from RonArtest.com: Mental Health and World Issues, June 8, 2012

What do yoga mats and prisoners have in common? Both are in high demand. With an overcrowded prison population in the US, it is not shocking to find around 60-67% of inmates return to prison within 3 years of their release…

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Compassion Fatigue and Corrections Officers

By Andrew Nolen, Officer, MSCJ/FP

Published: 01/03/2011   www.corrections.com

Working in Corrections is an interesting…

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Corrections Mentality: Here for Punishment or as Punishment?

By Andrew Nolen, Officer, MSCJ/FP

Published: 05/21/2012    www.corrections.com

In my first article…

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from Northwest Dharma News, Spring 2012

Is there a way to handle criminal justice that is more effective and humane than the current approach being used in the U.S, with its focus on long, mandatory prison sentences? Do…

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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.

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.

Today, I taught a meditation program at Mokotów Prison, the infamous Warsaw prison where the Gestapo detained, tortured and killed political prisoners during World War II and where the KGP and Polish communists detained, tortured and killed political prisoners from 1945 to 1955. At the street side entrance on a busy street in Warsaw, there is a memorial to the political prisoners killed there by the Nazis and the communists. This is a reflection of the tortured history of Poland,… Continue

With the help of my friends Andrzej Krajeski and Rober Sudol, I led meditation workshop for about 30 prisoners in their 20's and 30's at a large jail outside of Warsaw, Poland near the airport. We talked about how our conditioning drives our behaviors unconsciously until we awaken an awareness that can see the operation of this conditioned mind and not go along with it, awareness that leads to new choices and freedom. We practiced body scan, close placement mindfulness and counting breaths… Continue

2010 PRISON TOWN TOUR

What…

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Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, August 27 & 28, 2010

Front Gate at "The Farm," -- Angola

I’d been driving through thick, tall forests that blanket either side of the two land state road with an almost haunted feeling when suddenly the front gate of the Louisiana…

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It was one of those rare afternoons in my jailhouse classroom. Twelve or so teen-aged boys dotted around the room, their heads, some shaved bald, others wild and woolly with neglect, bend over their desks doing something. Reading a book; writing an essay—or a love letter to a shorty. Whatever they were doing, they were quiet. It didn’t happen often over the ten years I taught high school at a New York County jail, years that I chronicle in my book I Don’t Wish… Continue

At the overcrowded California Institution for Men, the gymnasium is used for bunks. (Monica Almeida/The New York Times)

U.S. prison population dwarfs that of other nations

By Adam Liptak, April 23, 2008

The International Herald Tribune



The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners.



Indeed, the United States leads the world in… Continue