Inner Peace In Jail Prisoners Volunteer For Intensive Course In Meditation Seattle

For 10 days and nights, the inmates are forbidden all worldly diversions: no talking, no touching, no reading, no writing, no smoking, no TV.

Cruel and unusual punishment?

Try Vipassana meditation, used for years in Indian prisons and now being taught for the first time in a U.S. jail. At Seattle’s North Rehabilitation Facility, petty criminals, alcoholics and drug addicts sit silently in a dark room for 10 hours a day, hoping to bring inner peace to their messed up lives.

For these dropouts of 12-step programs and halfway houses, it’s worth a try.

“What else do I have to lose?” asked Rose Clinton, 31, one of seven women who volunteered this month for the jail’s second Vipassana course.

She has had two crack-addicted babies, one of whom died, and has lost count of the times she has been to jail for drug dealing, prostitution, robbery and assault. Her forehead bears a jagged scar from a bottle hurled by an angry drug dealer. Welts on her wrists remain from the day in 1992 when they took her third baby away and she tried to slash her wrists with a broken crack pipe.

For most of Clinton’s adult life, introspection has been limited to the desperate, daily calculus of an addict: “You think about where your next hit’s gonna come from, or who you’re gonna beat for some money.”

For 10 days ending March 7, Clinton pursued purer thoughts. Waking at 4 a.m. to the sound of a gong, she pent hours in “noble silence,” sitting on a cushion, her eyes closed, a blanket wrapped around her.

With help from a Vipassana instructor, she and her fellow students learned to observe their breathing and other bodily sensations. They learned to feel an itch and not scratch it, and they saw at least the possibility of doing the same with the anger and craving that have ruled their lives.

“We call it mental boot camp,” said jail administrator Lucia Meijer, who authorized the program last fall after being persuaded to attend a 10-day Vipassana course herself. Her first impression, as she struggled to hold a meditation position for an hour, was that “these people must be sadists.”

Later, she saw meditation’s potential for building self-discipline and insight.

“It’s not a magic trick or a pill,” Meijer said. “It’s hard, conscious effort. It teaches them how to control themselves, how to go inside and deal with what’s there.”

Vipassana is considered the Marine Corps of meditation. As taught today by Indian teacher S.N. Goenka,it claims a direct lineage to techniques practiced 2,500 years ago by Buddha.

Adherents believe they have found a captive, eager audience in jails and prisons - if only they can convince skeptical jailers.

Even at Seattle’s North Rehabilitation Facility, a minimum-security jail with a reputation for innovation, the Vipassana program is a major disruption.

The students must be housed in a separate wing. Instructors and assistants insist on living at the jail during the course. The kitchen must prepare special meals. Loudspeakers must be disconnected. Everyone who works with the students, including guards, must be graduates of a 10-day Vipassana course.

In the program’s favor: It’s free. All Vipassana courses are run by volunteers.

It’s too soon to tell how well the Seattle program keeps inmates on the virtuous path after their release. But jail officials say behavior changes were striking after the first course last November, which graduated 11 men.