MEDITATING ON CRIME

With Criminal-justice Systems In Crisis, Writes The Globe And Mail's Shawna
Richer, A Growing Movement, Backed By Academic Research, Claims Probation
Might Be Revolutionized By Transcendental Meditation

When St. Louis, Mo., Judge David Mason was first asked to incorporate
transcendental meditation into probation sentences, he responded with an
open mind -- but a raised eyebrow too.

"I didn't know much about it," Judge Mason says. "I thought it was a weird
hippie thing people did after ingesting LSD. I'm a pretty seriously
practising Catholic, and I thought he was talking about some paganistic
thing that wouldn't do much good."

"He" was Farrokh Anklesaria, a lawyer, long-time student of transcendental
meditation (TM) and founder of the Enlightened Sentencing program at
Maharishi Consultants International. In the mid-1990s, Mr. Anklesaria began
lobbying judges in St. Louis, where he lives, to adopt the privately funded
rehabilitation program.

Judge Mason has been surprised by the results. Today, a half-dozen judges
in the city, which has the highest crime rate in the United States, hand
out sentences that include TM, and are finding that it's making a
difference. Of the approximately 150 people on probation who have attended
at least one TM class (the entire course lasts 26 classes), only five have
gone on to violate their parole.

TM in the justice system isn't new. Since the 1970s, it has been used in
pilot projects in prisons such as Folsom and San Quentin. But it has never
caught on in Canada, despite the efforts of the National Council for a
Crime-Free Canada (NCCFC), founded by Garry Foster in 1993 as a division of
the Maharishi Vedic Education Institute.

In trying to bring a fundamental approach to crime prevention, the NCCFC
staged a national tour to sell the 2,000-year-old technique to officials
from the Justice Department, the RCMP, the National Parole Board and police
colleges. But it met with a lack of interest and a dearth of funding.

Canada spends more than $8-billion a year on the criminal-justice system,
while the United States spends a whopping $700-billion (U.S.) annually. In
both countries, courts are jammed, police and probation officers
overburdened, prisons busting at the seams and, as a result, violence is
the norm rather than the exception.

TM became widely known in the 1960s, when the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whose
followers included the Beatles, brought it to the United States. People
jumped at the chance to experiment with a meditation that promised to alter
their states of consciousness and help them control their blood pressure
and heart rate.

Its credibility got a shot in the arm when Harvard's Dr. Herbert Benson
published The Relaxation Response in 1975, detailing how meditation could
treat high blood pressure, high cholesterol, chronic pain, insomnia,
anxiety and stress, among other ailments.

From bar fights to burglaries, murders to muggings, car jackings to crack
dealing, TM proponents consider every crime a reaction to stress by people
with poor coping skills. TM can solve the problem, they say -- and studies
seem to back them up.

"TM represents a giant leap forward in criminology and the methodology to
correct criminal behaviour," Mr. Anklesaria says. "While the Western
approach is to use psychology, TM takes into account that our actions are
based on our thinking, and our thinking is based on our consciousness."

Programs currently in use in corrections, such as drug and alcohol rehab,
can be more efficient when supplemented with stress-busting TM. Others,
such as anger management, youth boot camps and anti-shoplifting courses,
usually work well as long as the person is in the class, but there's not
much follow-up afterward, says Rosalyn Morgan, a St. Louis probation
officer and former police officer.

"Sometimes all it takes is the person being back hanging out in their old
environment to fall into trouble again," Ms. Morgan says. "That's exactly
what makes TM different. It gives the person in question more control."

"Unlike other types of rehabilitation programs," Judge Mason says, "TM
gives you something that you can carry inside you. It's yours. It comes
from within. And that's why it works. How many times have you heard, 'When
you're angry, count to 10' ? The TM effect is that times a thousand."

Dr. Raju Hajela, an addiction-medicine specialist in Kingston, Ont., who
has lent his voice to Mr. Foster's movement, offers TM to his patients, and
has seen it help as one part of a rehab program. "TM allows the brain to
function more coherently," Dr. Hajela says. "It has a calming effect on the
nervous system. . . . People don't use drugs and alcohol as much after
taking up TM."

Since TM became a household word nearly 50 years ago, there have been more
than 500 scientific studies on its benefits from more than 200 universities
and research institutions in 27 countries, from Harvard to Oxford to Yale.
In excess of 100 papers have been published in journals from Scientific
American to the British Journal of Psychology and the Journal of the
Canadian Medical Association.

Meanwhile, Maharishi Consultants International has been trying it among
more than 50,000 inmates and correctional officers in dozens of facilities
throughout the United States since the mid-1970s. In every case, recidivism
plummeted.

A 1987 study of 31 Senegalese prisons with 11,000 inmates and 900 workers
saw violent jails become more peaceful with meditation. In one of the
prisons, the warden stopped the program for five months, only to see three
murders and five rapes. When the program was revived, institutional calm
was restored.

California's San Quentin State Prison used TM program from 1978 until 1988,
when funding ran out. In that decade, disciplinary reports stopped for 90
per cent of the inmates who practised.

"Stress response has much to do with the crime we see in America, from
domestic abuse to child abuse to drug and alcohol abuse and violence in
prisons," Judge Mason says. "TM works on what triggers violence, and that's
what we need to do to stop crime."

As the world's first judge to use TM in sentencing, Judge Mason was met
with some eye-rolls in the courtroom. But they didn't last long. His first
TM case, a 24-year-old male addict with a handful of drug convictions on
his record who pleaded guilty to crack-cocaine possession, completed the
training six years ago. He went on to marry the mother of his children, get
a job and purchase a home; he has not returned to court.

"These are hard-core, inner-city drug dealers with gang involvement," Judge
Mason says. "Their lives are turning around, and I'm not just talking about
them not committing any more crimes. They're getting jobs, going to
college, changing their character and outlook on life."

St. Louis Judge Philip Heagney does not himself practise TM. He was
initially skeptical, but is optimistic from the results so far. "I think it
has good potential," he says. "I want to try everything within reason that
I can. We ought to use that tool, since we're lucky enough to have it
available."

Judge Mason has travelled to Wyoming, California, Iowa, Michigan, Kansas,
New York, Australia and Washington, D.C., and even to the Caribbean island
of Dominica, to extol TM's virtues to those at work in the justice system.
He says the reluctance to accept it as a rehab technique stems from prejudice.

"It goes against the grain of traditional Western thinking about crime," he
says. "We have a built in chauvinistic attitude to anything from the East.
If a Harvard PhD doesn't come out with something, we don't want anything to
do with it. TM has that fringe-culture image that seems silly and
inappropriate for the professional criminal-justice system."

But it seems to work where little else does. In the United States, of the
90 per cent of inmates that are eventually released from prison, about
two-thirds are convicted of another crime within three years.

Ms. Morgan was shocked at the changes in people on probation who took up
TM. "They show up on time. They follow their probation conditions. Their
anger goes. They don't want to hang out or smoke dope or sell dope
anymore," she says, adding that some people's unwillingness to embrace TM
is not surprising.

"Our politicians get elected by saying they are going to be tougher on
crime. We've always been tough on crime and all it does is rise. If our
interest is in making productive members of society, then let's use TM."

In Canada, Mr. Foster and Dr. Hajela would like another chance to convince
the criminal-justice system that TM is the answer. In St. Louis, Judge
Mason hope other parts of the world catch on. "There's a desperate need for
something like this," he says. "It doesn't take a lot of effort to teach
TM. And once you learn it, 20 minutes a day is all you need."