They filed through the gymnasium doors in regulation blue and gray sweatshirts, rubbing their eyes, some curious but all of them tired. A cellmate had kept most of them up all night by yelling and banging on the walls. At the doors, the young men slapped on name tags and grabbed their complimentary granola bars. “It’s a great day to be in prison,” one of them said as he filed past the makeshift check-in desks to find his seat. Although Prison Dharma Network (PDN) holds a shorter, smaller weekly class on Thursday evenings at the Lookout Mountain Youth Services Center in Golden, Colorado, today’s program would be a bit different. The fifty males—fifteen to twenty years old—who were about to go through the half-day PDN program on this Monday in late March had been hand-selected by Lookout staff as those most likely to benefit from today’s workshop.

PDN has been connecting inmates with the dharma through correspondence, book mailings, and dharma pen pals since it was founded in 1989. PDN has also been working to build a well-resourced, national prison dharma movement through its website, publishing projects, regional training programs, jail and prison programs, and by networking with other prison dharma projects. Its membership now includes over fifteen hundred individuals and over seventy meditation-based prison projects. Its most recent and now flagship initiative is the Path of Freedom program, a blend of Buddhist mindfulness practice and cognitive behavioral therapy, which PDN volunteers are introducing at facilities like Lookout Mountain.

Fleet Maull, a Buddhist who founded PDN while serving time in federal prison, stood in a large circle of folding chairs at one end of the drab wooden gym floor, encouraging everyone to find a seat. He spoke with trenchant insight into their situation, letting them know he was not there to patronize.

“I’m an ex-con. I spent fourteen years in a federal prison,” he said. “At the time, my best thinking got me in there. And I’m a pretty smart guy.” The group chuckled, and Maull cracked a smile himself before bringing up an important but difficult topic for him: his son, who was nine years old when Maull went to prison. “That was the most devastating thing,” he said. “There are guys in here who have parents in jail. The impact on kids is horrible.”

Maull said that his son, “who works hard but still hasn’t figured out what he’s doing in life,” had been assaulted in Peru less than a month before and had been in a coma for a week. He told the group that his life partner had cancer and recently entered a hospice program. [Maull’s life partner, Denise Lucile Thornton, died on September 3, 2008.] He said the practices and techniques PDN volunteers would teach them that day could help to change their habits and ways of thinking, so that they could not only stay out of prison but also deal with the kinds of difficult situations they’d inevitably encounter in everyday life on the outside, like the ones he was facing. Then he asked the men to close their eyes for a moment.

Maull explained he was going to tell them a couple of things, and he wanted them to pay attention to their first thoughts. “There is absolutely nothing wrong with anyone in here,” he began. He told them they all had basic goodness and a sacred, divine nature. He told them whatever their faith, they were not missing anything. He closed by saying, “All of us in here care deeply about you and your life, and what you’ll be able to do with it going forward.”

Fleet Maull, founder of Prison Dharma Network, speaking to a group of prisoners last Spring. “All of us in here care about you and your life, and what you’ll be able to do with it going forward.” © Jon Orlando

A young man raised his hand.

“What you said about how you care about us,” he said, “I thought it was all bullshit.”

“I don’t blame you for having those thoughts,” Maull said, unflinching. “They were conditioned into you since you were kids. They’re your core beliefs. They came from our parents, peers, teachers. We can change that. We learned to live from a place of fear and mistrust, and with that we developed self destructive, addictive behaviors. These practices you’re about to learn can help you see and trust your own goodness and see the world as a good place.”

Then the young men were broken into smaller groups and began their work with the PDN volunteers, whose stories about how they came to be part of PDN are interesting in their own right.

John Ehrhart, for instance, led a station focused on attentive speaking and listening, giving each member the chance to speak about a moment when they felt they were most alive. Ehrhart, who makes a living in Boulder as a land surveyor, went through the yearlong Peacemaker Training just over three years ago to be able to teach with PDN. He had learned about the program while pursuing his master’s degree in Transpersonal Psychology at Naropa University.

Maull teaches as an adjunct faculty member at Naropa, and his ties to the University date back to the days of the double life that would eventually land him in federal prison. He became a Buddhist while studying at Naropa University in 1978 under its founder, the late Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Maull studied at Naropa for most of the year, then traveled to South America for a few months, where he earned enough money trafficking cocaine to allow him to continue living modestly back in Boulder the rest of the year. The paradoxical nature of his former existence as both a Buddhist and drug smuggler is not lost on Maull, who has written of how his value system was shaped by the zeitgeist of the 1960s.

Maull was arrested in 1985 under the Reagan “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign. He was charged with engaging in a continuous criminal enterprise, otherwise known as the “kingpin statute,” which carried a minimum sentence of ten years and a maximum of life. Maull got thirty years, a bad deal by most accounts. Though Maull doesn’t deny that he smuggled drugs, he does say that he was in no way a kingpin.

When Maull entered a maximum security federal prison in Springfield, Missouri, he was already known throughout the Shambhala Buddhist community because of his travels to centers across the U.S. An article he published in Shambhala Sun about celebrating Shambhala Day in prison helped put his name out there even more. Maull said that within one to two years of being in prison he began receiving letters from prisoners interested in learning meditation. He wanted to help them, and since he worked in the education department at the Springfield prison, helping fellow inmates learn to read, earn their GEDs, and take college courses, he had access to a copy machine.

“I’d put together copies of some articles out of Shambhala Sun or Tricycle or out of books,” Maull said, “and I’d mail them out to the prisoners. I’d actually find myself in a state of bliss while I was doing that. I realized how impactful this would be to the prisoners. When you’re a prisoner, even junk mail feels good, much less a package like this with the dharma.”

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