“ Whether inmate or not, we are all prisoners of greed, hatred and ignorance. ”

In order to reduce crime and the causes of crime, our community needs to take responsibility for the creation of a generation of “Bigger Boys” unable to cope with the daily demands of adult society.

Bigger boys are more likely to be involved in crime, addicted to drugs, depressed and unemployed. Many prisoners - and prisons - are spiritually bankrupt. For many, this leads to low self-esteem, aggression, and chronic alcohol and drug abuse.

Studies have shown that there is also a direct link between nutrition and crime. The nutritionist Pat Thomas claims that juvenile delinquents showed a significant drop in anti-social behaviour when put on a low sugar diet:

“In a 1983 study of 3,000 imprisoned teenagers, snack foods were replaced with healthier options containing reduced refined sugary foods. During the year in which the diets changed, violent and anti-social incidents decreased by almost half. There was also a 21% reduction in anti-social behaviour, 25% reduction in assaults, 75% reduction in use of restraints and 100% reduction in suicides.”

(The Ecologist, March 2006,
“Asbos vs Nutrition”)

As the video Doing Time, Doing Vipassana proved, regular meditation retreats for prisoners are an essential tool to teach them to tame and train their bodies and minds (www.dipa.dhamma.org). For many prisoners, meditation retreats are an opportunity to become more mindful.

Bo Lozoff, Director of the Human Kindness Foundation, explains how society’s attitude to prisoners makes a bad situation much worse.

“There are simple universal laws of human life which cannot be violated without paying a painful price. Every great spiritual, philosophical and religious tradition has emphasized compassion, reconciliation, forgiveness and responsibility. These are not questions, they are instructions. If we follow them we will thrive, if not we will suffer. The socially sanctioned hatred and rage which we express towards criminals in modern times violates these timeless instructions. We are breaking a fundamental spiritual law, and the price we are paying for it is increased crime, violence, depravity, hopelessness, and of course, more hatred and rage”

(www.humankindness.org)

• Dyslexia is a hereditary condition that affects boys more than girls (3/4 of cases); it generally affects 10% of the population. According to some studies, dyslexia affects 30-40% of the unemployed and 80% prisoners.
• 80% of crime is due to alcohol and/or drug addiction.
  (www.archinitiatives.org.uk).
• 70% of ex-offenders re-offend within twenty-four months (Inside Time Magazine).
• “40-50% of inmates are ex-army,” according to a senior Church of England chaplain.
• It costs on average £49,920 per annum per prisoner (Inside Time Magazine).
• “Self-harm was a way of numbing the pain in my mind” Ammie, ex-prisoner from HMP Styal, talking to the Big Issue in the North (October 2007).
• “Afro-Caribbeans make up less than 3% of the population, but 40% of those detained in high security mental hospitals” Matilda MacAttram, Director Black Mental Health U.K.
• “95% of all prisoners are eventually released back in society, indelibly marked by violence they have seen or experienced” T.J. Parsell (Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in a Man’s Prison, www.TJParsell.com).
• “Research tells us that around half of all prisoners have a reading age of less than that of an average 11 year old” Stephen Shaw, Prisons and Probation Ombudsman (Prison Service News, September/ October 2007,
  

www.hmprisonservice.gov.uk).