14
A Sentence to Meditate
"Study links drugs to 80% of incarcerations-Alcohol has highest connection to violence."
That headline in USA Today on January 9, 1998, says it all. It's yet
another study on the tie-in between alcohol, drugs, and crime, this time from
the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University
in New York. Despite billions of dollars spent on conventional rehabilitation
measures, things aren't getting better, in fact, they're getting worse. Experts
say that we need to be bold, that we need to do something new to stop this vicious
cycle. My mind rolls back to a meeting I had 16 months ago with Judge David
Mason of Missouri's 22nd Circuit Court in St. Louis.
October 7, 1996, 10:00 a.m., Washington, D.C. Judge David Mason is here to address a conference on crime prevention in the China Room of the Mayflower Hotel. The event is being sponsored by the Natural Law Party. Other speakers include Dr. Ann Hughes, professor of sociology at the University of the District of Columbia and an expert on youth crime; Rudy DeLeon, former member of the California State Board of Prison Terms and Deputy Secretary of the California Youth and Adult Correctional Agency; and Jay Marcus, author of The Crime Vaccine, a critically acclaimed book on new approaches to crime prevention. This is another in a series of public forums put on by the Natural Law Party to investigate new solutions to America's problems; in this case, crime. It's not a partisan event; participants are here from all political parties.
The consensus among conference participants is that rehabilitation in America is failing badly. It is failing because our approach is palliative, it is superficial. It doesn't address the underlying cause, which is stress-usually inner-city stress, which is several orders of magnitude greater than most of us in America have ever experienced.
The stress-crime connection is gaining considerable weight among scientists and criminologists. Scientists now have a better understanding about the biochemistry of stress and the biochemistry of violence. It turns out they are not distant cousins; they are, in fact, cause and effect.
It also turns out that the usual risk factors for crime-growing up in the inner cities, living in an abusive home environment, a lack of educational opportunities, a lack of employment opportunities, etc.-these alone are not the immediate causes of crime. (There are kids who grow up in the inner cities who don't commit crimes, and there are kids who grow up in the suburbs who commit very violent crimes.)
Missing from this old diagnosis has been the understanding that each of these risk factors add up to make one big risk factor: Stress. For some reason, some people are not resilient enough, or healthy enough, to overcome these individual risk factors, and they get very, very stressed-and that, it turns out, is very, very dangerous.
Stress is something real. It's toxic and deadly. It's in the body, not just in the mind. It manifests as biochemical and neurological imbalances-low serotonin, high cortisol, EEG brain abnormalities-that has been linked to violent, criminal, or addictive behavior.
The problem with our current rehabilitation approaches is this: Psychological strategies alone, such as counseling, therapy, and mentoring, don't adequately affect the blood cells and brain neurons where stress does its damage. To be truly effective, rehabilitation strategies must significantly reduce stress, and then, as a natural byproduct, there should be increased serotonin levels, reduced cortisol levels, increased coherence in EEG brain functioning, and normal cortisol responses to stress.
The good news is that research shows that such strategies exist. And this is what Judge Mason has come to Washington to talk about, the reason why he interrupted his crowded court docket and traveled halfway across the country.
Judge Mason is a big man. He must be 6-foot, five-inches tall, and weighs well over 400 pounds. He has accomplished much in his life already, so I figure that he is probably in his early 40's, but he doesn't look it. He has a soft, kind, open face. But don't be fooled by appearances. He has a reputation in St. Louis as being one tough judge.
He talks to us about his own upbringing. He grew up on the hard-scrabble streets of Brooklyn in the '60s. He never knew his father, his mother was a drug addict, so he was raised by his grandmother ("a small woman, and if she was mad at me when I was a teenager, she would stand up on a chair and slap my face, hard.") He finished high school, put himself through college, and earned a scholarship to Washington University Law School in St. Louis, where he graduated near the top of his class. He won the National Collegiate Debate Championships in 1983 (no surprise there, he is a gifted, commanding speaker). After passing his bar exam, he served five years as a trial counsel and general counsel for the Missouri Department of Corrections. He is now in his sixth year as a circuit judge.
The men and women Judge Mason sees every day in his courtroom are just the type of people that George Rutherford is scared to death his boys and girls will grow up to become. They are drug dealers, thieves, muggers, and murderers.
Judge Mason says that if he's going to send a drug addict back out on the streets,
which he must do at some point-you can't keep everyone you arrest locked up
forever-then he must ask himself what tools has he given the kid to help him
stay clean every moment of every day, to keep him from sliding back down into
the murky depths from where he came? The kid's counselor can't be there on the
street corner whispering in his ear at every moment, Stay away from crack, stay
away from alcohol. What can Judge Mason give these men and women, who stand
before him with their lives in his hands, to help them get strong from within?
He's tells the conference that he's decided to give them the TM technique. He
wants them to meditate. I look around the room. Most people seem to take his
pronouncement in stride, but there are a few raised eyebrows, a few double-takes.
A reporter from the St. Louis Post Dispatch is scribbling down notes,
racing to keep up. Judge Mason continues. He says that personally he doesn't
meditate, and that his decision is not a casual one. He has spent over a year
studying carefully all the research on TM-including studies showing reduced
drug and alcohol abuse and a 35 to 40 percent reduction in recidivism rates
among many hundreds of meditating inmates1-and
on that basis alone he is convinced that it will help his probationers a lot.
He's not going to make TM optional; it will be their sentence. He wants to give
them a fighting chance back on the streets. He's just going to make sure they
take it.
September 19, 1997, 1:30 p.m., St. Louis It's been almost a year since I saw Judge Mason at the conference, and now he's done what he set out to do. He is presiding over a special graduation ceremony in an office building in the south side of St. Louis. Forty people stuff themselves into chairs, theater-style in a cramped conference room. They are the mothers and fathers, spouses, children, and friends of a handful of probationers who have just completed a unique three-month training course. The probationers are guilty of assault, drug trafficking, and robbery. They are here because Judge Mason sent them here. He sentenced them to meditate. Twenty minutes, twice a day, and 22 follow-up classes. Judge Mason has given them something he hopes will make them more resilient to stress, better able to resist the ever-present lure of drugs and crime, and able to feel better about themselves from the inside out.
None of the 30 men and women sentenced by Judge Mason to learn the TM technique had ever heard of it before. They had no clue what it was about, and were not, you might say, "prone" to meditating. But now they are experienced meditators and, from what they say, it's working.
One-by-one, several of the graduates get up to say a few words.*
Judge Mason listens closely. It's clear that he's satisfied.
"I know that I have a reputation in the community, particularly among defense attorneys, of being very tough," he says to the graduates. "And it is true that I can be tough. But for a judge to say that he or she is going to be tough on crime and not, at the same time, look for every possible way to help the offender to avoid re-offending is to me the lowest level of hypocrisy that a judge can have. So I constantly search for anything I can find that will help the people coming into my courtroom avoid coming back."
"Our court system operates like a McDonalds. Guys come in, they give a five-minute plea, and then I send them to a probation officer. When they violate the law again-bam!-they are back in court. In and out. In and out. Over and over. But nobody says, 'Let's stop a minute. Let's think about the individual. Let's think about how we can help that person make better decisions.
"Quite frankly when I first heard about TM, I thought it was weird. But I listened. Thank God I did. Because I have heard nothing but good stuff. I am looking forward to seeing the successful completion of your probation. I am looking forward to running into you on the street and we can talk and laugh about all this. I am looking forward to all of your great successes," he says, a smile spreading across his face, as he makes eye contact with each probationer. "Thanks for increasing my hope."
* The names of the probationers have been changed, but their ages, sex, reasons for arrest, and comments have not. (back)