Meditation in jail urged

Press, 10 December 1983, Page 18

Meditation in jail urged

PA Wellington Criminal reoffending could be reduced drastically if transcendental meditation were introduced in prisons, an Australian Crown prosecutor has said in Wellington.

Mr Phillip Jackson, of Perth, said that criminals were the victims of stress in society and putting them in prison only made them worse.

“The criminal justice system does not see any way of curing these people and so it puts them in prisons to get them off the streets,” he said.

“We put them in an environment which is the most stressful possible and it just

exacerbates their stress. If we introduced transcendental meditation into jails we could cure that knot of stress.” Mr Jackson is one of 20 meditators from Australia and New Zealand who have spent the last four months in Wellington becoming associate teachers of the transcendental meditation programme.

At a press conference yesterday they said the programme, founded 25 years ago by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, could bring about significant reductions in crime, unemployment, divorce rates, traffic accidents, and environmental pollution.

Another member of the course, Dr Hubert Lovell-

Smith, of Christchurch, said he would like to see transcendental meditation introduced in every alcohol-de-pendence treatment centre in New Zealand.