Prison Monks

The Dhamma Brothers Directed by Jenny Phillips, Andy Kukura and Anne Marie Stern at Cinema Village

If you asked the average Bible Belt denizen to volunteer for a 10-day Buddhist meditation course that requires them to remain silent, live according to a strict regimen in a confined area and spend 10 hours a day sitting motionless and reflecting, you’d probably get more than strange looks. Even with the promise of finding a path to inner peace, few would be willing to step outside their beliefs and relinquish their familiar comforts and distractions to plunge into the furthest recesses of their minds.

But it’s in this environment that a remarkable group of inmates at a maximum-security prison decided to learn Vipassana. They’re called the “Dhamma Brothers,” and they choose to surrender their few small freedoms to live like monks on their quest to learn this ancient meditation technique. But they may well have the least to lose and the most to gain from making such a sacrifice.

“Prisoners are willing to take risks and dig the deepest because they are suffering the most,” says Jenny Phillips, co-director and co-producer of The Dhamma Brothers, the documentary that chronicles the impacts of a Vipassana course for prisoners at Donaldson Correctional Facility in Bessemer, Ala.

Phillips, a practicing psychotherapist, a cultural anthropologist and an author, had been working with Houses of Healing, a prison psychotherapy program with a small meditation component, when she learned of a group of prisoners at Donaldson who had started their own meditation group. She went down to Alabama in 1999 to observe them; and though she’d worked with other inmates, her experience at Donaldson left an indelible impression.

Though Phillips had not practiced this style of meditation herself, her conviction that this challenging discipline could have a positive impact on the U.S. prison system was unwavering. Originally she had planned to write about her experiences with the program at Donaldson, but she ultimately decided to document it on film. “I became a filmmaker to make this particular film,” she explains. “I felt like you needed to hear it and see it. You couldn’t read about it and think about it.”

“Dhamma” is the term for the teachings of the Buddha, and the Dhamma Brothers engage in a meditation technique that offers an experiential method of recognizing the impermanence of existence. Vipassana teaches practitioners to train their minds to observe bodily sensations without reacting to them.

During the course, all participants observe “Noble Silence”; abstain from killing, stealing, lying, sexual activity and the use of intoxicants; and they endure the inevitable pains (both mental and physical) of sitting in meditation for hours at a time. One of the inmates in the film likens it to boot camp, an apt analogy for this rigorous and sometimes grueling practice (which I can attest to, as someone who’s taken a Vipassana course at Shelburne Falls in Massachusetts).

And through these means, many of the prisoners are able to gain insight into their motives and come to terms with their crimes. Several inmates reveal they were doubtful that the technique would have an impact on them. But one by one, they each explain how their deep-seated fears and old anger comes to the surface, in what their teachers call a “storm,” and they express remorse for their offenses. In line with the spirit of Vipassana, the film presents an intimate, compassionate and sympathetic portrait of a group of individuals that much of society has written off as savage and brutal and who reconnect to their humanity through the act of meditation.

Although prison administrators perceived a marked improvement in the conduct of the inmates who learned the practice, those who ran traditional religious programs in the facility felt threatened by the adoption of meditation practices. They feared that inmates were becoming Buddhists—although Vipassana is inherently non-sectarian—so the program was shut down.

But four years later, Donaldson was able to restart the courses, and it’s still going strong. Phillips hopes that the release of the film will help spur a new commitment to alternative methods of rehabilitation for inmates nationwide.

“There’s a sense of possibility, and there’s a long list of men who want to get into the course,” Phillips says. “I would like to see this very small, intimate story be generalized to social activism and prison reform.”