Prison-Ashram Project
Ashram is a Sanskrit word meaning "House of God." In the East, an ashram is a place where people
live for some period of time in order to strengthen their spiritual practice and
self-discipline. Many ashrams are very strict. Residents, or ashramites, abide by
an exhaustive schedule and live very simply, without many comforts or luxuries.
In 1973, Bo Lozoff and Ram Dass came up with the idea to help prisoners to use their prisons as ashrams if they were tired enough of seeing themselves as convicts just biding their time until they were released. Ram Dass funded the work, and Bo began corresponding with prisoners and, with their feedback, developing spiritual materials especially suited to that environment.
Neither Bo nor Ram Dass ever imagined that hundreds of thousands of hard-core convicts would be interested in such an idea. But within the first couple of years, the letters began pouring in and have not stopped to this day. By 1975, the Prison-Ashram Project had become Bo's full time job, and that same year Sita committed herself to the work as well. Bo & Sita have visited over 500 prisons, leading thousands of workshops. Bo's books, in particular the well-known We're All Doing Time, have become "the convicts' Bible" in institutions around the world. All of these books, as well as many of our tapes, are sent free of charge to any prison inmate who requests them.
The primary purpose of the Prison-Ashram Project is to inspire and encourage prisoners and prison staff to recognize their depth as human beings, and to behave accordingly. Our inmost nature is divine. The nature of our lives is an incomprehensibly wonderful mystery which each human being can experience only in solitude and silence. Prisoners have the opportunity to dedicate themselves to this inward journey without the distractions and luxuries which occupy many people in the "free world."
Bo teaches a balance between "Communion," which is an entirely inward, transcendent experience, and "Community," which includes everything else -- our behavior toward others, our worldly goals, our treatment of the planet and its resources, etc. His writings and talks, therefore, center both on personal spiritual practice, and committed social activism. The Prison-Ashram Project encourages prisoners to take responsibility for changing their prisons, their communities, and the world.
The Project has a sister organization in the UK. The Prison Phoenix Trust sends out free copies of We're All Doing Time and another book called Becoming Free Through Meditation and Yoga, by Sister Elaine MacInnes. It also sponsors yoga and meditation classes in British prisons, distributes newsletters and carries on correspondence. Click here for their website, or reach them at: PO Box 328, Oxford OX1 1PJ, UK
The French translation of We're All Doing Time, called Nous Sommes Tous Dans une Prison, is available free to prisoners and at one-half list price for prison workers. Write in French or English to: Association Lumiere en Prison, case postale 505, CH-Morges, SWITZERLAND; or to ALP Quebec, 910 rue LaBelle, Saint-Jerome, Quebec, CANADA J7Z 5M5.
(In France, books cannot be sent directly to prisons, but may be brought in during visits. So if you write to ALP from France, please give the name and address of a person authorized to take the book to an inmate during visiting hours.)
We're All Doing Time is available from HKF in English and Spanish, through our catalog. It is sent free of charge to prison inmates, and anyone else who genuinely can't afford it
The Italian version of We're All Doing Time is now available free to prisoners. We don't have any copies for sale to the public, but can put you in touch with the Italian publisher for purchase copies.
The Dutch version of We're All Doing Time is now available free to Dutch-speaking prisoners, and for sale to others. Write to the publisher directly: Franz Drost, P.I. Haaglande Afd. Onderwijs, Postbus 87810 2508 DE Den Haag.
The Czech version of We're All Doing Time is now available as an e-book for free download. Go here.
Can We Do Better Than Our Present Prison System?
by Bo Lozoff, Director
The primary work of Human Kindness Foundation is to offer spiritual support to people regardless of their circumstances. However, because we have been in so many prisons - I personally have visited over 600 institutions - we feel a responsibility to offer this brief statement into the widespread debate over crime and punishment, especially in the U.S.A. (most of the following can be applied to other countries as well).The Mess We’re In Now
America locks up more of its population than any other nation on Earth, a rate five times greater than most industrialized nations. In 1970 there were fewer than 200,000 prisoners in the U.S.A. Now, less than thirty years later, California alone has nearly that many. There are nearly two million across the country. The states are spending an average of $100 million per year on new prisons. Prisoners currently sleep on floors, in tents, in converted broom closets and gymnasiums, or in double or triple bunks in cells that were designed for one inmate. For the most part, prisons are barbaric, terrifying places. Crime victims derive no benefit from this misery. We offer convicts no opportunities to learn compassion or take responsibility for what they have done, nor make restitution or offer atonement to their victims in any practical ways.
Approximately 240,000 brutal rapes occur in our prison system each year. Most of the victims are young, nonviolent male inmates, many of them teenaged first offenders. They are traumatized beyond imagination. Michael Fay’s caning in Singapore was child’s play compared to the reception he would have had in nearly any state prison in America. Contrary to political sloganeering, we are not soft on criminals. We are irresponsibly vicious.
Nearly 70% of all US prisoners are serving time for nonviolent offenses. Please let that sink in, because it’s probably not the image you’ve received from the media. We’ve been led to imagine a legion of heartless monsters plotting to get out and hurt us again. The truth is, most prison inmates are confused, disorganized, and often pathetic individuals who would love to turn their lives around if given a realistic chance. Unfortunately, many of those nonviolent offenders will no longer be nonviolent by the time they leave prison. Prisons are not scaring offenders away from crime; they are incapacitating them so they are hardly fit for anything else.
In other words, the criminal justice system that we’re paying for so dearly simply isn’t working. And yet we keep on throwing more money into it. So how do we start fixing what’s broken? Here are a few places to begin:
Compassion Versus Rage
There are simple universal laws of human life which cannot be violated without paying a painful price. Every great spiritual, philosophic and religious tradition has emphasized compassion, reconciliation, forgiveness and responsibility. These are not suggestions, they are instructions. If we follow them we will thrive, if not we will suffer. The socially-sanctioned hatred and rage which we express toward criminals in modern times violates these timeless instructions. We are breaking a fundamental spiritual law, and the price we are paying for it is increased crime, violence, depravity, hopelessness, and of course, more hatred and rage.
Our children inherit these destructive attitudes. Teen suicide has doubled and teen homicide has tripled in recent years. Many children carry weapons to school. Our children are absorbing the message that it’s okay to despise and harm people whom they perceive as enemies. That is not a mature or civilized philosophy. We are crossing a dangerous threshold of violence and ill-will. We have already crossed it in many movies and TV shows. Even at home around the dinner-table, children may hear words like "scumbag" and "animal" to describe criminals. They may hear jokes or celebratory remarks about the execution of a human being. Children cannot unlearn such views and behavioral patterns overnight.
We must change our attitudes toward those who wrong us. That doesn’t mean we allow people to hurt us or rob us or harm our communities. After all, we don’t allow our children to do cruel or immoral things as they are growing up, but when they do, we don’t hate them for it. We don’t punish them so viciously that they can hardly function for the rest of their lives. We don’t throw them out of our home and tell them to fend for themselves forever. Yet that is what we do in our criminal justice system. By venting our rage and hatred, we make things worse. We make people worse. We take many confused, mostly selfish young men and women, and we create bitter, violent career criminals out of them.
We must also bear in mind that many of the greatest saints and sages of all religions were once criminals, drunkards, prostitutes and even killers. St. Paul was once Saul of Tarsus, a vicious persecutor and killer of Christians. Religious history is filled with such redeemed, transformed sages. As we give up our belief in redemption and transformation, we are crossing another line, one of narrow-mindedness, which will render us poorer indeed. Some of the potential sages and activists of our times may be languishing in prison cells right now. We must seek to maximize rather than destroy such potential.
Drugs Are a Public Health Problem, Not A Criminal Justice Problem
Nonviolent drug addicts are clogging our nation’s prisons. Sixty-one percent of federal prison inmates are doing time for drug offenses, up from 18% in 1980. All this incarceration is doing nothing to solve the drug problem. Many wardens, judges, and other officials know this, but it has become political suicide to admit it publicly. We must insist upon a mature dialogue about the drug problem. Keep in mind that the high-level drug dealers aren’t cluttering up our prisons; they’re too rich and smart to get caught. They hire addicts or kids, sometimes as young as eleven or twelve, to take most of the risks.
We need to address these issues in ourselves, our families, our communities. And we must press for changes in drug laws -- not to legalize all drugs, because it’s not that simple. But we do have to decriminalize their use, treating the problem as the public-health issue it is. Without drug offenders, our prisons would have more than enough room to hold dangerous criminals. As a result, we wouldn’t need to build a single new prison, saving us $5 billion a year. If we spent a fraction of that on rehabilitation centers and community revitalization programs, we’d begin to put drug dealers out of business in the only way that will last: by drying up their market.
Separate Violent And Nonviolent Offenders Right From The Start
It’s inconceivable that we routinely dump nonviolent offenders into prison cells with violent ones, even in local jails and holding tanks. What are we thinking? I know one fellow who was arrested for participating in a Quaker peace vigil and was jailed in lieu of paying a ten-dollar fine. In a forty-eight-hour period, he was savagely raped and traded back and forth among more than fifty violent prisoners. That was twenty years ago, and since then he has had years of therapy, and yet he has never recovered emotionally. His entire life still centers around the decision of one prison superintendent to place him in a violent cellblock in order to teach him a lesson.
Most nonviolent offenders do in fact learn a lesson: how to be violent. Ironically, we spend an average of $20,000 per year, per inmate, teaching them this. For less than that we could be sending every nonviolent offender to college. We need to offer conflict-resolution training such as the "Alternatives to Violence" programs currently being conducted by and for convicts around the country. Such training should be required for all prisoners and staff.
None of us, including prison staff, should accept violence as a fact of prison life, and it would be easy not to. We could designate certain facilities as zero-violence areas and allow inmates to live there as long as they don’t commit — or even threaten to commit — a single violent act. The great majority of prisoners would sign up for such a place, I can assure you. Only about 10% of the prison population sets the terrorist tone for most institutions, and they are able to do that because the administration gives no support to the vast majority of inmates who just want to do their time, improve themselves in some way, and get out alive.
Join And Support The Restorative Justice Movement
For decades our justice system has been run according to the tenets of "retributive justice," a model based on exile and hatred. "Restorative justice" holds that when a crime occurs, there’s an injury to the community, and that injury needs to be healed. Restorative justice tries to bring the offender back into the community, if at all possible, rather than closing him out. Instead of "Get the hell out of here!" restorative justice says "Hey, get back in here! What are you doing that for? Don’t you know we need you as one of the good people in this community? What would your mama think?" It’s an entirely opposite approach.
I’m not saying that every offender is ready to be transformed into a good neighbor. Advocates of restorative justice are not naïve. Sadly, prisons may be a necessary part - a very small part - of a restorative justice system. And even then, prisons can be humane environments which maximize opportunities for the inmates to become decent and caring human beings.
What can you do?
First of all., if you become the victim of a crime, insist upon meeting your assailant. Insist upon being involved with the process of his or her restoration. Join or create a VORP (Victim-Offender Reconciliation Program) in your community. Tour your local jail or prison to see firsthand what your taxes pay for. Go in with a church or civic group to meet inmates. Become a pen pal to a prisoner who is seeking to change his/her life. Talk to your friends and colleagues about employing ex-cons (in nationwide surveys, most employers admit they won’t hire a person with a criminal record, so where are they supposed to work?). Reclaim your power and your responsibility, because the retributive system you have deferred to is not serving your best interests. Please take the issue of crime and punishment personally, because it is an issue which definitely affects you and your family and your descendants for generations to come.
We have to realize that we are all a part of this problem. If you vote, if you pay taxes, if you are afraid to walk alone at night, you are already involved. And so we have a choice to be involved solely in negative, destructive ways, such as home security systems, car alarms, personal weapons, etc., or in constructive ways which might actually change the problems. We all must make real changes — not just political ones, but also in our personal attitudes and lifestyles. America will not thrive, nor will we and our children be happy, by becoming a nation behind bars.
Human Kindness Foundation, PO Box 61619, Durham, NC 27715; (919) 383-5160