Update on Prison Community

Dear friends of Rainforest Lab,

Last Tuesday marked the end of another class cycle at Clallam Bay Corrections Center where the members of Rainforest Lab have supported a community of incarcerated men with facilitation and teaching for the past year and a half. The community is centered around Nonviolent Communication (NVC) and mindfulness and is a branch of the Seattle based organization Freedom Project. For me the recent 15 week course on NVC and mindfulness was a sanctuary of nourishing connection and learning.

One value I see the community at CBCC embracing is shared power, which I believe is a critical component of NVC. I see this value embodied when incarcerated folks in the class step into leadership and teaching roles. I see members of the community who live in prison offering constructive feedback on the material and structure of class to those of us who do not live in prison. In those moments I believe roles and the integrated power- dynamics associated with them are challenged.  I imagine this requires so much courage on the part of the incarcerated.

Five members of the community at CBCC have been coming to the class cycles for the past year and a half. I’m so grateful for their modeling and teaching of NVC consciousness to us outside facilitators and to their peers. I’m deeply inspired by their capacity to practice this way of life under what I believe are such brutally dehumanizing conditions.

In the class we are all learning to speak our truth and name what we perceive as unbalanced power dynamics, just as we are learning to cultivate empathy that allows us to be free of enemies. I consider this work to be central to the development of nonviolent leadership that I hope is part of grassroots prison abolition over time.

I celebrate the support of the incarcerated practitioners who have been with us since the beginning of this journey at Clallam Bay, and the open hearts and minds of those who just finished their first class cycle. The container we have created every week has been fueled by our bonds of empathy and commitment to transformation. I hope that the work we are doing together is a part of a larger movement of nonviolence that I see the Freedom Project as a part of. I hope that we are all learning and building connections that will support us in a collaborative and nonviolent dismantling of the Prison Industrial Complex, and the creation of a world where we are all free.

Love and Solidarity,

Morning Munk