Zen Peacemaker Affiliate - Prison Outreach
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Prison Mindfulness Institute
Transforming Lives and Criminal Justice with Mindfulness & Compassion
Prison Mindfulness Institute's programs benefit tens of thousands of prisoners annually with in-person, online, and correspondence-based Dharma, mindfulness, and mindfulness-based intelligence programs.

Our Mission is to provide prisoners, prison staff, and prison volunteers, with the most effective, evidence-based tools for rehabilitation, self-transformation, and personal & professional development. In particular, we provide and promote the use of proven effective mindfulness-based interventions (MBI’s). Our dual focus is on transforming individual lives as well as transforming the corrections system as a whole in order to mitigate its extremely destructive impact on families, communities and the overall social capital of our society.

 

Our Goal is to establish these mindfulness-based interventions (MBI’s) as the evidenced-based norm in education, rehabilitation, drug and alcohol treatment, pre-release and post release programs for prisoners as well as in staff development and leadership training programs for corrections professionals. We believe in the power of mindfulness practice and the various mindfulness-based interventions (MBI’s) to change behaviors, heal and transform lives, and ultimately to prevent crime, reduce recidivism, and enhance community safety and wellbeing. We also believe in the power of mindfulness training to positively enhance performance, quality of life, and health and wellbeing among corrections professionals while at the same time creating healthier, more humane environments for prisoners and staff alike and ultimately achieving better outcomes for prisoners, staff and the community.

 

Our Vision
TRANSFORMATIVE CORRECTIONS: We envision correctional institutions and community corrections facilities and programs as safe, humane, and education-focused environments that genuinely support healing, rehabilitation, and personal transformation -- making use of the proven-effective mindfulness meditation and body-mind awareness practices of the world's great contemplative traditions and the research-based integration of these traditional practices with contemporary psychology and modern therapeutic methodologies. We envision a restorative and transformative criminal justice system that genuinely and intelligently focuses on public safety and harm reduction rather than punishment or revenge. We envision a significantly smaller and dramatically less expensive prison system that reserves secure facilities for providing humane, mindfulness-based treatment and rehabilitation for violent offenders and employs proven outcome-effective and cost-effective community corrections programs for non-violent offenders.

SUCCESSFUL REINTEGRATION: Through the success of our programs, we envision a faster and more successful reintegration of rehabilitated and transformed prisoners into the community and a gradual shift toward more reliance on high quality, mindfulness-based community corrections programs that keep individuals in the community – working, supporting their families, raising their children and paying taxes rather than becoming a tax burden to the community while housed in prisons that often do them more harm than good.

EMPOWERING COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP: We further envision a growing number of transformed prisoners and ex-prisoners emerging as community leaders and change agents working to heal and transform individuals and communities both inside and outside the walls of our correctional institutions, thus contributing significantly to the overall health and well-being of society.

How can people help? Support our programs at: https://www.prisonmindfulness.org/support Volunteer at your local jail, juvenile facility or prison.
For more information: info@prisonmindfulness.org
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Prison Mindfulness Institute
Deerfield, MA