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January/February 2006 Featured Stories
Tom Duffy

An Interview by Miriam Knight

Tom Duffy

"…I found all the love that’s within, violence ends where love begins." (From the song "Streetlights" by Tom Duffy.)

I first heard about Tom Duffy when I did an interview for the September/October ‘05 issue of New Connexion entitled "At Risk Youth & The Art of Living." The interview describes the tremendous impact the Art of Living program has had on the lives of Ryan and Jeremy, and those they went on to teach and inspire. They told me about the Art of Living prison program that Tom developed for prisons at the request of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, founder of the Art of Living. It was then known as Prison Smart, focusing on stress-management and aiming to "uplift human values within prison environments." The 15,000 prisoners around the country, plus guards, police, bodyguards and even secret police around the world that have been through the program have greatly reduced their stress and anger levels.

It was only after hearing from Tom what prisons are really like inside, that I could appreciate what a breathtaking achievement this is. The rest of the interview that follows is a disturbing account of what the prison system has become, (and it is up to us to reflect on what that says about us as a society.)

Tom, how did you decide to get into working with at-risk youth and in the prisons?

Well, I had taken the Art of Living Basic Course back in 1990. It really just opened up a light bulb inside of me about taking responsibility for my own path, and forgiveness for people that I was personally holding grudges against in my own life. A few months later I went on a silent retreat and experienced the depth of the Art of Living Advanced Course, which Sri Sri Ravi Shankar was on, and then from that, he invited me to come to India. Here I was, a housepainter in Massachusetts, not making a lot of money, and I just said to myself, "Okay" (laughing), and next thing I knew, a few months after that I was in Bangalore, India. The person I was supposed to go with cancelled out, but I said, "You know what, I’m going." Then I used the last bit of my savings and off I went. While I was in Bangalore, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and I were talking in his little cottage, and I was telling him about my past about doing some wrong things, like a lot of us do, and actually, I was kind of complaining to him at the time. I was saying that, "You got a bunch of rich white people in this organization. I don’t see any poor people," or whatever, and he said, "Oh, no, no, we offer these programs to anyone, even if they can’t afford it. It’s free of charge. We taught it to all the prisoners in Bangalore, and I went, "Whoa, what?" and he said, "Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s very amazing. They take the course and they’re so free. We’ve taught all the secret bodyguards, all the secret police for the President and the Chief of Police of the Police Departments, and it’s had remarkable results." I said, "Wow, that’s really great! Who’s doing that in North America?"

He was spinning his beads and he caught them and he said, "Ahhhh, that’s what you’ll do," and I said "What?" I hadn’t taken teacher’s training or anything. I had only taken the course, and I just had this open heart, you know? As a result, what happened was, he just said, "Go and start teaching," and he wrote down these points. I went back to America and just said, "Well, I’m going to do what he told me, and for three years I tried to kind-of piece it all together like, "Well, how can we take this course and bring it into a place that’s just so against this kind of a thing. I mean, it’s sort of like lighting a fire under water. In the process of those three years I did complete the teacher’s training, but I was making phone calls and phone calls and no luck, no luck. Then while I was on a job working painting houses, I was talking to a customer about the idea I had when all of a sudden the person said, "Well, are you doing anything here in Massachusetts in the prison on the cape?" I said, "You mean there’s a prison on Cape Cod?" We had called all over the United States and traveled to a few prisons and just got doors slammed in our faces left and right. It was only me and a couple of other people. So one day I called up the superintendent of this prison and he gave me a meeting and said, "Come on in. I’ll give you ten minutes. Tell me what your little song and dance is." Two hours later I was sitting in a room full of inmates doing my first what’s called an Intro Talk, and for three years we just put together the program by walking into the jail, taking the Art of Living Basic Course, and saying "How can I adjust this right now because I need to make this work." Out of that came a ten-day format, and to make a long story short, this was around 1995, 1996, I started teaching in other prisons. Then the prison Administrator said to me, "You know, you really need to take this all over the United States. This is Hot Stuff. We got people that were not interested in going to therapists, not interested in AA meetings, not interested in having any type of a positive attitude at all, and now they’re demanding programs and counseling and therapy and they want to do all this stuff. They’re attributing it to your program, and I said, "Well, I told you so, didn’t I?" (laughing) So, off it went! It took off like a wildfire. It went all across the United States, it went into Hawaii, and the Department of Public Safety did a state-wide program. After we did about 14 programs in America, we got a deal with L.A. Probation to work with their most violent gang members. It was in a program called VAP, Violence Alternative Program that’s out in Lancaster, California. We basically did a pilot there and they just said, "This is Hot Stuff," and made it court-ordered mandatory that every minor that came through had to take the program. This was around 2001-2003. So that was really the birth of what was called the Prison Smart Foundation. Since then we reorganized it. I had a goal that after about ten years of getting on its feet it would be run by inmates and then I would step away from it. That goal was achieved to a certain extent, but the only thing that was left out was the inmates running it. The program was very strong and still is. My goal was to bring it more under the umbrella of the Art of Living instead of it being a satellite organization, and now it is a complete offshoot of the Art of Living. It was before, but administratively we had started our own non-profit to cushion any repercussions of a potential lawsuit. We were told by consultants that inmates can sue you, then you got this situation of people being trained in the program, and then they’re going to come to your local satsangs and kirtans and Art of Living gatherings, and what to do... So, it was recommended that we start our own non-profit, which was running full-steam ahead until 2003. Then we just migrated the program more under the umbrella of the Art of Living, which is really it’s natural flow, it’s where it really belonged because it was seen as two different organizations, two non-profits that were working as sister organizations. I don’t want to put too many details out there, but that was the birth of Prison Smart. What inspired me personally to do it was, I saw prisons as places that were debilitating. I felt, and so did a lot of other people, that it was important to make them a place of rehabilitation instead of debilitation. We basically went against every paradigm that was already in place, which was: take someone, lock them up and throw away the key, give them very little programming, they become better educated in the crimes that are available, they make new contacts and friends, and then they get released. Well, we wanted to change that. We wanted to turn, which is what the Art of Living vision with the prison program is, to work on bringing programs like this into jails and teaching inmates that there is a better way, there is a new way, and that old ways of looking at things are only the smoke off the fire of your traumas that you’re holding onto. If you can just cool that fire down and find some peace there, then the smoke that would come off it would be more peaceful, who they really were, the loved and compassionate human values that are in every one of us. We would tell prison staff, "You know, there are some genetically, biologically wired people that need to be kept away from society, but if you look at them overall, populations in prison, it’s only about 5-8%. The rest are people that are in there for drug offenses, some theft, burglaries, some violent behavior, stuff like that, but most of the people, I believe, from what I saw, can turn it around if you give them the tools that will re-instate or remind them of the very core human values that would make them the beautiful people that they once were as children, which is love, compassion, empathy and expression of joy. When people get into a life of crime, they generally come out of a family with some violence or they’ve been neglected, or there’s been abuse, and they, in turn, got into drugs, and then bam, they wind up in jail. Most of them are in there for drug offenses. If you look at the numbers, it’s mind boggling. And the other thing that’s amazing is that a lot of people in jail have dyslexia, ADD and different learning disabilities or disorders. It’s fascinating stuff.

Do you think that’s part and parcel of this whole syndrome, I mean, what is chicken and egg?

It’s hard to iron out, but one thing is for sure, when you talk to the majority of the people that are in jail, they had some sort of significant trauma that is holding their mind in the past. Part of the program is something that Sri Sri told me once and has told it to many groups is that our mind is like a kite. It goes back and forth between the past and the future. What happens when we have traumas and stresses in our life, what happens is our mind gets caught and stuck in the past, and also we can get caught up in the future thinking about "Well, what’s next, what’s going to happen," or we think about what happened, "Oh look what happened in my life." But this cycle of the mind getting caught in the past is something that’s very negative, our minds cling on to the negative. It’s a very fascinating thing how Sri Sri explains about how the breath can be the very tool to free a person’s mind from being stuck in the past. If you look at that kite, that’s swinging back and forth from the past to the future, just like when we’re talking on the telephone right now, your own mind may be reflecting on something you’ve heard before, or it might even be reflecting about the article that you possibly might write about this little interview we do, it’s a natural happening, your mind does this all the time. Sri Sri talks about one of the most important things that happens in the Art of Living Course. Through the breath, which is like the string attached onto the kite, the breath, when you bring discipline to the breath, what happens is that it brings the kite up into the center of this vacillation between the past and the future, and what happens is the mind becomes very present. Now if you do that with a person that’s been in jail, that’s been regretting the past and feeling revengeful toward the future, like "When I get out of here I’m going to get that dude." That’s what almost all of them think, "I’m going to get that guy, he ratted on me, he’s a fink. And then at the same time they’re caught up with all this stuff of what happened. The first thing they say is that they’re innocent, which is true. In their core they are innocent. When we teach them the Art of Living Basic Course, that innocence comes back. That’s kind of the core tool that we bring into the prisons, and the teachers that do it, they’ll all tell you the same incredibly beautiful stories about things that they’ve seen and heard. I’ve had guys admit to crimes that put them in jail for twelve more years because they said, "I need to do this for myself. I need to be truthful about my past, because what I learned in this program showed me that I’m going to be in prison in my own mind for the rest of my life, even after I get out of this place in two years. One guy went back to court after the course, got right up in front of the judge and said, "I’m guilty and this is what I did." Boom. And he came back in the course after his court, before he was sent off to Walpole to serve his time, and he said, "I don’t care about the next twelve years in court. I’m free," and I said, "Right on man, you are free," and I gave him a big hug in front of the officers, and they said, "You are free. Now stay free. Stay with the breath and keep free. This is where you’re going to find your freedom." That was one of the most remarkable things I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen 10-15,000 people or more go through the program just in North America. And, I’ve trained a lot of the teachers to go into the jails, and it’s just remarkable, absolutely remarkable.

It’s such an amazing story. Tell me, you’ve trained 10-15,000 people, now what proportion of the prison population does that represent?

It’s a drop in the bucket. Millions of people. You’d have to look at the current FBI list to see how many people are incarcerated. But allow me to backtrack… I started teaching the Art of Living Teachers that took teacher’s training through the Teacher’s Training, and then I would work with them one-on-one to make them into teachers that could work in a prison environment. I trained 14 teachers, actually a little more than that, since 1991 there’s probably been 17 or 18 people that I’ve worked with directly, and those people, through all their programs, contributed to that number. It was all just not me. I just lit a fire and watched it burn. The teachers that I worked with are the people that really did the work. It’s pretty remarkable. I just want to make clear that it wasn’t Tom Duffy that trained 10,000. I probably taught a huge amount. The first three years that I taught, I probably had about 1800 that I taught, just in Massachusetts, and then when we were in L.A. Probation, we probably did about 1500 juveniles there. I probably personally taught in Hawaii about 300, and then a number of other courses that I was on, probably another 200-300. But the big numbers came from the teachers themselves that are working in the different prisons. I just want to make sure that I don’t get the big credit as being the one who taught 10,000 people.

Sure… The prisons where you’ve been have had such remarkable results, why is this not being adopted in every single prison and why aren’t they clamoring for this kind of thing?

I think a lot of it’s, and it’s kind of a harsh reality, but everybody that is in a prison is anywhere between $30-50,000 per year of an agency’s income that they get from the federal government. So, you do the numbers and you then you think to yourself that there’s a gentleman somewhere in a department of corrections that’s saying, "Well if I have 800 inmates in my prison, and I’m overseeing this budget or I’m a senator or whoever, I don’t know who makes these decisions, the last thing they want to do is see that number go from 800 to 400, because that’s $50,000 per person per year, and that doesn’t even include medicine, the money to contractors, the cooking contractors, the laundry contracts, the money that they buy uniforms so much and they charge the state so much, and it’s huge. And there’s a whole institutional mindset that I think contributes to your question too, why isn’t this being adopted. Number one is economical reasons, because after the first Bush administration closed a lot of military bases, coincidentally, right after that, they started this war on drugs. What they did was they built massive amounts of prisons, guess where, in or around the bases that were closing. That’s why, when you go to Lancaster, California, you got almost a huge consolidation of 3-4 giant prisons right around Edwards Air Force Base, and even though Edwards is still going, that point that I’m saying is that in other parts of the country where economies were being crushed by base closings, the government just coincidentally started the war on drugs, and started… the populations have just gone so ridiculously high over the years, it’s just mind boggling, so there’s an economical machine going on here where bodies are worth money. To try to drive this point a little deeper for a reality check for your readers, is that you have a massive migration now from state agencies migrating to privatization. The word privatization basically means that human bodies are numbers on a spreadsheet. I’m not exaggerating, because this is a reality. I’m not a radical protestor of the issue, it’s just a fact, but Correction Corp America, there’s about six or seven of them. There were three when I was doing a lot of my teachings. Now it’s just huge. And you can buy currently, on the U.S. Stock Exchange, stock in a prison, and guess what the commodity is – a body. To me, I almost barf when I hear that, because when people ask me why are prison populations going up, I can’t honestly say, "Well, there’s just more people now that are dealing drugs. I look at this big machine that, I always worked from Administration, and then I worked my way down to get to the inmates. I mean, you could feel the energy of it, you know, the safety and the stability of that job that a Correction’s Officer has, it’s huge. So to answer your question, that’s just one component. Why aren’t programs like this taught in prisons, because when you rehabilitate someone, they don’t come back. When they don’t come back, there’s no money. Is it all about money? No. You can’t say it’s a blanket statement. It’s one large component, but it creates a mindset that’s built on what the society says emotionally. It says, "We hate these people. They’re mean, dangerous people and we don’t want to deal with them, so the phrase lock them up and throw away the key is basically the blueprint. But what people don’t realize is that these people come back to society. Ninety percent of these people will be released, and they will be coming back to our playgrounds, our shopping malls and parking lots, at taxpayers’ expense, a better-trained inmate. And that’s just the fact. Why isn’t this brought into large institutions? Because I don’t believe a large percent, not all, but a large percent of the criminal justice system has no, what’s their motivation? Think about it? What’s their motivation to have people be rehabilitated? Nothing, because their whole career is based on people breaking the law. It’s a harsh reality, but it is a reality. It’s a shocking reality. The other reason is that the energy of, say an ashram or a yoga class, is one of peace and joy, and it wants to develop more peace and joy. You go into a prison, it’s just the opposite. You see people being dehumanized at a large scale, they’re being abused by other inmates, they’re not being treated like humans because of their behavior, and that’s their responsibility, but the basic thought that I want to pass on to you or whoever ever might be reading this if it ever becomes an article, is that – I used to always say, when I would walk in the front door with teachers and they had never been in a prison before, I used to look them right in the eyes and say, "You’ve got to realize that you’re walking into a machine that eats its young and it will break your heart, but you have to stay focused on the goal that we’re here to uplift the spirits and you’re here to change the mindset, are you ready for it," and they look at me and they will say yes, and in we go, into the machine, and it’s negative, negative, negative, it’s yelling, yelling, yelling. It’s just an atrocious environment for a human soul to try to be a human soul in, and we’re doing just the opposite of that. So why it isn’t being incorporated into every prison is that it’s the institution. It’s what they’ve built. You can look at it as a house on fire and you have a squirt gun and you’re trying to put the house out. You know that the water’s hitting some flame and putting it down and you’re seeing some beautiful souls going off to the side. I had a prison guard who is a very big person in the federal system, and he said to me flat out, "We don’t want these guys to be relaxed and calm, and I said, "What?" And he got real close to me and he leaned over and whispered from the chair, I was teaching and we were in the middle of a break in a course in a federal prison, and he said, "Well, if these guys are relaxed, then they got time to think about how they can hurt us and how they can break out, and our job, pretty much, is to keep them revved up and under stress. And I said, "You’re joking." And he said, "Nope. Look around. Do you think we developed this system because we want these guys to be relaxed? We created what we wanted in this system. The federal government does what it wants. It gets the results it wants." He told me this prison system in North America is modeled after the Russian Gulage system. I said, "Are you crapping me?" He said, "Well, we don’t torture people. We don’t work them to death because they have constitutional protection, but the idea is to keep the inmates under severe stress so that they look at one another and fight with one another, they plan with one another, and that means security to the prison administration, because then they’re not planning. Now this is one opinion from one person in a federal facility, but I said to myself that that was an amazing window that he opened up to me. As I went to other prisons across North America, I began to see in the back of my head that there are certain administrators who want to do change, who want to change the system, but it’s trying to get people from to wind generation for electricity and weaning ourselves off of oil, it’s that s significant. The oil industry is an industry, and trying to sell wind instruments against that huge lobby and that huge machine that’s making billions of dollars a year, it’s the same analogy. I say that with incredible confidence. And that’s why it’s not being incorporated by every prison. A lot of prisons open their door, but there’s aspects of the system that undermine the program. I always say that I feel more, sometimes, in danger of the guards, I’ve never felt threatened by an inmate, ever in my life. Never. There are some levels of corruption in some prisons, somehow drugs are getting in there pretty easily, so there are just huge things going on in the system that need to be fixed. And a lot of organizations have reached out and said, "We want to change this broken mould. We know this doesn’t work, and even those people get eaten up by the system. When people speak up like that and want to do good, they are accused of being …, you know, I’ve had guards come up jokingly at the water cooler in the coffee room, and they come up and says, "Oh there’s that guy who’s running the Hagasaw program, ha ha ha ha, you’re going to teach these guys how to meditate, you’re full of crap. These guys are animals." So that’s why it’s not being…, because you’ve got an institutionalized mindset that doesn’t mean to, but it develops hate and anger. Your average inmate goes in one way and he comes out a lot worse. That we know. We know this for a fact, that prisons are an institutional college for crime. Some people even say that our war in Iraq is developing a training ground for terrorists. The head of the CIA, in power right now, under this Administration, has said this, and it’s documented. Well, guess what. The same thing is happening in U.S. prisons, and the scary thing about it is that if somebody was to come over here and cause this country harm, where are they going to go? They are going to go to the disenfranchised members of society that have a bone to pick with the establishment, and guess who the largest number of those people are? People with a criminal record. Where do you find them? Impoverished areas. It’s easy to get them. They’re easily accessible. So, if they ever did want to come over here and do something, they’re not going to go to Greenwich, Connecticut and knock on a mansion door, they’re going to go to the ghetto. They’re going to go to the gang members in South Central. They’re going to say, "Hey, you’ve been shit on. Come on, we’ll take care of you." That’s basically what a gang does, right. I’ve said all along that we need to work on reforming prisoners because these are the people that are going to get a negative message, possibly, in the future, from some fruitcake that wants to do harm to others, mainly a terrorist agency. That drives me to want to make this program more successful, because of that, and also because of the fact that ninety percent of them are going to be released. So, you’re getting the whole story here from Tom Duffy.

So, ninety percent will be released but will there be a high degree of recidivism?

Huge! I don’t know the exact numbers, but it’s well over half.

Because you were saying earlier that they want to keep the system stocked with bodies, so if ninety percent are released anyway…

They relapse.

So they are counting on the relapse rate to keep the numbers up, they don’t just want them to go off and not come back?

Well, it would be hard for me to say that in that context, but will I will say is that they’re not too enthusiastic about doing anything to stop that from happening. Of course, I’ve heard people actually say that in upper administrative levels, whether that’s an actual paradigm that they all say, "Hey, we got to get bodies," I can’t say that with a great deal of confidence, but I will say that they’re not doing a lot to slow the process down. I’ve never seen a crying warden saying, "Oh, we’ve got thirty new inmates." It’s just amazing.

Do you feel that your work with at-risk youth is trying to stop them before they get into that system?

Absolutely! We work side by side with the counselors in a variety of prisons, or we would work directly under them as one of their programs. They told me that if you can catch a kid before he’s 21, you stand a chance. They’ve got this magic number, 21, and we don’t know why, but it’s something to do with the transition between formative years to adulthood, and once they get past 21, the percentages of success of turning a person around are very low. I was out in Hawaii, teaching out there, and we just said, "We’ve got to really get our act together about getting the biggest bang for our buck, and I said, "Let’s focus in youth. Let’s go to the largest youth detention center on the planet, and guess where it is? Los Angeles. It’s the largest juvenile detention center on this planet, and that is a fact. People come from all over the world to look at the L.A. model. The camp environment they call it, and it’s pretty brilliant, it’s pretty impressive.

You were actually invited into that system, right?

Correct. I was teaching already at Camp Holton, as it was called, right outside of L.A. The director there was just like, "This is bonkers. You need to make a presentation to all of our camp directors, and I’ll arrange it. So she did. We sent some teachers there and they made a presentation, and coincidentally, the one guy that bit the hook, was the guy who was in charge of the VAT program, which was at the Challenger Memorial Youth Center. He said at the time, "I want to give you guys a go, because if you can show some results to L.A. Probation with the most violent offenders, you can go anywhere in the world, because these are the meanest, meanest, and I don’t understate that word, mean, cruel teenagers that have done atrocities beyond your imagination. Don’t say the name of the gang, it’s disrespectful to say the name of the gang. It’s disrespecting a hood. Very unsafe. Just say, and it’s true, one of the gang’s initiations is to walk up to an elderly person that you don’t know and kill them. I mean, I sat with these guys all the time and I was like, my God, "Come into my class." The only thing I could do was say, "I want to help you, man, and they would come in, sometimes, physically kicking and shoving, and I would often go to the lockdown and pull them out and talk to them in a concrete box of solitary confinement, just me and a kid and a camera. I would just get him into the program, and we had great success, huge, huge success with these violent defenders. The staff openly reported that on the nights that we did the evening program, we would go in and do a guided meditation, and in the dorm, on the control center, I would set up a portable PA and play Carlos Nikai flute music and put the kids to sleep with a guided meditation that we use in the Basic course. And this was just the evening program, this wasn’t even the program, this was just the little sideline thing that we did, the staff said, "We’ve never had a fight break out on the nights that the Art of Living prison program, it was called Prison Smart back then, we’ve never had a fight on the evenings that those guys came into the camp. We want them to come into the camp. Can you come in more regularly? We did it about two or three nights a week. It was remarkable. Then the kids who took the program, a lot of their case workers would report that there was a shift. Now whether that shift stays or not, I don’t know. If you take someone and put them in church or a meditation retreat, they’re going to walk out feeling great. But what happens when they go back into their environment? I probably can say with a little bit of confidence that most of my kids are dead, because I knew where they were going, and the large percentage of African-American gang members under the age of 21, you can look up the percentage, that’s out there, it’s huge, how many will die. Simple. Your average black male has a huge statistic hanging over his head, just because he’s a black male. You throw in the fact that he’s a gang banger, even Latino kids are shooting and killing each other constantly. It’s an overwhelming, alarming situation that society doesn’t want to deal with beyond the courtroom and the front page. As long as you lock them up and throw away the key, that’s about as far as the consciousness goes with the society. It’s true. Look and see. People don’t want to deal with it, they don’t want to deal with their youth, they don’t want to deal with their elderly in this country. We focus on the middle class, basically that’s everything. The only time we hear about the poor people is when they hit the news. Very few rich people you’ll hear about in the news. Very few. Every murder you look, oh downtown Mattapan, Massachusetts, South Central L.A., you know, it’s just heartbreaking. In those three years I was brought into a relationship with those gangs in L.A., and they let me in because they trusted me and the teachers that I worked with. The mission statement back then, we used to say, "Violence ends where love begins." That was something that I saw written on a wall. There would be staff that would hand me a kid, literally handcuffed, and the staff standing there with the pepper spray and the safety off the pepper spray pointing it two feet away from the kid’s eyes, saying, "This kid, I want you to work with him." And I said, "Let me talk to him. Can I take him over here? Yes, okay, we’ll go out and sit in this big field in front of the gymnasium, and out in the middle of the Mohave Desert. This prison is a nightmare of the juvenile camps, Challenger Memorial Youth Center. It’s out in the middle of the Mohave Desert. They got this giant green field in the middle and I would go there and go, "Hey man, what’s your name," and he’d say… whatever, José something, some Spanish kid or whatever, and I’d say, "What’s going on, what’s making you tick right now, what’s happening?" And he’d say something that he wouldn’t say to the staff, because he didn’t feel safe. He would say, "My homie got shot yesterday and I’m pissed." I said, "So, can you agree that’s what’s making your behavior go like this," and he goes, "Yah, but nobody will listen to me." I said, "Well, if you come into my class, I’ll listen to you. Will you come into my class?" "Yes, yah, Mr. Duffy." And I’d say, "Will you sit down and promise me that you won’t jump any of your amigos?" "Yes, Mr. Duffy." "Do we got an agreement? Look me in the eyes." He’d look me up in the eyes and I’d say, "Let’s do this together, you and me, let’s see if we can find a little peace for you, okay? A little love." And he’d look at me like, "Nobody says those words in a jail. I’ve gotten in trouble actually by prison administrators because a guard overheard me saying, ‘I love you.’ I said, "I don’t want to have sex with you, I don’t want to molest you, I don’t want to marry you, but I love you as a person, and I want you to get that." And they look you in the eyes and they go, "Whoaaaaa." One kid said, "Man, Mr. Duffy, you got the love roll. You got that love stuff goin’. You all right in my book." And I said, "Come on into my class," and I’d walk him over, which I did, and I said, "Uncuff this kid. He won’t give you any trouble." And the kid said, "Excuse me?" I looked at him and said, "Are you going to give me any trouble?" "No." I said, "So we have an agreement." "Yes, sir, Mr. Duffy." "If you bust this agreement, I’m going to send you back to court. You’re going to get refiled and serve your full time. He said, "You can do that Mr. Duffy?" I said, "Yes I can. I have an L.A. Probation badge. Here it is. I’m not a probation officer. On the full extent I can’t take you to court, but I can fill out a piece of paper to send you back to court, and I can have you refiled on. And they’re like, "Whoaaaa." I said, "But you know what, I’m not going to treat you like an animal. Do you want me to treat you like an animal?" And he would say, "No, Mr. Duffy, I don’t want to be treated like an animal." I said, "Do you want to be treated like a person and be treated with integrity, which you deserve, and you want to be treated with respect?" "Yah." I said, "Then don’t act like an animal and I won’t treat you like an animal. Do we have an agreement?" That’s my sound byte of the year. I said those words thousands of times to the most dangerous people who no one could reach, and the only tool I used was love." Whamo. In three years, we had 1500 inmates, juveniles, court-ordered, they didn’t want to be there. They came in, sat with their rival gang members, thirty at a time, sometimes fifteen, sometimes fourteen, no staff, we ordered no staff supervision. We had one correctional officer that had an office next to the gym, but he was out of the gym most of the time. We eventually got a walkie-talkie that we had to buy ourselves and put that in the POD, which was ten minutes away. Many times I called to check on the officer and they weren’t there. But we sat in that gymnasium in Lancaster, California for three years, and we had never had one fight. I attribute that to the fact that we treated them like human beings, we supported the human values that make them human beings, and we never treated them like animals unless they begged us. And they would beg us by mouthing off. We probably threw twelve kids out in 3 years, and half of those kids came back, asking to come back in the program. With every one of them I went after them the next day and sat with them in lockdown and didn’t go in there with an officer with pepper spray. I went in there as a human being and looked them in the eyes and said those words that I said to you earlier. Do you want to be treated like an animal? Do you want to be treated with respect? If you want to be respected, then act like the human being that you are, don’t act like an asshole. I would swear all the time to them, and they would look at me after hearing me say that, and they would sit down and talk with me. I couldn’t deal with it. Most of the time when they had an emotional issue, what I did was, I didn’t try to be a psychotherapist, because an Art of Living teacher is not a psychotherapist. What I did do is I would walk with that minor side by side, no security, I’d sign him out of the hole, out of the lockdown, and I’d walk him over to the Psych Department. I had my keys. I would open the door, and I would walk him right down the hallway. I would knock on the door and say, "Mrs. so and so or Mr. so and so, can you have a word with this minor, or at least work out a time when you could have a word with him?" "Absolutely, Mr. Duffy. Have him sit down right now." We would call Security, say he’s in the Psych Department right now, we would call for an officer, you know, we’d follow the rules, do everything to the book. Then those kids would come back, after getting something off their chest, and finish the program. The majority of those kids would just finish the program. I proved to the Administration that where violence ends, love begins. If you take a room and there’s no light, then it’s complete darkness, but if you light a candle in there, darkness is never the same. The same thing happens inside of a young soul when you light that candle of love that’s in their heart, what happens is, the true person that’s there underneath the gang, underneath the tattoos, underneath all the fashizzle-magizzle, whatever talk they do and all the rap talk, underneath that is a beautiful young soul and it’s just begging to have someone care about them. That’s what we do in the Art of Living prison program, and no one can tell me that it doesn’t work. For the seventeen years that I taught in prisons, I made a gamble with every prison Administrator I ever work for. I said put me in a room with your most violent, most dangerous criminals, and if you don’t see a result in the first two hours, you may throw me out of this prison and I will never call you again. I said that to every prison Administrator I ever worked for, and a lot of them said, "You’re crazy, but you know what, I’m going to call you on it." I had guys say that. They’d say, "And when you get your ass kicked and you get stabbed, I’m going to laugh at you. I’m going to make an example of you." I have had some guards say that to me. I said, "I understand why you would feel that way. I would feel that way if someone said that to me, but go ahead, put me in the room, you sit and watch the camera, and no Security, no guard," because I would say, within myself…, I couldn’t tell the guard this, but I said to myself, "God is my greatest guard. Love is what God is to me, and that is my guard." And I have never been attacked. Well, I have been mouthed off to, I had a guy come up to me and call me an Irkle-look-alike mother fucker one day.

A what? What was the first word?

You know Irkle, the character on the TV show? Irkle, he was a black nerd, and he’s got my face. I had a guy mouth that off once. (laughing) So, I said, "Well thank you for the compliment. Sit down and do the briefing." You obviously can’t print that, but it’s the whole concept. What I would like to see that manifests into an article, is demonstrating the importance of turning prisons into a place of rehabilitation and not into a place of debilitation, to remind people that the reason it is that way is because we had decided that way as a society. This is what we have told our government to do, punish them. You look through all history, the only prisons that really worked were the first prisons. In the first prisons, they would bring people in for thirty-forty days, from the villages or the little townships, and usually they were run by a spiritual person or they were either sent to a monastery or some sort of a retreat center, and they would get spiritual values taught to them of some sort. Then they were released or they would have to go and sit with the tribal medicine man. If you listen to these beautiful stories of the Native American Indians, how did they deal with the criminals back in the old days? Well, they dealt with them the way they should have been dealt with, to get results, and that was to do what we did. They would sit with the medicine man or the chief, or they would live with the chief or have to be under the guidance of the spiritual leader. But then what happened was, all of a sudden, as history unfolded, the prisons became places, like, where the dungeons came in, where torture was really what you got. In a lot of third world countries, they’re still doing it that way. America has an opportunity here to really take this and turn it around because of who we are. We can turn this around. I would say with great confidence that 80-90% of the people in the prison right now can turn their life around if they were given the tools that they need, which I believe, strongly, are spiritual based programs. It doesn’t have to be the Art of Living. It could be Buddhism. I know a lot of people that are in the Prison Dharma Network teaching Buddhism in prisons. You can’t imagine the results they are getting. The Vipassana Yoga organization has been able to do remarkable things where they get control of a whole prison unit. They control the diet, they feed them the proper food, give them the proper spiritual lessons, and you can’t imagine the beautiful stories that come out of it. Art of Living has had huge results, and the list goes on. Very few spiritual groups that have worked in prisons have had bad results, but there is a lot of nonspiritual approaches that have had a lot of negative results. And that is well documented. Powerful stuff, isn’t it?

Very.

In the Art of Living, I think Sri Sri Ravi Shankar has cracked the code. He really has. If you think about it, if anyone wants to argue with my point, they can. My point is that if you have a fire and you throw sticks on it, is the fire going to grow? The answer is yes. If you have a fire and you throw water on it, and you throw a lot of water on it, you’re going to get a few sparks that will fly off and start another fire, but you’re going to get a big fire that goes out. Right now we’ve got a big fire burning that’s catching society on fire, and you’ve got a few people, maybe a few thousand, and I feel confident in saying that, people that are working in spiritual organizations – Buddhists, Christian, there’s nothing wrong with church and faith-based groups, I’ve got nothing against them… There’s a few thousand standing at the bonfire with squirt guns saying, "amen, amin, shalom, om nama shivaya" with every squirt, and little bits of the fire are going out, and one of those is this conversation. But right now there is a giant billion dollar industry just roaring like a big fire, and it’s just gobbling up souls and turning them into scorched beings. The Art of Living program is definitely at the top of the pyramid of success stories of what you can do with people that are incarcerated.

Well, bless you on your work.

The main people to bless are the teachers in the Art of Living that are doing the work, and the organization of the Art of Living that are supporting the work, and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar for developing the work that we brought in. He created this, it’s one of the main reasons why I believe he should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, because I really believe he’s one of the people who’s established a lot of peace in the world that I’ve seen with my own eyes.

You can contact Tom Duffy at 866-300-2395 or tomduffy@onebox.com. The Art of Living website is: www.artofliving.org/