I don’t think I would have ever volunteered to go into a prison purely on my own, but I went in the first time under the auspices of my school, Naropa University, to teach creative writing. I filled out an application, I think, but the professor, Mary Stewart Kean, did the rest—getting us cleared, getting our schedule and so on set up, transporting us down there. We went into Colorado Territorial, the oldest prison in the state, that still has block, razor-wire topped walls with guard towers.
That’s maybe enough for the average person who has no reason to see what it’s like inside and doesn’t want to know, much less care about the people housed there.
And who are those people, other than felons: they robbed convenience stores, they got into arguments and shot people, they sold fentanyl, they sexually assaulted children, on and on. It’s a very long, very tawdry list.
If you tell someone you’re going into a prison to teach meditation, one possible negative reaction is that you’re “making criminals feel better.” They did something evil and deserve to be punished. Why do they get to feel better?
Let me suggest that had they felt better, they were a lot less likely to commit crimes in the first place. Crimes, generally-speaking, aren’t committed because the criminal feels good. They come out of dissonance, alienation, exasperated desire, unchecked aggression—out of emotionally conflicted states rooted in the mind of the person acting them out.
So crime has to start in the mind of the person before it becomes an action with social repercussions. We can look at the psychological conditioning a person may get from their family or from oppressive social circumstances. Sometimes these things can point very clearly to why this person went off the rails. Sometimes it’s not at all clear why they act out; they can come, for instance, from a good, caring family. There’s not automatically an obvious explanation.
But either way, it still starts in the person’s mind, and that’s where it has to get sorted out if they’re going to live a different kind of life and look beyond entirely selfish motives and a blanket animosity toward the larger world.
Hence, I and my many colleagues in this work over the decades have gone into prisons to help the human beings who faltered into them find their way out, and that starts with them coming to know their own minds.
You can learn a lot from books, and readable dharma books are much more available these days, but, as much as it’s going to take the daily, entirely personal, uncomfortable effort to face your own mind, it’s still extraordinarily helpful to have another human being come and teach you how.
Really, the effort of a volunteer who brings dharma into a prison has to do with the reclamation of the humanity and basic goodness of the person on the other side of the wall, who, after all, had a family, maybe has kids themselves, who could be contributing to the world instead of draining state funds yearly and rotting there.
It’s not merely a matter of making someone feel better; you’re giving them tools to uncover their life as a decent human being and solid citizen. You’re encouraging them to have empathy for the people around them by bringing empathy to them yourself. You’re addressing a social ill at the place where it starts by sharing your own humanity, and your own lived, spiritual journey, showing them that they can do the same thing.
I would not say that this kind of volunteer work is for everyone. It requires a certain level of resilience and poise for dealing with the institutional rules and bureaucratic mishaps. There’s some tendency to be sympathetic to the inmates and side with them against the people running the institution or against the justice system, but that’s not what you’re there to do. They’re being punished by the state, and it’s up to them to deal with that. You’re teaching them how to work with their own minds and make better decisions. If you lose (as I would think of it) your “professional distance,” and try to get involved in their personal details, you’re setting yourself up to be manipulated or, at the very least, rejected by the institution as someone inappropriate for a volunteer role.
I’ll be presenting on what we do at the Boulder Shambhala Center on October 14th at 7 pm in the Community Room. We do a lot of other things to support inmates learning dharma, including our through the mail study courses, which also need people who can instruct in meditation and Buddhist teachings.
But what keeps me going in this capacity certainly isn’t all the misery I’ve heard about within the razor wire, but it’s knowing that I can make a difference in a person’s life, such that they might uncover their own sanity, find resources of strength in themselves, and find their way out of this nightmare. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve been glad I could help.
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