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The meditating prisoners: Transformative silence?

'Sometimes the only way out," says Jenny Phillips, "is in." That's the jailhouse mantra at the Donaldson Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Bessemer, Ala. The barbed-wire-wreathed bunker resembles the cheerless pen in The Shawshank Redemption except that at Donaldson, murderers serving life terms don't break out. At least not physically.

'Sometimes the only way out," says Jenny Phillips, "is in." That's the jailhouse mantra at the Donaldson Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Bessemer, Ala. The barbed-wire-wreathed bunker resembles the cheerless pen in The Shawshank Redemption except that at Donaldson, murderers serving life terms don't break out. At least not physically.

Mentally though, through a Vipassana meditation program introduced by Phillips in 2002, some Donaldson inmates are breaking the cycles of anger and revenge that got them there in the first place.

The Dhamma Brothers, a documentary chronicling the Donaldson experiment, will screen at 7:30 tonight at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute. (Dhamma, the Pali form of the Sanskrit dharma, is the teachings of Buddha that lead to enlightenment.)

Following the screening is a panel discussion that includes Phillips, the Boston-based psychotherapist who directed the film with Anne Marie Stein and Andy Kukura. Also on the panel is David Rudovsky, a public-interest attorney and University of Pennsylvania law professor who believes the film offers useful lessons for the Philadelphia Department of Corrections.

Can an ancient Buddhist meditation technique requiring nine days of complete silence and 100 hours of deep reflection transform a prison culture of violence into one of mindfulness?

Phillips thought so. An anthropologist as well as psychotherapist, she knew of Kiran Bedi, India's inspector general of corrections, who brought Vipassana to New Delhi's Tihar prison complex in 1993. From the 1997 Israeli documentary Doing Time, Doing Vipassana, Phillips learned how meditation transformed the notoriously violent Tihar into an "oasis of peace." For Phillips, by then conducting research on prison culture, "the movie was really inspiring."

In 1999, when she heard that a group of Donaldson inmates were informally practicing meditation, Phillips traveled to Alabama to interview them. She wondered whether a more formal program might deliver greater benefits.

"These men were prisoners trying to heal themselves, searching for solutions," she remembers. Though a meditator herself, she had never heard of Vipassana before she saw the Israeli film. She found Vipassana teachers Jonathan Crowley and Bruce Stewart, who agreed to conduct a 10-day retreat at Donaldson with the blessing of prison psychiatrist Ron Cavanaugh.

Phillips says, "At Donaldson, the joke about Ron is that when someone says that he thinks out of the box, his rejoinder is, 'What's a box?' " To document the experiment, Phillips put together a film crew and was Alabama-bound.

Initially, the prison warden and corrections officers were skeptical of the experiment. But the participants emerged from the program as men who for the first time had come face to face with their inner demons. Men transformed.

"You look at these guys," Rudovsky says. "You see the change in their demeanor and faces. You hear how they have tapped into their anger and deep remorse. You see how these men in isolation become members of a community."

And when they saw all this - and saw that disciplinary actions against the Vipassana meditators fell by 20 percent - even the skeptics among the Donaldson administrators became true believers.

Happy ending?

Not so fast.

When West first met East in the Deep South, as Phillips puts it, not everyone in the Donaldson community and the state of Alabama was aboard the harmonic convergence bus.

While Vipassana is a Buddhist technique, those who practice need not forgo other religious beliefs. Nonetheless, meditation was perceived as an affront to Western religion. This, even though America's first penitentiary - Eastern State in Philadelphia - was founded by Christians who encouraged meditation in a solitary context.

According to Cavanaugh, Donaldson's chaplain worried about inmates converting from Christianity to Buddhism and losing his congregation. When the chaplain alerted the state commissioner of his concerns about the Vipassana boot camp, the commissioner called the warden in July 2002 to stop the program.

Crushed, Phillips continued to communicate by letter with the meditators, who named themselves "Dhamma Brothers" - and continued to meditate even though it was forbidden.

In 2006 changes in the Donaldson administration meant that the Dhamma Brothers could meditate openly, a turn of events that gave Phillips and her collaborators a more affirmative ending to their documentary.

For activists such as Rudovsky, who has litigated prison-related issues for 35 years, The Dhamma Brothers is an instructive and inspirational lesson. Since 1974, when sociologist Robert Martinson published findings that suggested prison rehabilitation programs didn't work, the culture has turned from rehabilitation to "pure punishment," Rudovsky says. But punitive measures aren't working either.

"The State of Pennsylvania has 50,000 inmates; Philadelphia has close to 10,000 - the highest incarceration rate per capita of any city in the country," he says. "Repeat-offender rates are very high."

"In a city that spends close to $260 million annually on prisons - a very expensive proposition for a city in serious financial trouble - meditation could be a promising, cost-effective program that might reduce recidivism levels while doing something for the betterment of inmates and the general population," he says.

Rudovsky's not the only one thinking along these lines.

"Right now," Phillips says, "the Massachusetts Department of Corrections is exploring such a program. And Newark Mayor Cory Booker, who's a meditator, has likewise been inspired by the movie.

"When I started the film I hoped that these inmates we've warehoused could be teachers to the outside world," Phillips says. "That was my dream and it became true."

Tonight at 7:30 at Bryn Mawr Film Institute, 824 W. Lancaster Ave., Bryn Mawr. Panel discussion to follow. Tickets: $9.75. Information: 610-527-4008, Ext. 109.