Early Pennsylvania prisons, based on Quaker ideas,[8][9] used meditation upon one's crimes as a core component of rehabilitation.
[4] James Mease in the early 19th century described this approach involving isolation and meditation and the logic behind it: [Repentance of crime is produced by:] (1) a tiresome state of mind from idle seclusion; (2) self-condemnation arising from deep, long-continued and poignant reflections upon a guilty life.
All our endeavors, therefore, ought to be directed to the production of that state of mind, which will cause a convict to concentrate his thoughts upon his forlorn condition, to abstract himself from the world, and to think of nothing except that suffering and the privations he endures, the result of his crimes.
[12]This approach was critiqued in-between the late 19th and early 20th century, specifically with research showing the isolation it incorporated was causing more harm than benefit.
In the 1970s organizations such as the Prison-Ashram Project[14] and SYDA Foundation began programs to offer meditation or yoga instruction to inmates.
In New York City, Anneke Lucas, who has alleged that she was the victim of child sex abuse, has used her story of trauma, recovery, and skills as a yoga and meditation teacher to build a non-profit organization that brings volunteer yoga and meditation instructors into prisons and jails citywide.
[29] But court actions recognizing Zen Buddhism as an "acceptable religion" secured meditation programs in New York prisons.
[28] Author Christopher Queen feels that funding in the United States for prison contemplative programs was hampered in 1997 by the repeal of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993.
Doing Time, Doing Vipassana released in 1997 documented a large scale meditation program at Tihar Prisons in India with over a thousand inmates.
[16] The Dhamma Brothers released in 2007 documented a smaller scale, optional meditation program implemented at Donaldson Correctional Facility in Bessemer, Alabama.