Documentary chronicles meditation behind bars

Is a prison a place of rehabilitation or a warehouse? That question continues to vex the penal system in this country, and jailhouse documentaries such as “The Dhamma Brothers” argue hard for rehab.

This movie chronicles a program in Buddhist meditation, initiated at the rough Donaldson Correctional Facility in Alabama. For 10 days, a group of inmates strictly follow the silent meditation techniques of Vipassana meditation.

At first, some skepticism about this is understandable. Surely such a program would probably look good on a prisoner’s record, or at least be a break in an otherwise monotonous life.

But one inmate, in jail for murder, describes the 10-day program as the hardest thing he’d ever gone through — and he spent years on Death Row.

Meditation may not sound like the most arrestingly cinematic image; Let’s face it, it’s people sitting around with their eyes closed for hours at a time. But the movie weaves in before-and-after interviews, not only with the convicts but with guards, wardens and the teachers who brought the program to Donaldson.

There must have been some washouts, although we don’t hear about that. (We do hear about cultural resistance to a Buddhist-based program in a heavily Christian community.) But some of the inmates emerge as — well, if not as changed men, then at least as people who have gone to some deep place and had a profound experience there.

The movie has some similarities to “Shakespeare Behind Bars,” which was about prisoners performing in an annual Shakespeare production. That film had more richness, because it gave the inmates something to talk about besides themselves.

One of the directors of “The Dhamma Brothers,” Jenny Phillips, is a psychotherapist who began the meditation course at the prison, so this is not an objective outsider’s look at the subject. It doesn’t claim that serious criminals should be let free, either — just that something significant might happen to them while they pay their debt to society.