QiGong Prison Ministry

– Marilyn Schlitz-Mandala, PhD

I’ve been inside a new chapter of my prison story for a month or so now.  Funny how you know something fundamentally has shifted long before the words come to express it.  Another veil has lifted, another layer of the onion peeled, and my heart feels raw and exposed as the tears sting my cheeks.

Part of this chapter is about waking up to the inmate to inmate violence, or what today we were calling the “under belly” of prison life.   Nothing has changed inside the walls, but much seems to have changed inside me.  A willingness to see and be seen has brought my attention to the daily terror the men and guards live within. Just the vicarious sharing of a tiny piece of this pain has me all twisted, and yet the Holy seems to be standing close by, tending me carefully.   

Classes yesterday (three on B Yard) and today (one on C yard, Old Folsom once again locked down) were full of flow and my whole being was vibrating in a harmony that kept up through the night as a holy chant saturated my sleeping and dreaming states.  After class I wanted to visit a man who has not been able to come to class, but the guards were searching for weapons.

A conversation arose about prison programs, and before the men could edit themselves, I heard: “Wasn’t that when “X” got his face cut off my “Y”?  They quickly reassured me that that was the only act of violence that they know of that had happened in the chapel. But the story came out, along with a number of other stories about the climate of violence and culture of shot callers and obligations to fight, even if the issue had no relevance to you or your own friends.  Stories being stabbed when you refused to fight … of trying to keep a friend from bleeding to death as others scattered … of shot-callers owning men … and inmates answering to shot-callers in distant prisons.   I am hearing stories like this not only from the men, but the guards and chaplains.

While I was being educated on the darker side of prison life, another alarm went off.  Soon we saw a stretcher head across the yard, then returned filled, with a bloody handcuffed cellmate escorted behind.  Two roommates had chosen handmade shanks to solve their problems.   This sparked further stories about what it was like to live within this violent game and survive holding to a different path.  “I don’t run across the yard anymore, to get in any one else fight.”  “I don’t care if I get stabbed next, I refuse to fight in another’s game.”

I walked out of the Chapel into the sunlight and past the bench where I had sat with the GED teacher after the last fight I witnessed.  She had said that the men have delayed their fights until she was out of harms way, and didn’t worry too much about getting in the middle of things.  The punishment is much more severe if a free staff gets hurt.  But I still couldn’t help but imagining myself as the “ashen faced volunteer struggling to fill out a report” that the clerks had just described.

I went over to B Yard, thinking I would visit some of my students who have been locked down for several weeks.  An hour or so earlier there had been a stabbing with two Hispanics taken out to the hospital.  As I checked in at the Watch Office, I fell into a conversation with a guard who was unwinding from the events.  Feeling that it would be helpful to my education and his tension release, I listened.  More stories of feces contaminated knives aimed at their neck veins, having to pick apart an inmates bowel movement to find drugs and weapons, punctuated his review of the men who I wanted to visit, all of who were on lockdown.

After the stories, I didn’t feel very grounded, but went ahead into the cell blocks. I started with the man I knew better than the others.  Our conversation didn’t last long, he seemed interrupted and it was unsettling to look beyond the pornography mounted in his window.  That was enough, I could hear my inner wisdom coach. I no longer had the stomach for “cold calls” to other students, at least today.

As I got to my car, the tears struggled for release.  More got shed in the park.  I experimented with my prayer beads, but I didn’t want to pull away from this pain quite yet.  I must “get it” about the violence between the men, and not be so naïve.  I must know the risks and the perversions of this place, and find the way through fear, disgust and grief.  The inmate's internal business of violence has plenty of causes, consequences and perpetrators and all this poison is what makes my small efforts valuable.  

May I be given the strength to continue to be shown the reality of this environment.  

May the very peace, I bring inside, sustain me as I face into this terror.

"...for the one who is in you is greater
than the one who is in the world."
I John 4:4