>I know this is probably a controversial opinion to non-meditators, but if you're going to downvote, at least provide an argument for why you don't agree.

I'm guessing it's the pretense that you can simply teach anyone to meditate whether or not they want to learn. Also, it suggests a system where a form of torture is potentially justified because you shift responsibility to the person being tortured. "They took the class on meditation and signed on the line that they understand how to endure solitary, so their suffering is their own fault!"

>"_____ so their suffering is their own fault!"

Well, that is the core insight, no matter the external circumstance. (Though, of course, it’s not about blame, and more like “here is the door.”)

Get deep enough, and yes, being in a shitty version of solitary is the same as being in a positive fantasy of your choosing.

> I'm guessing it's the pretense that you can simply teach anyone to meditate whether or not they want to learn

Meditation techniques aren't hard to learn, they're comparable to any form of exercise. The hard bit is in doing them sincerely, just like any form of exercise.

Can you teach someone press-ups? Then you can teach them meditation. You just can't make them do it, or effectively.

As to signing up for solitary for an extended period, I wish I could, but only if it was humane (e.g. no violence, feces flung at me etc), which I'm willing to bet (and the article seems to back up my suspicion) prison solitary isn't.

What you're describing is forcing people to meditate.

The way I understand what you describe: "We will torture you, you can either have it better by doing this meditation thing _we teach you_ or you can suffer"

The issue here is the torture itself, not the fact that the torture is difficult to deal with.

AFAIK, that's how the US got in this mess to begin with: because people thought that solitary confinement would lead to reflection, prayer, and self-improvement. Suffice to say, this approach has not been very successful.

I think that arguing for meditation to make your stay in jail tolerable is similar to throwing people into the sea and arguing they should learn how to swim - it's focusing on the wrong part of the problem. Extended isolation is torture. Arguing in favor of "making the torture less awful" (the "when life gives you lemons" approach) diverts resources from the actual problem, namely, let's stop torturing people.

> this approach has not been very successful.

Obviously, because they indeed torture them by making the conditions so horrible, as described in the article. Nor do they provide guidance in how to actually cope with isolation and put this time into good use to train the mind.

> Extended isolation is torture.

That's entirely subjective and dependent on the conditions.

> That's entirely subjective and dependent on the conditions.

In good faith, we can assume we're talking about the context of this article. Let's step beyond the literal and discuss the entire conversation. If we do this, yes it is torture. Even if we don't consider the entire conversation, just within the cultural context of the article we can assume that it would be for most people. Continuing to focus on changing the victims instead of the perpetrators is the wrong initial avenue of approach.

By all means, campaign for teaching people your preferred form of meditation. Just do it in a context where everyone is already free.

> I think long solitary confinement might work if you teach people how to meditate.

Work to achieve what? To whom? At what economic cost?

You can do away with solitary confinement and still provide access to skills and space to learn and practice meditation.

The solitary confinement component is quite disagreeable.

Here‘s an argument: The US is supposedly the land of the free, where everyone is allowed to live life according to their beliefs. It would be against this principle to force this re-education program you‘re proposing on someone.

A way simpler argument would be that it‘s unrealistic to expect this level of discipline for a stretch of time like this from people who couldn‘t even stop themselves from killing someone.

However, if you‘ve ever read „Papillon“, I think the methods he describes as using in dealing with his sentences seem to me to be pretty close to meditation.

Well, ideally you'd give them a choice between following an intensive meditation training (for instance, I don't think it can be only thing that's needed for rehabilitation) and just classic imprisonment. If you force it on them, it can have the opposite effect.

Then you should also have monks as supervisors in those solitary confinement cells.

You can't make actual change to an individual. You can give them an opportunity of course, but not change them. Some will harden their person and some will just break, you want neither.

Show them humanity, love and give those treatment that need it. Focus on the positive parts and lift those up. Solitary confinement can only be of good if it's chosen, much like any personality change.

Admit that it's not the prison that is a problem, it's that youth problems is not properly dealth with. (as pointed out in the article)

I don't see any focus on this in neither local or global politics. It's odd that it's still given today that we could possibly bully each other to a better behavior.

When will we learn? Punishment does not lead to improvement.

Quoting from a blog post I wrote [1] which included a note on this documentary and why I think it made an overly positive case for Vipassana and its effects on prisoners in Tihar Jail:

> There is a popular documentary on YouTube called “Doing Time, Doing Vipassana” on the introduction of Vipassana into Tihar Jail (probably the most populated prison in the world with a current population of 17130 prisoners), and how Vipassana improved several measures of psychological well-being among the inmates that undertook it — things like anxiety, depression, sense of alienation from mainstream society, etc. This has become such a success story for Goenka Vipassana that Kiran Bedi — Inspector General of Delhi Prisons at the time — is invited to speak at major public events organised by the Goenka Vipassana organisation. Having become a Vipassana enthusiast herself, she praises it freely in TV interviews and even the odd TED talk.

> But to me this is yet another example of bad science in which meditation seems to get a free pass. Introducing Vipassana was not the only improvement Bedi made to Tihar; she arranged vocational training for prisoners, introduced Yoga classes, organised sports events and celebrations for religious festivals, established petition boxes and went on daily inspections, interacting with prisoners and listening to their problems. Just like patients who feel better after homeopathic treatment, what may have mattered more to prisoners was that Bedi was actually trying to help them; they knew this and therefore already expected things to improve in their lives. Also, there seems to have been no control group in the Vipassana Tihar research. Prisoners who volunteered to learn Vipassana were segregated from the rest and may have been treated better overall. There should have been a control group that was also segregated and in all respects treated the same as the Vipassana group except for the Vipassana part.

[1] https://karanvas.com/posts/adventures-at-the-vipassana-enlig...