:: September/October 2004 Volume 3/Number 5

Big Men, Big Time:

(and the still small voice with-in.)

By Laura Shin

He was 18 when he first went to prison. He had a 5-inch swastika tattooed onto his 18.5” arms, and a prison sentence to serve at Terminal Island in San Pedro for robbery, burglary and conspiracy to blow-up a tattoo parlor.

Today, 18 years after his first time inside, Mark Foster has a steady job on the outside as a heavy line technician at a Cadillac dealership, a wife and a brand-new baby girl. He also has a meditation practice and has never thought of returning to crime or drugs since his release.

Foster is a rare product of the California prison system: a success story. In a country with the highest rates of incarceration in the world, the state’s prisons score low marks. The system is in such disarray that a judge has threatened to turn it over to federal management because of funding crises, scandals over corrupt internal investigations of guards and criticism that the correctional officers’ union wields too much influence.

One good omen is the appointment of Jeanne Woodford as director at the Department of Corrections. Woodford is a former warden at San Quentin State Prison north of San Francisco and known for bringing a personal, motherly touch to corrections. She welcomed yoga and meditation and a host of other rehabilitation programs into San Quentin. Considering her openness to such services on one hand and the budget and more pressing problems on the other, the introduction of yoga and meditation in prison on a wide scale could take anywhere from a year to life.

As it exists today the penal system in California would be considered a mistake by the man who spurred the reforms that shaped it. In the ‘70s, New York sociologist Robert Martinson published, “The Effectiveness of Correctional Treatment: A Survey of Treatment Evaluation Studies,” concluding that, “the field of corrections has not as yet found satisfactory ways to reduce recidivism by significant amounts.” That led to the oft-repeated phrase “Nothing works!” -- meaning rehabilitation never succeeded – which was catchy, but wrong. Conservatives took the argument out of Martinson’s hands and claimed that rehabilitative programs never worked and that prisons should be built for punishment only. That cause became law when California dropped the word “rehabilitation” from the state penal code in 1976.

Now, inmates, who number over 160,000 in California, serve out sentences in prisons stripped of services that could be considered the coddling of criminals. Unfortunately, no one noticed when, just five years after his study, Martinson realized many rehabilitation programs did in fact work, it was just that the ones he’d studied had not been properly tested.

Despite those conclusions, which have been confirmed in other studies, prisons in the U.S. have remained bare-boned cells of punishment. Because rehabilitative programs beyond education, vocational classes and substance-abuse courses are no longer state-funded, volunteers have taken up the call to bring programs like yoga and meditation to inmates. The Prison-Ashram Project, one of the longest-standing programs started by Bo and Sita Lozoff of the Human Kindness Foundation, has brought workshops teaching inmates to use their prisons as ashrams in hundreds of institutions around the world since 1973. What they focus on is communion and community. “Communion is having some time to be alone with God – prayer, meditation, mantra, whatever works for you. And community means how you use your time to help people,” says Sita.

In California, the Insight Prison Project is another program that has taught yoga, meditation and classes such as anger management, positive parenting and substance abuse recovery at San Quentin since 1995. Jacques Verduin, the executive director and a teacher, says the program drops ideology and speaks to people about what’s relevant in their lives. “Nobody’s talking about Swami Beyondananda or the seventh realm of nirvana,” he says. “We speak of the moment of fatal peril, where everything speeds up, everything becomes intense, and there’s usually an experience of regret afterward. How to recognize the moment of fatal peril.” The Yoga on the Inside Foundation, founded by Los Angeles yoga instructor Mark Stephens, has also brought hatha yoga to a handful of prisons nationwide since 1998. The Gangaji Foundation sends videos, books, audiotapes and volunteers to five prisons in Colorado, California and Oregon. Hari Lubin, the director of their prison program says, “The non-teaching that Gangaji offers is to just be still and experience who you are, and from that experience, as you do the things you have to do every day, you’ll be more present to everything and not in survival mode.” Some yoga classes are arranged just between the teacher and the prison itself, like Keya Keita’s and Joanne Gregory’s classes for female inmates at the Metropolitan Detention Center downtown.

Yoga is finding an even bigger toehold in juvenile detention centers. The Insight Prison Project’s James Fox, who has taught in prisons and youth facilities for over three years in both San Francisco and, in the summers, Chicago, says juvenile halls have fewer barriers to programs. “They even allow ex-offenders to go into the juvenile system and teach as long as they’re with a program,” he says, adding that many are county-run, rather than managed by the state or federal governments. “It’s easier dealing on a county-by-county basis.”

Yoga on the Inside has also found that the juvenile system is more open to yoga. The nonprofit has programs at nearly 200 youth facilities (including schools of at-risk youth), but classes only at a half-dozen prisons. James Wvinner, a founding director, says, “We have more luck with the youth programs, because there’s a parole officer in every unit, or someone who’s the counselor/disciplinarian/
den mother/father of these kids, as opposed to just a jailer.”

The inspiration for Yoga for Youth, which serves incarcerated youth in L.A. and other cities nationwide, came to founder Krishna Kaur after she saw the movie, “Juvies,” which showed how once young kids are labeled as gang members, no matter how tenuous the affiliation, people treat them with fear. “Their reaction to the injustices they experience adds to their getting in trouble,” says Kaur, whose mission is to help them change their reactions by teaching them kundalini yoga, breathing exercises and meditation. The Mind Body Awareness Project, another prison yoga program, was founded by “Dharma Punx” author Noah Levine, who began meditating while incarcerated at age 17. Nine years later, he began teaching meditation at his former juvenile hall. Then there's the eight-year-old, New York-based Lineage Project; it brings meditation and yoga to at-risk youth to teach them wisdom and openness.

Some teachers focus on youth, because they believe that rehabilitating juveniles before they become adult criminals is a more effective method of reducing crime. The “get them while they’re young” method may work, but doesn’t necessarily mean that adult criminals are hopeless. Teachers who have had experience with adult and minor students note, in fact, that adults are more open to yoga and meditation. Even Levine, who started meditating as a youth says, “My experience is that it’s rare for a young person to really understand the necessity of doing this work. They still feel invincible. Adults have a greater potential to realize that they need to learn a new way.” Jacques Verduin, executive director and a teacher at the Insight Prison Project, says, “People who have gone in and out of prisons for a part of their lives get a little easier to the place where they say, ‘Okay, I ought to try something else.’ We have a lifers’ class, and when you walk in, it’s like walking into a monastery. It’s ten times more disciplined than any yoga place in a big city.”

Foster illustrates just how ready adults are for the teachings of yoga. When he entered Terminal Island, he was a fearsome, 235-pound figure who could bench press 385. “I didn’t care about myself or about going home, so I was always in trouble. I ended up getting a disciplinary action, and I got sent all the way out to Wisconsin, and I was in the hole in there. I figured if I was bigger and badder than everybody else, I couldn’t be hurt by anybody. But I finally reached the point where I realized, ‘Hey, I do care. I had to walk all the way from that end where my heart was and get back to the other side.” Foster, who is part Native-American, first sought spiritual sustenance in sweat lodges, which were held regularly at Terminal Island. Then Yoga on the Inside began offering a yoga class there. “Hatred gets old eventually,” he says. “Yoga helped me find myself, a piece of my spirit that I never really knew.”

Foster is just one example of what a scientific study has proven -- that meditation helps reduce recidivism and drug use. In a study published in American Jails Magazine in July/August, 2003, 56% of inmates at the King County North Rehabilitation Facility near Seattle who completed a Vipassana meditation course recidivated within two years compared to 75% of the inmates who didn’t learn meditation. Additionally, the rates plummeted among the Vipassana group for marijuana, crack and cocaine users. For instance, when comparing the 90 days before incarceration to the 90 days after incarceration, the inmates who didn’t learn meditation reduced their marijuana use by half, but the Vipassana group cut its use by 90%. With cocaine, the numbers are more striking: the inmates who didn’t learn meditation curbed their use only by 11%, after prison time. But the inmates in the Vipassana group, once released, slashed their cocaine use by 90%.

Ironically, the very reason that adults are more willing to learn – that they are at the end of their rope – is what also makes it less likely that they’ll receive yoga. Adult prisons are usually built in remote locations. Wvinner, who taught at Terminal Island for four years, eventually quit, because of the time commitment. “The teaching is always really gratifying. It’s the travel time that gets to people. There aren’t really prisons on the West Side of LA,” he laments, adding that in general, Yoga on the Inside can’t fulfill requests by inmates and chaplains to bring yoga to remote prisons like Lompoc, over an hour northwest of Santa Barbara.

The teachers who have made the commitment, however, to teach in adult or juvenile settings, eventually find it extremely rewarding. Instructor Tiffany Fraser, who taught 30 teenage boys at Barry J. Nidorf for two years through Yoga on the Inside, says, “I felt like I could make them feel they were worthy in a place where no one else made them feel that way.” Although they could be rambunctious teenagers, they would roll out the mats, call her “Miss,” and volunteer to demonstrate poses, including the hardest ones -- crow, handstand, astavakrasana (eight-crooked limb pose), vasisthasana (side plank pose) – that were their favorites. “They were more respectful than any other classroom of teenagers,” she says. When she would leave, “all 30 boys couldn’t stop saying goodbye, and they really wanted me to look in their eyes and say goodbye. It was so sweet and so heartbreaking. It reminded me of how similar people are regardless of how drastically different their circumstances are. How similar they are in their need for love and attention and recognition. That’s no different from my paying yoga students.”

Although the teachers remain aware of what their students have done, many teachers see a common humanity between yoga students outside and inside. Common interests are what led Wvinner to look past Foster’s swastika tattoos and Foster to open up to his yoga teacher. “I like motorcycles, he was an ex-biker, so we had common ground,” says Wvinner. “He liked photography at one point in his life, I’m a photographer -- more common ground. He was a body builder. I’m a yoga teacher -- more common ground.” As women on the inside are taking to yoga too, Keya Keita’s class of 35 women at the Metropolitan Detention Center downtown has had a similar impact on her. “In the beginning,” she says, “I always wondered, ‘What did you do? What happened?’” But after a while, she realized, yoga in a prison is still yoga: “What’s amazing is that for the most part, the minute the doors shut, it’s just a yoga class.”

Laura Shin is a writer and yoga teacher in Los Angeles. Youcan read her work in publications like the Los Angeles Times, Organic Style and Yoga Journal.