Transcriber: Yuko Niizeki Reviewer: Denise RQ
This is a story of a maximum security prison in Alabama
that decided to take a risk,
decided to do something so unusual
that I think I could actually call it revolutionary.
I've been working with prisoners in the Boston area for many years,
but in 1999, I went down to visit this prison in Alabama
and this is the story about what's been happening
down there since.
Donaldson correctional facility
is deep in the Alabama countryside.
It's known amongst the prisoners as "The House of Pain."
It's the end of the prison system.
There is nowhere lower you can go in the Alabama prison system.
1,500 prisoners live inside.
Many have life sentences.
Many also have something called life without parole.
There is a heavy atmosphere of hopelessness and despair,
that saturates the place.
The prison is surrounded by razor-wire fencing,
which actually looks very beautiful when the sun is shining on it.
But don't be fooled by it.
This is the last gate before going inside the prison
and once you pass through this gate you begin to see the prisoners.
This is a gladiator world;
watch your back, be strong, hide your emotions.
Be ready to fight at a moment's notice.
Big Ed,
drug dealer,
gang leader.
He was just released from 4 years in solitary confinement.
He was afraid of no one.
But actually he was afraid of himself,
and his bottled-up anger.
Grady, abandoned by his mother
when he was a small boy.
Life without parole for standing-by and witnessing a murder
and doing nothing to stop it,
and then leaving the crime scene with the murderers,
8 and a half years on death row,
filled with anger and grief.
Johnny ran away from home as a small boy
following the accidental death of his baby sister.
He spent most of the last 40 years in prison,
and those have been years of violence
and multiple attempts to escape from prison.
Charles, 20 years for homicide.
Larry, drug addict,
serious heart disease,
life without parole,
terrified of being forgotten,
and dying behind bars.
Omar, 3 strikes and you're out.
Life without parole.
As a school boy, he and Condoleezza Rice
were always the top students in the school.
Later, as a promising college student,
drugs took him down a different path:
two armed robberies and drug addiction,
filled with a sense of wasted promise.
Like all the rest, trapped behind bars.
This is a really tough place.
This prison is filled with people that society has deemed
too dangerous or too dysfunctional to live on the outside.
However, the prison environment is actually perpetuating those very behaviors
that sent them there in the first place.
And you should know that over 95% of the prisoners
are going to return to the streets and your neighborhoods.
But I also learned, on that first visit,
that nobody was happy with the situation at Donaldson.
Nobody wanted to work there,
it was always understaffed because nobody wanted to go to Donaldson.
Nobody felt safe.
The prisoners weren't safe. The staff wasn't safe.
But I found that people were looking for solutions.
And after my first visit to Donaldson,
a radical idea began to spread.
First it spread among the prisoners,
and then is spread among the staff,
that maybe meditation could help.
So they turned to an intensive, rigorous, ancient meditation program
called Vipassana.
It is based on the teachings of the Buddha.
It requires 100 hours of meditation
in silence and stillness over a 10-day period of time.
The director of treatment for the Alabama Department of Corrections
lead the charge.
There was a series of meetings between the prison staff
and the Vipassana leadership.
And in 2002,
right in the heart of the Bible Belt,
Vipassana was brought behind the walls of Donaldson prison.
East meets West in the Deep South.
It was an amazing thing when it happened.
Day 0, the prisoners must gather their belongings
and bring them into the gym.
The gymnasium was transformed into a meditation sanctuary.
Everybody was about to be locked up together in the gym.
In prison your are triple or quadruply locked down anyway,
and here they were behind another locked door.
The teachers, of course, were afraid of the prisoners.
Somebody had told them that these guys could kill you.
But the prisoners were terrified of the teachers.
They were thinking:
"Who were these freaks, who want to be locked inside prison with us?"
And then in the moments
just before silence fell and the program began,
the prisoners gathered together and made a rallying cry,
"20 in, 20 out, 20 strong."
And they determined in that moment
that nobody was going to drop out of that program,
no matter what happened.
And behind this locked door,
their journey was about to begin.
Alone together,
seated on their meditation mats,
riding on the waves of emotion and pain.
For the first 3 days,
they are taught the skill called Anapana,
which means focusing on the breath as it moves across the upper lip
and in and out of the nostrils.
For 30 hours,
they do Anapana,
30 hours in 3 days.
When the mind wonders they have to come back to the breath,
over and over and over again.
They were sweating and shaking and itching, trying to be still.
At the end of the 30 hours,
their minds were sharp and focused,
and on Day 4, they were taught the skill of Vipassana,
and this is what they must do for the next 7 days.
They take the sharply focused mind,
and move it systematically through the body,
and keep moving it through the body,
journeying into the areas that have never been explored before.
As memories rose to the surface,
they had to face those memories.
I've done this program myself, Vipassana, several times.
It's not easy.
But to do it inside a prison,
where everything is locked inside,
nothing gets explored.
That takes real courage.
The teacher said that they had never seen,
in all their experiences teaching Vipassana
in centers around the world,
they have never seen anyone like these 20 prisoners.
As the trust grew between the teachers and the prisoners,
the prisoners' work deepened.
Grady was able to look up close at that crime,
something he had never been able to tolerate doing before.
Big Ed had to face the that his daughter had died in a playground accident.
And even though he had been taken to her funeral in shackles,
he still couldn't let himself come to the truth that she'd died.
It was too much to tolerate in prison.
Wayne was unable to sit and focus.
He was squirming, jumping, and running from the mat.
Finally on Day 6, he was given a choice by the teachers.
Either he had to leave the program right then and there,
or he had to sit and focus
on whatever it was that he was avoiding.
So finally in that moment, with that wise advise,
he sat, and went inside,
and faced himself for the first time.
And then the program ended
and the men were about to walk out of the sanctuary
and packed into their chaotic lives as prisoners.
Everybody was thinking:
"What are these guys going to be like?
Who are they going to be today?"
They walked out of that door
and they seemed to carry a sense of calm dignity.
They couldn't be provoked or upset so easily.
They seemed to have changed.
They formed a brotherhood.
They called themselves "The Dhamma Brothers."
In the language of the Buddha
it means the seekers of wisdom and truth.
They were loyal to their practice,
even when it meant gathering twice a day to meditate together.
Then, one day, a phone call was placed
to the Commissioner of the Department of Corrections
and somebody said:
"You better watch out what is happening at Donaldson.
Those prisoners are being turned into Buddhists." (Laughter)
And that was all is took.
The program was shut down.
The men were forbidden to meet or meditate,
and Vipassana was outlawed at Donaldson.
But many of them continued to gather and meditate.
This is Ed's cell, and Ed and Charles on the bottom bunk,
and that's Wayne on the top bunk.
Johnny, finally able to quiet his restless spirit,
and be where he was,
and to have his emotions and his memories without resorting to violence.
Listen to the words of Charles and Larry
as they say a little bit about their practices.
Charles: [It's almost like you find a state of inner peace.
When you are in a volatile situation,
and you know it's a volatile situation,
but you know that you can't walk away
because the choices are always there,
no matter what the choices are always there
even when we choose to do the wrong things,
the choices are always there.
I think Vipassana has helped me to see the time I can take the choice
before it gets out of control,
and I am able to do that now.
Larry: You interact with people differently.
I I know I do. I do, I interact with people differently.
Now I am conscient of what my actions might do.
I think about what my actions might cause that person to feel towards me.
Charles: You're still the same person.
What it is, is you begin to recognize who you are,
and by recognizing who you are you learn that "Hey, I've got control.
I can make choices that will change the outlook, experience, or result
of a situation or an experience.
Which ever you go, if you go the wrong way,
then it's going to produce this,
If you go the right way, then it's going to produce this,
so, once we recognize and accept who we are,
on that level to say there is a sense of acceptance,
and a sense that, you can't change other people,
but you can get them to see you differently;
and if they see you differently, they begin to see themselves differently,
because, really, the things we don't like in other people,
[are the things we don't like in ourselves.
It becomes a sense of acceptance.]
Four years after the shutdown,
Vipassana was brought back inside Donaldson in 2006.
Now 400 prisoners have been able to take this program.
This have been a personal journey for me.
I helped initiate and establish the Vipassana program at Donaldson.
Several years ago I released a documentary film,
and published a book about the story of the Dhamma Brothers.
But when I first started documenting this story,
I thought "Maybe the Dhamma Brothers can become teachers for us,"
because we don't hear from these people.
We don't hear from these 2 million plus people, who are incarcerated,
we don't hear their voices.
And I thought that they could teach us, and then I thought, " No, that's silly."
But actually, that's what I see happening right now,
with the story of the Dhamma Brothers.
Thank you. (Applause)