By Nicole Doll for KPTV Portland OR

Instructor Gina Kieval's Monday night yoga …

Please help filmmaker finish this important new film, Naked Mind, which chronicles the many ways that meditation is positively impacting modern culture in the West.   The film features many of the most preeminent meditation teachers, East and West and as well as the prison work of Prison Dharma Network (Prison…

It’s an optimistic headline: “Prison Rape: Obama’s Program to Stop It”. It leads into a comprehensive New York Review of Books article on three recently released Federal government publications.  Two of these documents examine sexual abuse in the nation’s detention centers while the other outlines the Department of Justice’s regulations for eliminating prison rape. All three aim to address the appalling number of people—young and old, female and male, citizen and those awaiting…

Our class at women's today started out with a hiccup. "I'm not feeling good" she said looking towards her feet "I don't think I can stay." Her eyes were far gone from the moment which our incredibly skilled facilitator Rebecca noticed and proceeded to take one to connect with her feelings. She then asked her "Can you stay and just try to hold your space here with us?" Thinking for a second, she shook her head towards those same feet and then towards the sky -- took (and held) her…

from BBC News, October 22, 2012

There is no alternative to making "prisons work", David Cameron has said, insisting criminals can be punished and rehabilitated at the same time.

In a speech in London, he said the debate on crime and…

Based on the book, Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in a Man's Prison.

Fish tells the story of a 17-year-old boy sent to an adult prison for robbing a photomat with a toy gun. Fish is a coming of age story set inside the very prison Director T.J. Parsell was housed in over thirty years ago.

Late adolescence is a…

When most Americans hear the familiar constitutional phrase “cruel and unusual punishment” they can tell you what it means, at least to them. Hanging. Flogging. Chopping a hand off. Chain gangs.

Putting juvenile offenders in solitary confinement is high on my list of “cruel and unusual punishment.” What else do you call locking up fifteen, sixteen year olds, some even younger, in total isolation for 24 hours a day, in some cases for months at a time, never leaving their…

I arrived at MA prison and was alone-- the only volunteer this warm July Sunday morning. No volunteers, no visitors, just a quiet and empty waiting room for me to pace around for a few minutes and finally settle down onto one of their many wooden benches made by some inmates past. After twenty minutes I was "processed" by…

I didn’t expect my talk to a class of criminal justice majors at a local community college to be any different from the other workshops, presentations and classes I’d done. The students had read my book for class. I figured I’d talk about the book, about my 10 years teaching high school kids locked up in an adult county jail, and about juvenile justice issues in general. The usual topics. But when I asked the students to go around and say what area of criminal justice they wanted to pursue,…

by Dearbhla Kelly for The Huffington Post, June 22, 2012

Last December I visited a state prison in Northern California (Deuel Vocational Institute) and not only had the opportunity to teach yoga to inmates but also to talk with them afterward about their yoga practices. It was an…

from Kickstarter.com

A Place to Stand is the authorized story of Jimmy Santiago Baca’s transformation from a functionally illiterate convict to an award-winning poet, novelist and screenwriter.

A Place to Stand follows Jimmy’s path from Estancia,…

from One Street Shy, June 15, 2012

Rummaging through my kitchen cabinets earlier today, looking for an old antique pottery bowl to give a friend of mine as a gift, I came across another piece of pottery I had completely forgotten about.  I had tucked it away in the cabinet so as not to break…

by Amelia Gentleman for The Guardian, May 18, 2012

Halden prison smells of freshly brewed coffee. It hits you in the workshop areas, lingers in the games rooms and in the communal apartment-style areas where prisoners live together in groups of eight. This much coffee makes…

by Jenny Phillips for the Huffington Post, May 2, 2012

In the fall of 1999, I packed my tape recorder and traveled from my home outside Boston to visit Donaldson Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison outside Birmingham, Alabama. I was hoping to interview prisoners about their lives in prison and…

by Yasmin Rammohan for Chicago Tonight, April 26, 2012

“Without tools to manage extra stress, there’s a high rate of recidivism [for inmates],” said Gabriella Savelli, National Coordinator of Prison SMART.

Prison SMART’s mission is "to make a life-transforming…

By Gwen Moran for Entreprenaur.com,  April 7, 2012

Most yoga classes aren't filled with gang members and convicted felons dropping F-bombs. But that's a typical scenario in Ascend Program classes.



Founded by defense attorneys Toni Carbone and Christine Galves, the court-approved Sacramento,…

By Michelle Alexander for the New York Times, March 11, 2012

AFTER years as a civil rights lawyer, I rarely find myself speechless. But some questions a woman I know posed during a phone conversation one recent evening gave me pause: “What would happen if we organized thousands, even hundreds of…

By Marianne de Nazareth for the WeekendLeader.com, Bangalore, India, March 15, 2012

Picture a burly, foul mouthed convict, condemned to life imprisonment for murder, roaming freely in your town as part of a theatre group and then returning to his cell along with prison officials after the show is…