I visited the prison in Tehachapi last week as a guest chaplain for some inmates who requested a Buddhist priest to conduct services for them. As the director of the Zen Fellowship of Bakersfield, I was contacted through the Prison Dharma Network, a group that coordinates visits to prisoners throughout the U.S. It took several months of paperwork and delay, but at last I was entering the first of many gates.
About forty miles from Bakersfield lies the dry, stark, windblown Cummings Valley of the Tehachapi mountains, high enough for scrub oak but too low for evergreens. Among a scattering of houses and vineyards sprawls the cement and steel compounds of the eighty-year-old California Correctional Institute, the third oldest prison in California after Folsom (1880) and San Quentin (1852).
The prison opened in 1933 as the California Institution for Women, Tehachapi, the first women’s prison in the state, with 28 inmates transferred from San Quentin where they had been housed side-by-side with men with predictable results. The new women’s prison was run on progressive lines with the idea that these women (those who were not hanged) could be returned to society better than they came in. They were allowed to make “colorful frocks” fashioned after what was chic in the magazines and even to wear red shoes if they liked, rather than the drab prison garb and dull boots they had sported in San Quentin.
It was into that environment that Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade sent Mary Astor as Brigid O’Shaunessy at the end of The Maltese Falcon (1941): “Well, if you get a good break, you’ll be out of Tehachapi in twenty years and you can come back to me then. I hope they don’t hang you, precious, by that sweet neck.” James M. Cain also referenced the prison in Double Indemnity (1943) when he mentioned a wife who was cleaning her gun when her husband “got in the way.”
There was a reason Tehachapi became a byword in the noir films of the 1930s and 1940s. First, it was a new concept and in the news. Also, crimes committed by women like Burmah White (L.A.’s own version of Bonnie Parker) were on the rise with the breakdown of traditional family values that came with the economic hard times of the Depression and the Dust Bowl migration to California (most of the several hundred female inmates in Tehachapi during its “boom” years in the ‘30s were from the Los Angeles area). You can read more about its history in Kathleen A. Cairns’ Hard Time at Tehachapi: California’s First Women’s Prison (2011). The prison closed after the 1952 Tehachapi earthquake and reopened as a men’s prison two years later.
When the airport-like metal detector went off in spite of my having taken off my shoes and emptied my pockets, the guard asked me what that was around my neck, indicating the bib-like garment given to me by my Zen master when I was ordained. I never wear my rakusu outside the dojo where we practice, but I did today. Along with my drivers license, it’s all I’m allowed to carry inside. “It’s a religious thing,” I said. “Oh,” said the friendly guard, passing his wand under my arms and between my legs. “I thought maybe it was some kind of bag. You’re good to go.”
Research has confirmed the value of various kinds of meditation in prisons, even for the most hardened criminals (and guards). Although many wardens and chaplains have shown some resistance, resistance has softened with the hard data that shows a decrease in recidivism for prisoners with an established meditation practice, and with the substantial anecdotal evidence that prisoners who meditate become model prisoners while still incarcerated. One study estimates the economic benefits of meditation in prisons resulting in annual savings of more than $31 million, with about half of the total benefitting correctional institutions and half society at large (David L. Magilla, “Cost Savings from Teaching the Transcendental Meditation Program in Prisons,” Journal of Offender Rehabilitation 36:1-4, 2003, pp. 319-331). Most studies have focused on TM, Vipassana, and mindfulness meditation techniques, but for rehabilitation purposes the differences between these techniques appear to be negligible.
One program in Alabama that focuses on Vipassana is the subject of a documentary called Dhamma Brothers http://www.dhammabrothers.com. Testimony from the prisoners is extraordinary and moving. “For the first time, I could observe my pain and grief,” states Omar Rahman. “I felt a tear fall. Then something broke, and I couldn’t stop sobbing. I found myself in a terrain where I had always wanted to be, but never had a map. I found myself in the inner landscape, and now I had some direction.” Another inmate tells how his practice helps him navigate prison life: “When someone cuts in front of you in the chow line, the first reaction is to push him. The Vipassana technique gives you a mental tool to observe the situation. If you give yourself time to think, you are gonna come up with a better solution.”
The idea is simple: meditation opens a window on the self and its relation to the rest of the world that causes each person to take responsibility for the consequences of his or her actions.
My guide was a decade-long veteran of prison ministry. We drive past D Block, a relatively peaceful place, where she says they keep former gang members, sex offenders, and homosexuals for their own safety. Occasionally they add a lifer to the mix. Lifers tend to have a calming effect, she said, because they don’t like others disturbing the peace of what they consider their home.
Our destination is C Block, where the general population of convicts resides. The fifteen-foot fences are topped with gleaming spirals of razor wire like great ominous Slinky toys. As we approach each inner gate, it opens ahead of us and shuts behind us, seemingly on its own.
The chapel is a nondescript, dingy room with a dirty linoleum floor on a hallway with classrooms on either side. Eight inmates file into the room, and we shake hands and introduce ourselves. They range in age from 20s to 50s, black, Hispanic, white. A couple of them already have an established personal practice. Some are curious. All want to improve their lives.
We push aside the bright orange plastic chairs and spread the grey woolen blankets that serve as cushions. They show me the meditation postures they use on their bunks in their cells.
I invite them to try sitting my style for a while, focusing on those new to the practice. One fellow who has been taking notes is slouching. He seems accommodating, aiming to please. His posture expresses a kind of submissiveness that I have seen cured in the past by a few months of diligent zazen. I come up behind him and press my fist into his lower back, straightening his spine. I get him to lift his collarbone, tuck his chin in, and gaze straight ahead. “Look at him,” I say. “Look at his posture. How intimidating he is. He looks like a goddamn samurai.”
I turn down the hard fluorescent lights and the room immediately feels more congenial, more human. In the semi-darkness we let our minds quiet in the silence, pay attention to our breath, and let our hopes and regrets drop off. This is zazen, just sitting, being here and now.
I compare this process to a muddied stream. You can’t clarify the water by continuing to stir it up. As Kodo Sawaki said, “Zazen is good for nothing.” You have to do nothing; then clarity can arise, even here in the belly of concrete and steel bars. Afterward we read the first half or so of Dogen’s thirteenth-century “Fukanzazengi,” which says, “Nothing is separate, nothing is missing. Everything is present. Why go elsewhere when you can practice the Way here and now?”
Our time is up for today. We shake hands again all around. They thank me, and I thank them. These inmates are hungry for more, more books, more DVDs, more mala beads, more help with their practice. They especially want more access to teachers. I would like to encourage other teachers to join the Prison Dharma Network and to offer their services to inmates who request it. The work is satisfying and needs doing.
The IBS (International Bodhisattva Sangha) in San Diego has in the past come to Tehachapi, but it’s a long trek from San Diego. The Buddhist scholar Lewis Lancaster discusses his years of work with IBS in California prisons in an interview in which he mentions collecting about ten thousand books for the prisoners in California, about a thousand of which were given to Tehachapi. Although they have been approved by the censors, these books have yet to reach the shelves or the inmates.
I look forward to going back. In the meantime, the inmates can sit on their own, like monks in a do-it-yourself monastery, knowing that they are not forgotten or alone.
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