QiGong Prison Ministry

Just found this interesting web blog:

http://realcostofprisons.org/blog/

An example: "Incarceration as a Failed Policy" by Alvin Bronstein August 26, 2005
Jim Gondles has invited me to write a guest editorial on “why US policies on incarceration are ineffective in terms of crime control, costly and counter productive,” something I had said to him in an email in another context. I was glad to receive this invitation and I should point out at the outset that my criticisms would apply to almost any country’s policies on incarceration and not just the United States. This is not intended as an attack on United States’ prisons but rather prisons generally. There are better, less damaging prisons than those in the United States, for example in the Scandinavian countries. And there are far more that are far worse than the United States. I have been in prisons in some countries, Russia and Brazil, that make ours really look like country clubs. The point is not how new or modern or well equipped prisons are but rather the fact of incarceration itself that is, in my opinion, a complete failure.

In his marvelous 1974 book, The Future of Imprisonment, Norval Morris, the distinguished criminologist and long-time consultant to the Federal Bureau of Prisons wrote:

The criminal law’s reach has been extended in this country far beyond its competence, invading the spheres of private morality and social welfare proving ineffective, corruptive and criminogenic. This overreach of the criminal law has made hypocrites of us all and has cluttered the courts and filled the jails and prisons, the detention centers and reformatories, with people who should not be there.

When that was written, we had about 350,000 men, women and children in our nation’s jails and prisons. Today we have over 2,200,000 and prisons here and throughout most of the world are still ineffective, corruptive and criminogenic.

It is widely recognized that we have locked up too many social nuisances who are not real threats, too many petty offenders and minor thieves, severing such few social ties as they have and pushing them further toward more serious criminal behavior. In the US, we inappropriately incarcerate the mentally ill and the alcohol and drug addicted. Prisons generally make people worse.

The 1973 national commission, The National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals, recommended that “the institution should be the last resort for correctional problems.” They gave their reasons – failure to reduce crime, success in punishing but not in deterring, providing only a temporary protection to the community, changing the offender but mostly for the worst – and concluded that “the prison has persisted partly because a civilized nation could neither turn back to the barbarism of an earlier time nor find a satisfactory alternative.” Today, over 30 years later, we have a new national commission that is looking at the abuses in and the problems of prisons in America.

Again, nothing has changed except that there are many more people in prison, our prisons are now larger and more destructive of the human personality with fewer programs and harsher regimes. Many years of studies have revealed that only three possible changes in the life of the prisoner during his or her incarceration are correlated with later conformity to the conditions of release and with the avoidance of new criminal behavior – the availability of a family or other supportive group to join on release, the availability of a reasonably supportive job, and the process and duration of aging itself. Getting a job and preserving or creating social relationships are exactly what prison most interferes with although time for aging it does provide. We cage people, it is clear, not to treat them but for a variety of other reasons. Increasingly prisons are places of punishment and have nothing to do with rehabilitation.

One of the great prison reformers in the world, Baroness Vivien Stern, Secretary General of Penal Reform International, in her 1998 book A Sin Against the Future: Imprisonment in the World, wrote:

It is a great strength of the reform movement that the people in the system know that what is going on is wrong. They say so through the associations to which they belong. They need to be reinforced in their conviction that whilst they are contracted to carry out their instructions and follow their rule book, they have a higher loyalty to a set of values and principles. It will not be an excuse for the perpetrator of a clear human rights abuse to say, “I was just obeying orders”. Prison staff need to be given the confidence and courage to keep on pointing out what is wrong. Perhaps they should require that the international norms and instruments governing the treatment of prisoners should be written not just into prisoners’ rights, but into their rights too, as staff. There are rules governing how prisoners should be treated. So also should there be equivalent rules governing what prison staff can be asked to do, and making it clear what they cannot be asked to do.

As Nelson Mandela once said, “Prison not only robs you of your freedom, it attempts to take away your identity. Everyone wears a uniform, eats the same food, follows the same schedule. It is by definition a purely authoritarian state that tolerates no independence and individuality.”

In 1999, a large group of criminal justice professionals, academics and officials from 50 different countries in all five continents met for five days in Egham, England, to consider “a new approach for penal reform in a new century.” At the end of the five day meeting they drafted without any dissents an agenda for that new approach which included among them the following:

The understanding that penal reform is an essential part of good governance.The awareness that penal reform cannot proceed without changes to the criminal justice system as a whole and that crime prevention in and by civil society is essential to the success of penal reform.The determination to make sure that everyone, especially the poor and marginalized, has equal access to the justice system. The recognition that drug abuse is usually better dealt with inside the health or social welfare care system rather than the criminal justice system, especially when there is no violence involved. The need to enrich the formal judicial system with informal, locally based, dispute resolution mechanisms which meet human rights standards.

During the past 40 years I have visited hundreds of prisons and jails in the United States and many prisons in Asia, Latin America and Eastern and Western Europe. The best, least destructive, prison that I have ever been to was a maximum security prison in the city of Ringe, in Denmark, which I visited on a number of occasions.

This was a small maximum security prison which housed men and women prisoners together, all of them recidivists, in which every prisoner worked at a productive job every day, where correctional officers wore no uniforms and worked side-by-side with the prisoners and had many other marvelous features. Every time I left the prison and walked out through the main entry way I was accompanied by the prison governor, Eric Andersen. Each time I left, I would say, “Eric, this really is a marvelous prison.” And his answer each time was, “But remember, Al, all prisons damage people.”

* Alvin J. Bronstein is Director-Emeritus of The National Prison Project of the ACLU; US Board Member, Penal Reform International (London). This editorial originally appeared in the August 2005 edition of Corrections Today magazine.

Friends Committee on Legislation Education Fund
FCL Research Page

Reform Our Systems of Justice, End Violence and Terrorism

1st_prison_newsletter.2.pdf

There is a divine center within all of us. It sustains our bodies and our stories even when ignored or disrespected. We learn to move from this divine center in QiGong moving meditation. Our divine center, when vibrant, resonates with the Holy everywhere and in everyone. When cultivated with practices such as Tai Chi Chih, our personal chi (Qi) or life-force energy may radiate peace from this deep place within us into all we do.

I believe there is also a divine center inside this institution, residing inside it’s story, inside it’s walls and buildings, inside the collective of all those who work and live here.

We activate and cultivate our divine center with our practice of Qigong (or other spiritual practices) praying and moving ourselves into a sense of wholeness. Simultaneously, we are cultivating the healing possibilities of this institution and the world. However far away it seems that we are from our own personal wholeness or from a prison institution of balance and well being our practice is vitally important to ourselves and to this place. 

The impacts of your practice are cumulative and may seem miniscule. Just as the days and hours of your sentence seem to stretched out towards some far away point in time, each breath takes you closer. Each breath we take towards the cultivation of our inner and outer possibility of perfection is significant. Each practice adds to our vitality. Look all around you – seek out signs of hope.  Seek out signs of life and beauty.  Seek out reasons to smile and laugh.  Seek out the chi (Qi) flowing freely.

There are times of contraction and times of expansion.  This is the way it is.  Yin and Yang playing, dancing, relating to each other.  We yearn for the bliss and ease of hanging out eternally in the harmonized state of being. I trust that’s what the universe itself is seeking.  But as long as there are blockages within ourselves, within the institutions that effect us, within the geo-political nature of world, within our spiritual traditions, then we are called to work within these very limits to cultivate the chi flow. We are called to practice right here, right now.

The dynamic of playing with opposites within the movement patterns sets up and stimulates the chi flow.  At times it may seem that we add constrictions, but watch, that will be followed by release and expansion which pumps the chi.  So too in your life.  When constriction seems imposed upon you – receive it’s energy without resistance, allow that part of it’s cycle, yet watch for the impulse of release and expansion and get a sense of the resulting flow.  See if you can not seek or get attached to either the yin or the yang, but to ride in the flow that their dance creates. The beauty isn’t in following or leading, isn’t in the expansion or contraction, but is in the flow created by the relationship. It’s not in your confinement or in your freedom but the gift of life expressing within any circumstance.

Blessings on your practice.

State of the Prison Ministry Report January 2005
Judy Tretheway

When thinking over 2004 and the evolution of my (our) prison ministry I recognize that something significant has shifted.

This work no longer seems right to call MY work, MY ministry. There is a "we," an "us," an "our" that is forming. I am more and more aware that I do not go in alone, but in some spiritual way, I take in all of you supporting my efforts.

There is beginning to develop a supportive community that I can FEEL, talk to, engage with, and trust to support the emotional and financial path of my ministry sharing QiGong inside prisons.

For years the Sacramento Friends Meeting has sponsored my work but this April, when I thought the doors were all closing, I sent out an email many of you got. The circle has grown much wider.

At that time, I felt resigned to lay down what seemed to be finished, with gratitude. Within days of sending out that email, all the momentum had shifted. Doors were opening and I was feeling empowered with a fresh vitality.

There is no question in my mind that reaching out, asking for help, directing more than just my own intentions and prayers towards this ministry, made a dramatic difference.

Now in 2005, I feel challenged to somehow cultivate the supportive energy of this fledgling community and bind together this scattered support of my ministry. I don't so much have a picture of what or how, as I have a yearning, a feeling of rightness about this next evolution of my previously very personal journey.

So I look to you, my community, for suggestions, for encouragement, for questions and prods. I feel that a big part of the health of this community of support is the cultivation of my own ability to share about the work, and to ask for help and support.

In December, I began a Web Journal. To begin with I pasted in the reports I had written on this years work, added some of the papers I wrote back I 1999, and began writing about each Thursdays experience at Folsom prison. I plan to write down some of the stories, musings, frustrations, and perspective that have previously just been shared orally. Ask me your questions, that will help stimulate the material people want to read most.

http://chifully.blogspirit.com/

I have been encouraged to write some magazine pieces, and to speak at upcoming QiGong conferences. I have submitted four proposals for workshop presentations. I trust that as I develop the Web Journal the articles will emerge.

In November I experimented with asking for financial support and was so pleased that with your donations I was able to print another run of 5,000 of the Freedom Within handout, and pay all my out of pocket expenses for the Chaplain Conference and second trip to Avenal State prison. The pot is empty now, but I have no doubts that when the need arises the resources will be there. And that feels good.

It is good to know you are in this with me -- helping to reverse the cultural norm of rejection, shame and abandonment of these precious fellow human beings who are imprisoned. I am delighted to be your emissary. I am grateful for all the support of your prayers, thoughts, intentions, finances, and all manner of blessings.

How you might help:
1) Hold this ministry in your prayers. Pray for our QiGong classes, the practices of the men, and my efforts as their teacher, and the prison system in general as well as the victims. Programs are currently at New Folsom, Old Folsom and Avenal State Prisons.

2) Follow along as the story unfolds, check into my Web Journal frequently. Normally I add into it weekly. If you would like the weekly addition emailed to you I can add you to that email group -- replay to this email asking to be in the WEEKLY UPDATES group.

3) Be available for specific prayer support. When I need spiritual support, am adding a new program, am having trouble or want to celebrate something I would send out a email request just to that group. Respond I'll put you in the PRAYER SUPPORT email group.

4) Support the program financially. Your contributions are managed by the Sacramento Friends Meeting and will be used to support my travels, copying of handout materials and development support materials such as the contemplative calendar I dream of, or development of a prison related prayer research project. Perhaps you might consider my/our work as a part of your "missions" tithing.
Marked for “Judy’s prison work” send tax-deductible donations to: Sacramento Friends Meeting, PO 163677, Sacramento, CA 95816

5) Begin to talk and think about our prison system, ask questions. Wonder how things might change so that these institutions can become true houses of healing. See those locked up as fellow humans rather than the rejected dregs of society. Help a crime victim heal. Give a parolee a chance.



"Prayer is not an old woman's idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action" - Mahatma Gandhi

Judy Tretheway