"The focus of the Prison-Ashram Project is to help prisoners and prison staff throughout the world turn inward and use their harsh environments to develop wisdom and compassion." [1]
The Prison-Ashram Project was started in 1973 by Bo Lozoff and Ram Dass to encourage convicts to use their prisons as ashrams.
"Ashram" is a Sanskrit word meaning "House of God." In the East, an ashram is a place where people live for some period of time in order to strengthen their spiritual practice and self-discipline. Many ashrams are very strict. Residents, or ashramites, abide by an exhaustive schedule and live very simply, without many comforts or luxuries.[2]
Originally, Ram Dass funded the project, and Lozoff corresponded with prisoners, going on to develop educational materials, including books, audio recordings, and videos. Lozoff's wife, Sita, joined the project in 1975, and the two of them have led thousands of workshops in over 500 prisons. Bo retired from the project in 2011; Sita now leads the project, along with a board of directors.[2]
Lozoff's first and best-known book is We're All Doing Time: A Guide to Getting Free, first published in 1985, now in its seventeenth printing and with a foreword by the Dalai Lama.[3] The Village Voice called it "one of the ten books everyone in the world should read."[4] It has been translated into French (Nous Sommes Tous Dans une Prison), Spanish (Todos Estamos Encarcelados), Italian (Spezza le tue catene), Dutch, and Czech (Všichni Máme Svá Pouta - aneb průvodce k osvobození), and is available at no cost to prisoners.[2]
The Prison-Ashram Project is part of the Human Kindness Foundation, which was founded by Bo and Sita Lozoff, and has a sister project in England, The Prison Phoenix Trust, which offers yoga and meditation to prisoners in the UK and Ireland.