The Meditating Prisoners: Transformative Silence?

'Sometimes the only way out," says Jenny Phillips, "is in." That's the jailhouse mantra at the Donaldson Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Bessemer, Ala. The barbed-wire-wreathed bunker resembles the cheerless pen in The Shawshank Redemption except that at Donaldson, murderers serving life terms don't break out. At least not physically.

Mentally though, through a Vipassana meditation program introduced by Phillips in 2002, some Donaldson inmates are breaking the cycles of anger and revenge that got them there in the first place.

The Dhamma Brothers, a documentary chronicling the Donaldson experiment, will screen at 7:30 tonight at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute. (Dhamma, the Pali form of the Sanskrit dharma, is the teachings of Buddha that lead to enlightenment.) (More)

Source: Philadelphia Inquirer