Dear PDN Family,



Many thanks to all of you for the great work you do in bringing the transformational power of meditation and the Dharma to prisoners and everyone touched by our criminal justice system.   Many thanks for ongoing friendship and support for PDN.  We are proud to represent a prison Dharma community of over 5000 dedicated prison volunteers and corrections professionals and tens of thousands of dedicated prisoner practitioners.  Very best wishes to all of you for…

I am a hippy. We are not known for being a disciplined lot, and I own this stereotype. Heck, I may well be responsible for it. However, I try - and at times I fail to make use of discipline in my life. I'll latch onto my hook and Shenpa on down the road in anger or guilt or lonliness - despite trainings that impart the willpower that keeps many from said hook. I'm far from perfect. What I don't do is berrate myself too much for my lapse. I try to cultivate…

An Arizona court ruled that a fee charged to prison visitors is constitutional. Once again the burden is placed on poor families already struggling to keep their loved ones connected to a support system that study after study shows is essential for keeping ex-offenders out of jail. I am sometimes overwhelmed by the mean-spiritedness of our penal system and have to work hard to maintain my faith in people's goodness.

Wherever you read this from, it seems possible that you're experiencing the cultural connotations associated with the holidays.

My practice is not perfect. I feel alone - work is closed today, and my collegues will likely return with stories regarding celebrations and family. I don't have that - transition in gender was the final nail in the familial coffin, a decade-and-a-half ago. Will I bite on the hook (Shenpa) of loneliness? Of jealousy? Honestly, sometimes I do. In a city of…

 This paper was submitted as a part of a class a little over a year ago. The sentiment still feels valid, and the ideas explored may be of use to others. YMMV. :o)

Beholden Only to Basic Goodness

Riki Sarah Dennis

10 Fall TSD 8210 01 Self, Society, and Transformation…

If anyone doubts that the young people locked up in our jails are children they should spend some time in one of those prisons around holiday time.

I did just that for the 10 years I taught high school students, some as young as fifteen, in an adult county jail, and every year it got tougher to deny the impact being locked up for the holidays had on these teens.

Jail’s a pretty isolating place. That’s one of the ideas. But in lockup they watched a lot of TV—that great purveyor…

From BBC News:

17 November 2011 Last updated at 11:21 ET

A dozen inmates at a juvenile…

Beautiful slideshow of prison yoga.

Dear PDN Members and Friends,

We are completing our most successful year ever in Prison Dharma Network’s twenty-two years of bringing transformative practices and hope for a better life to the men, women and youth incarcerated in our jails, prisons and juvenile facilities.  As many of you know, we moved our offices last year from Colorado to Rhode Island in order to be close enough to a number of adult prisons to run our own researched-based programs.  We are now located just…

The Christian Science Monitor did an interesting story on yoga and meditation in jails and its effects on violence, something that we are all pretty aware of, but I always find it heartening when stories like this appear in the mainline press. It's a great reminder to the general reader that people locked up in our national jails are people capable of change and demanding of respect.

It was like a giant switchboard, the kind you see in 30s and 40s movies, a bevy of operators plugging in a crisscross of wires, taking calls, making connections, a cacophony of chatter.

That image came to me recently as I walked into the lobby of the MassMutual Center in Springfield, MA. The only difference was that the conversations filling the hall were about the same thing: girls and young women in the juvenile justice system.

We were there—teachers, social workers, lawyers,…

"It was as if the pain didn't actually exist at all. Without a thought that is..."

"Nicholas Silva died this past week" says one of the inmates Dennis as…

I was thinkin' about how I could contribute here. School & work keep me busy, so being of use may occasionally take the form of sharing?

One thing I CAN contribute is in sharing that for years after surviving an assault I cocconed myself in anti-male bias. It was my beloved armor. Male-identified folks were dangerous. The were in power positions. The were not to be trusted. Besides, I didn't want to get stomped on again.

Well, these biasses were doomed the moment I Sat. It…

From NPR: Julio Diaz has a daily routine. Every night, the 31-year-old social worker ends his hour-long subway commute to the Bronx one stop early, just so he can eat at his favorite diner.

But one night last month, as Diaz stepped off the No. 6 train and onto a nearly empty platform, his…

Maximum Security

by Naomi Shihab Nye

Vocabularies glittered in that tightly locked space.

Ways of breaking through, tunneling verbs,

compact muscular descriptives you could

hop a wall with, if only. Try this on

your own time. What they had — time.

And regret — imagine if we’d known

these wide words in the streets.

The youngest, celebrating his birthday,

sat in front, hands folded on desk,

smiling softly through apologies

to daughters,…

Dear Friend of PDN,

Recently I had the pleasure of joining our PDN team at a Rhode Island Department of Corrections facility for men.  Together we launched our first research initiative to assess the impact of our Path of Freedom curriculum, integrating mindfulness practice with cognitive-behavioral…