Insight-Out provides prisoners with practical tools that foster insight, heal emotional wounds, and create ways to feel connected, responsible, and part of a world beyond their own needs – and past mistakes. The signature program of Insight-Out is a 52-week course titled Guiding Rage Into Power, or GRIP, which integrates violence prevention, mindfulness, yoga, victim dialogues, and emotional intelligence.

 Verduin draws from the Navajo belief that someone who has committed a crime is “one who acts as if they have no relatives.” Verduin believes that a crime is an inarticulate plea for help and that someone commits a crime because that individual does not feel like a bonded and accountable member of the community. Thus, core of the GRIP program works to reestablish a prisoner’s sense of belonging and accountability to a community.

Community in Prison

All learning takes place in a group called the GRIP Tribe.  The group identity is a “powerful incentive to bond in a positive way rather than a destructive way, as in a gang,” explains Verduin. Emphasis on community identity helps prisoners practice an increasing sense of relatedness. Verduin says, “Accountability is evoked through meaningful relationships and a sense of purpose. It’s not a standard you can keep without being socially bonded and personally motivated.”

Participants sign an extensive pledge that commits them to stopping violence, developing positive behaviors and habits, and remaining accountable to themselves and each other. If a pledge is broken (because mistakes are part of life), prisoners share that stumbling block with the class so it becomes a positive learning experience.

The tight container of the Tribe holds the prisoners and their experiences as they proceed through intense psycho-spiritual exercises. Mindfulness practices, processing early traumas and victim meetings help to heal deep personal wounds. Participants map out their personal histories to see patterns between violence suffered and violence perpetrated. Through a meditation practice called Sitting in the Fire, men are taught how to go in, through, and out of deep suffering and trauma.

The poet Rumi says, “the cure for the pain is in the pain.” If we imagine a wound as a cut and learn how to be present for it, we also discover that this cut represents an opening. It is through this opening that the realizations are passed and become insight.

A graduate describes GRIP in eight words what the process is all about:

 “First I learned: ‘hurt people hurt people; that I lashed out from the pain inside me that I didn’t know what to do with. Then I learned: ‘healed people heal people;’ that my own healing drives me to want to heal others and give back. These eight words describe the GRIP Program and that lesson was all I needed.”  -Brother G., GRIP Graduate                                                ~

Widening Community

The men speak to victims; they write and read aloud ‘letters of unfinished business’ (not to be sent) to people they have hurt or to family members that have passed during their incarceration. They bond deeply this way.

Breaking down the “me and other” dichotomy eventually creates an interconnectedness that “leads one from the identity of being an offender to the identity of being a servant,” says Verduin.

Return to Community

To support the men as they leave the year-long program, Verduin arranges a graduation ceremony open to families, victims, local officials and people who visited the program over the year. At the ceremony, the community bears witness to the men signing the same peacemaker pledge they took at the beginning of the year— but this time it’s forever.

“This is our gift to the community,” says Verduin, “the gift of returning safe men, men who also know how to resolve conflict. It is through giving back to places we took from that we publicly state our new identity.”

“We now have the first life-sentenced prisoners in the country who have been professionally trained in preventing violence in their communities,” says Verduin. “Some who have been released are giving back to communities with this job skill, and the ones in prison work with fellow prisoners.”

 Full Circle: Working with At-Risk Youth

 In our youth program we work on the other side of the pipeline, where a disproportionately high number of youth are feeling alienated and rebellious to a world that fails to see them, appreciate them, or understand their struggles. Insight-Out hires former prisoners trained by the GRIP Program to work with youths on probation, in schools, and in youth centers to prevent both re-victimization and incarceration.

“The youngsters often feel the Elders have come back to reconnect with them,” continues Verduin. “For many of the released prisoners, working with challenged youth is a way to gain back their dignity and a means to give back. It is their deepest wish, a dream come true.”

“At the heart of Insight-Out’s teachings is the actual experience of how each person’s freedom is intricately interwoven with the liberation of others,” explains Verduin. It is this shared sense of mutuality, the experience of truly belonging to one another, both spiritually and as a community, which informs the GRIP Program participants.

“Every time a kid spits his/her destructive impulses into a poem that makes that anguish sing and teach others, the community wins,” says Verduin. “Every time a victim feels their pain honored by a heartfelt apology, we all grow taller. Every time a prisoner returns to his or her community as a safe person, it reaffirms the life of that community.

“Together we learn that being free isn’t just a geographical fact; it’s not just the other side of the gate. At the heart of being free is not knowing where you are, but knowing who you are. That identity is sustained by building a tribe or community which helps you in reminding you what your place is and how you belong”.