A FEW REFLECTIONS ON PRISON AGGRESSION AND THE MEDITATIVE PATH

The Buddhist tradition gets regarded as pacifistic.  It definitely emphasizes not creating harm–not resorting to aggression in speech or physical violence.  But anyone who’s spent real time on the meditation seat knows that aggression often shadows thoughts in some form or another.  Over the decades you can see what a refined game it is.   Even pretty subtle thoughts can arise purely for the sake of dodging your direct experience and any raw feeling that goes with it.  There’s a fundamental aggression in discursive thought habituated to rejecting your own naked experience, and that tendency goes deep.

But then, when I consider what inmates routinely go through, unraveling your own subtle aggression seems like a boutique activity in the face of the very real possibility that someone will try to beat your face in because they don’t like your tone.  Or maybe they’re threatening to kick your ass if you don’t hand over your chocolate bars.  Whatever it is.  It can get a lot uglier from there.

So, pacifism or not, I’ve never told inmates not to fight and defend themselves.  I never tell them that violence isn’t valid because who knows what I would do in that circumstance, or what the wisest action is when you have very little choice?  I don’t take a position because I simply don’t know what’s correct. When in a world of lurking menace, even despite a commitment not to cause harm, what exactly are you supposed to do?

Not unlike animals in a jungle, inmates learn how to stay alert and avoid trouble.  They watch what’s going on around them and stay sensitive to what’s happening in this interaction or where that looks like it’s headed. That much self-preservation becomes instinctive.  The ones who come already well-trained in violence learn how to use that to their advantage within the prickly prison politics.

But here’s where inserting meditation might, if nothing else, shift you out of some of the more obvious patterns.  This is an inmate’s account from a prison in Michigan:

“When something stressful happens, my thoughts run out of control.  Here is a recent example: A man from my cube (a space I share w/ seven people) came to me and told me that he was protecting me from people who wanted to get at me.  ‘I don’t know how much longer I can hold them off,’ he said.  My thoughts started racing: ‘Who could these people be?  What are they going to do to me?  Probably try and extort.  I’ll have to stand my ground.  Will they hurt me?’  Fear and anger fueled all of these thoughts.  I climbed onto my bunk.  I meditated.  I did some simple yoga stretching.  I calmed the thoughts.  I found it all very funny.  This man was try to ‘soft squeeze’ me.  He wanted me to pay him for ‘protecting’ me.  I have no money (commissary items).  I don’t steal from the kitchen where I work.  It’s all a joke.  Ha!”

Meditation helped him see through the illusion and manipulation the other guy tried to suck him into.  The fear, aggression, and potential for violence that seemed so solid got seen through and became a joke.

So I think that’s the power of meditation, just broadly considered, that it gives you some strength of mind that you aren’t merely overpowered with kleshas (“afflictive emotions”), and that can give your prajňa (“superior knowledge”) a chance to beam through the emotional murk and dispel it.

I remember visiting the guard station on one of the units of this massive prison in Washington state (I can’t remember the name now).  The c.o. manning the station over-looking the tiers of cells below, commented, “Everything’s calm.”

I said, “As long as it doesn’t go south.”

And he replied, “It can go south in a hurry.”

I think that’s a central value meditation brings to this circumstance: its ability to undermine escalating emotion.  Provoked emotional reactivity easily escalates, and oh so easily turns into violence in a prison.  There’s a code, an ethic, that enshrines that kind of thing.  For instance, violence has social sanction as an automatic response to insult.  An inmate quoted on our “Prisoners on Dharma” page:

“Life-long habits and prison culture demanded that I respond to insult with anger and violence. The response was so conditioned as to become automatic. It took me a long time to realize that disrespect usually is a symptom of the speaker’s inner pain and suffering. A part of my realization was that any anger that may arise in response to an insult passes fairly quickly, but if I escalate the situation and respond – either verbally or physically – anger, hatred, and other negative emotions become stronger and last longer, as do the practical negative consequences of my words and actions.”

Here you can feel both the calming and sensitizing influence of meditation and the moral view of the bodhisattva we teach in our courses.  It prods him beyond a deeply ingrained and unquestioned habit of violence to see more deeply what’s taking place there.  Crucially, he recognizes the underlying psychology of the aggression coming his way, and beyond that, starts to track the cause and effect of the violence, coming to the conclusion that he doesn’t need to get so insulted, and will the outcome truly be worth the cathartic response?  Thus, a whole, pretty brutal pattern gets unraveled in the midst of a pretty brutal place—and that’s path.

Still, if you’re on the receiving end of very menacing aggression, I don’t think there’s an easy way out.  A trans inmate recently sent me a letter describing how they were threatened with rape at knife point if they didn’t move out of the unit.  The authorities decided to ignore their complaint and request to be moved, pushing this person to a suicide attempt, swallowing “a bunch of pills and two blades.”  Their life was saved, and they’ve been trying whatever they can, including starting “a big ass fire,” doing anything possible to avoid getting sent back to that same unit.

This person has written me, asking for dharma advice, but I don’t have it, other than, “Don’t kill yourself.”  They say, “I don’t want to hurt anyone or myself anymore,” yet I wonder if there’s no solution but to fight tooth and nail with the person intent on attacking them?  Their practice may calm them down for a time but does not resolve the external situation, which they greatly fear.

I’ll write back shortly, but when I do, should I lend spiritual authorization to violence, even in self-defense?  Some problems have no happy solutions.

Others, though, get removed by a change in view.  It all starts at that level of view, of mental attitude, where anger can fester, and it’s got a ton of festering points in the average prison.  The inmate from Michigan:

“What comes out of a person who is open is compassion.  Not hatred.  Not shadows. Not passion…which is an attempt to hold on, to be a suffering martyr to what is going on.  So when it’s noisy in my cube, or people are threatening me, or just generally acting stupid, I feel anger in the form of indignation: ‘How dare these idiots get in the way of my sitting practice!’  But then I remember: none of this matters.  It’s all a gift.  It is the perfect chance to let go.  Let it be.  I make this sound easy.  It is not.”

It is not.  But it is path.  It’s the kind of change of view which could change many things.