969 Goenka has personally taught over 300 Vipassana meditation courses to tens of thousands of people. Last year, while touring North America, Goenka was profiled by Emmy award-winning independent filmmaker Bennett Miller. It was the ten-day, retreat-style Vipassana course, long taught by Goenka and his predecessors,that was taught to the elite in Massachusetts and the convicts in Donaldson.

There are three major steps or stages in the ten-day course: 

• First, participants vow to abstain from any action that would disturb the peace – their own or others'. In Pali, this is called sila. Sila is required because it's impossible to pursue the delicate task of meditative introspection if your behaviour is not conducive to calm and balance. Meditators therefore vow not to kill, steal, commit sexual misconduct, lie, or use intoxicants. 
• The second step is developing concentration (samadhi). To be able to focus for hours at a time on our inner life, we first need to wean our minds from everyday distractions. This is accomplished during the first three and a half days by focusing for about ten hours a day (in multiple sessions) on the subtle sensations of the breath as it flows in and out of the nostrils. 
• On the fourth day, participants are ready for the final step: practising Vipassana meditation itself. The same attention that has followed the breath so intently for three days can now be directed to witnessing all the body's sensations and the thoughts and feelings associated with them. Such intense focus often triggers floods of emotion-laden memories and ruminations – joys, sorrows, dreams, wishes, hurts, resentments – the whole three-ring circus of our inner life. Importantly, meditators are taught to "witness" this passing show patiently, without judging or reacting. The very powerful combination of prolonged inner attention and determined detachment is what helps the meditator develop insight, equanimity, and freedom from compulsion. For convicted felons and afflicted civilians alike, this emerging ability to reflect before reacting is a key to self-empowerment. 

Fortunately, more and more correctional facilities are looking for innovative ways to break the cycle. At the North Rehabilitation Facility – a minimum security prison in Seattle, Washington – Vipassana courses have had such positive effects on recidivism (as they have in other countries) that the U.S. National Institutes of Health have funded a three-year study by researchers from the University of Washington. According to a progress report published at the Vipassana Meditation Website (www.dhamma.org), "preliminary results are impressive and seem to show radical and statistically significant changes in the inmates which have attended Vipassana courses versus a control group which has not."

In India, Vipassana has been taught in prisons since the 1970s. The award-winning documentary Doing Time, Doing Vipassana tells how an extraordinary woman named Kiran Bedi introduced the practice in 1994 to one of the most notorious, toughest, and largest prisons in India – Tihar Central Jail – while she was Inspector General of the Delhi prison. The results of that course, taught by Goenka and his assistants, were so positive that another soon followed with over 1000 inmates – one of the largest in modern times. Thanks largely to Bedi's influential work, Tihar now boasts a permanent meditation centre and Vipassana has spread to prisons around the world. There have even been over a dozen courses for Indian police cadets.

The first course at Donaldson in January of 2002 had been a remarkable success. Most of the 20 participants had been incarcerated for violent crimes. About half were serving a life sentence, some with no hope of parole. Yet every single man finished the course. As one exclaimed with pride at the graduation ceremony: "Twenty in, twenty out, and twenty strong!" 

It wasn't just the inmates who were moved by the experience, according to Bruce Stewart, who wrote about it in an email: 

Vipassana courses are conducted in what is called "Noble Silence." No communication is permitted except for basic needs like personal hygiene and to question the instructor about one's meditation practice.

A prison gym temporarily divided by a hanging blue tarp into three sections – a meditation hall, a dining hall, and sleeping quarters – was the inmates' home for the entire course. A shower, sink, and two toilets provided for their personal hygiene. Two times a day they were given an opportunity to walk outdoors in a specially cordoned off area. The guards would clear the hallways of other inmates to maintain the necessary atmosphere of seclusion and follow any inmates who felt like stretching their legs outside to a patch of grass enclosed by a brick wall in the sweltering southern heat. 

Inside the hushed gym, the small, one metre-square space around their meditation seats provided the men with some of the only peace and quiet they said they'd ever had behind bars. Ironically, it was one of the noisiest meditation halls I'd ever been in, with the constant crackle of CO radios, the piercing jingle of keys, and the clang of big metal doors locking and unlocking all day. The frequent banging on a door just outside the gym to another wing of the facility would regularly send a crashing echo our way, like a giant high hat smashing in a cement tunnel. 

But for the convicts meditating inside, this was peace; this was quiet. They were in here, and all that was out there. 

Though some of the convicts had likely never even heard of meditation before now, they took to it like ducks to water. As with the first course, we civilian meditators and the corrections staff alike were moved by the prisoners' determination to train and tame their minds. 

For most of these men, the course touched places in their hearts that had lain dormant throughout their time in the cold concrete and metal institution. It was a place that rippled with revenge, anger, hatred, and survival. One day a senior corrections officers took a few of us aside to show us a display case full of confiscated weapons crafted by the inmates, some with remarkable ingenuity. Nicknamed "Mad Dawg" by the prisoners, the officer perfectly evoked the Hollywood stereotype of a Southern state guard or highway patrolman. "You can bet every one of your little meditating friends in there got their blades sittin' right under their pillow," he told us in his thick Alabama accent. 

Later, two of the inmates – graduates of the first course who were helping us supervise this one – chuckled at Mad Dawg's remark and said they hadn't owned a weapon in years.

Once, one of the two men shared with me his deep gratitude and wonder at the energy the few of us "outsiders" brought to the oppressive prison environment. From the time they landed in Donaldson, men would be ground down by the forbidding atmosphere of failure, competition, and authority and starved for warmth and kindness. 

Sometimes I would overhear a meditator animatedly telling the instructor, Bruce Stewart, of his elation at having finally awakened to an important truth that had slipped under the radar for decades. Such glimpses of joy were rare in The House of Pain.

On the last day, when the first meal was being served after the silence had been lifted, we were encouraged to mingle with the inmates and talk. 

The one fellow I seem to remember the most was still visibly awestruck. He was short and stocky with tatoos all over his muscular body. Speaking with a Southern accent so thick I could hardly understand him sometimes, he searched for words to describe "the journey" he'd been on for the past ten days. He told me how he'd run the gamut from discovering wellsprings of inner joy, to enduring hours of boredom, pain, or agitation, to reliving long-lost memories, to endlessly replaying past experiences and thinking about the future. But behind it all there had been a feeling of calm and peace unlike any he'd ever known. 

"I ain't never done nothing like this before," he said, explaining that while he'd done all kinds of things and taken all sorts of drugs in his fiftysomething years, this was something real.

Meeting the prisoners as they emerged from their ten days of silence was a revelation for me of how people can truly change, given the tools. Through their own honest efforts – not by force or fear of punishment – these men had discovered an inner path to true freedom of choice. 

Vipassana is a technique, not a religion. People of all faiths (and of no faith at all) have practised it without conflict. My ten-day "prison sentence" vividly reminded me that this ancient art of living, first taught over 2500 years ago, is still a vital means of self-transformation for Alabama prisoners and Winnipeg suburbanites alike.

Michael Pancoe has practised Vipassana meditation for three years. He and other members of The Manitoba Vipassana Foundation continue to organize 10-day Vipassana courses in the Winnipeg area. For more information, call or email Michael at (204) 254-1679, info@mb.ca.dhamma.org, or visit www.dhamma.org. Aquarian editor Syd Baumel has meditated off and on for 30 years.