Rev. Danny Fisher

URGENT ACTION: Petition your senator to oppose George W. Bush’s nomination of Michael B. Mukasey for attorney general here.

My dear friend Kerry Lucinda Brown sent me a story from the New York Times about the new documentary entitled The Dhamma Brothers. The film, directed by cultural anthropologist and psychotherapist Jenny Phillips, documents a ten-day meditation retreat undertaken by thirty-six prisoners at Donaldson Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison with death-row capacity outside of Birmingham, AL.

She interviewed the 36 participating prisoners (called “the dhamma brothers” after the Dhamma, or dharma, the term for the collective teachings of the Buddha) for hours, discussing their childhoods, their crimes, their struggles to get through each day in lockup and the Sisyphean challenge of trying personal transformation inside an often-hopeless prison culture.

One result is an emotional documentary about the benefits of meditation for a most unlikely set of candidates. But until a year ago, the film was shaping up as a different story than the uplifting one it has become.

The impetus for the film came in 1999. Ms. Phillips, who had volunteered in Massachusetts prisons and conducted research on prison culture, heard that some inmates were informally practicing meditation inside Donaldson. After trading letters with the meditation group’s leader and traveling to the prison to meet the men, Ms. Phillips, herself a meditator, wondered if a more formal and intensive program could further help the men’s stress levels. (Similar programs have long been proven successful in some prisons in India.) Ms. Phillips approached two meditation teachers, Bruce Stewart and Jonathan Crowley, to lead a Vipassana meditation course–a 10-day meditation program held in complete silence–at Donaldson.

What Phillips and others found was unprecedented.

“No one thought these guys could tolerate a 10-day meditation course,” Ms. Phillips said in a phone interview. But the prisoners did more than tolerate it.

“We were finding that after this 10-day course, inmates were better able to control their anger and better able to conduct themselves,” said Dr. Ron Cavanaugh, director of treatment at the Alabama Department of Corrections, who worked with Ms. Phillips to bring Vipassana meditation to Donaldson. “The initial group had about a 20 percent reduction in their disciplinary histories.” After the course ended and the film crew returned to Massachusetts, the Dhamma brothers continued meditating daily, with a longer sitting once a week.

Unfortunately (and rather startlingly), the chaplain at Donaldson challenged the sitting group, taking his beef to the highest levels of administration.

“The chaplain had reservations about inmates turning into Buddhists and losing his congregation,” Dr. Cavanaugh said. “He called the commissioner; the commissioner called the warden and told the warden to shut down the program.”

The Dhamma brothers were now only a community in spirit. “I felt responsible,” Ms. Phillips said.

“Perhaps in my greediness of making a film,” she added, “I had hurt these people. When you’re in such a state of deprivation anyway, and you’re deprived of things that are so helpful to you–it was absolutely devastating.”

For the next four years Ms. Phillips corresponded by mail with the Dhamma brothers. “I didn’t think we’d ever get back in again,” she said.

While Ms. Phillips and Mr. Cavanaugh continued to hope that the Vipassana courses could return to Donaldson and the Dhamma brothers, Ms. Phillips and her team–the editor and co-director Andy Kukura of Boston’s Northern Lights Productions and another director, Anne Marie Stein–resigned themselves to making a film that would be “a downer,” Mr. Kukura said.

But in December 2005 Ms. Phillips received a call from Dr. Cavanaugh informing her that the administration had changed at Donaldson, the meditation program had been reinstalled and the film crew could come back.

I’m disappointed that the chaplain at Donaldson was so threatened by this group of meditators and this film that he responded the way he did and that it affected things for so long. His first priority should not be the size of his congregation, but rather attending to the spiritual needs of the prisoners.

Happily, though, things have changed at Donaldson.

For more information about the film, including a trailer, visit http://dhammabrothers.com/. Also, stay tuned for Ms. Phillips’ forthcoming companion book Letters from the Dhamma Brothers, to be published by Pariyatti Press.