35 Years Behind the Walls: A Conversation with Gary Allen
- PMI Staff
- 3 hours ago
- 4 min read
For more than three decades, Gary Allen, Co-Executive Director and Director of Education of Mindfulness Peace Project, has been quietly doing the work — mailing books into cells, leading sitting groups across Colorado, and playing what he calls "the long game" with Dharma in prisons.
Gary Allen has been teaching Buddhist practice and mindfulness inside prisons since 1990 — with only five years away, spent living and studying in Korea. What he has built is not a flashy program. It is, by his own description, a pile of mail on a desk, a corps of volunteer teachers making long drives across Colorado, and an abiding faith that the Dharma works.
Most of what Gary's organization does comes through the mail. Prisoners write letters — sometimes long ones — and Gary writes back. He and his volunteers respond personally to every letter, and their study courses are built entirely around this correspondence model.
"We try to be fairly personal," he explains. "We'll write back long letters to long letters."
The work is not glamorous, and Gary is the first to say so. He has shown up at a prison gate regularly for five years only to be told there's no record of him. He has driven two hours to facilitate a ninety-minute group, then been asked to leave early because chow ran long. "That stuff happens on a semi-regular basis," he says, with the matter-of-fact calm of someone who has stopped being surprised by it.
Anger: The Emotion That Runs the Yard
"Anger is the number one thing in prisons," Gary says simply. "Your number one klesha, thousands of years running."
He didn't arrive at that conclusion from a textbook. Thirty-five years of sitting across from incarcerated people — in groups, through correspondence, in the particular silence of a prison meditation room — has made it plain. Anger is what's there. It's in the walls, in the dynamics between people, in the history that landed most of them inside in the first place.
When Gary’s organization asked Khenpo Tsültrim Gyamtso Rinpoche what they should be teaching, his answer pointed directly at it: the Patience chapter of Shantideva's The Way of the Bodhisattva — a rigorous, classical examination of anger and how to meet it with patience. It's the most demanding of the three courses Gary offers, and the students who make it that far often find it speaks to something they've never had language for before.
"Some of them really love that course," he says.
"Anger is the number one thing in prisons," Gary says simply. "Your number one klesha, thousands of years running."
There's nothing soft about the way Gary talks about anger in this context. It's not framed as something to manage or repress. The Mahayana teaching on patience doesn't ask you to pretend anger isn't there — it asks you to look directly at it, understand its nature, and work with it over time. For people whose anger has cost them enormously, that distinction matters.
The Veterans Course: Meeting Trauma Where It Lives
Alongside the Buddhist courses, , Gary and his organization developed two secular mindfulness tracks — one designed specifically for people in solitary confinement, and one for military veterans. The veterans course goes deep: sitting, walking, listening, and sensory awareness practices are woven together with material on negative ideation, recurring nightmares, somatic work for releasing stuck trauma, and an honest examination of moral injury.
"There's a section trying to look deeply at what it means to be traumatized," Gary explains. "A lot of times that's related to moral injury."
The response has been powerful. "They're like, 'Oh, this is finally talking about what's happening to me.'"
The Long Game
Gary is candid about the limits of what secular mindfulness can accomplish, especially in the veterans’ context. Students who arrive with no prior framework sometimes struggle to grasp even foundational concepts — distinguishing between a direct sensory experience and the thought that follows it. "Nothing replaces a lot of time on a meditation cushion," he says.
This is where the Dharma, in Gary's view, provides something secular frameworks cannot: a path, a goal, a sense of identity. Taking refuge vows, joining a lineage, developing devotion to it — these things matter. “It gives you greater inspiration and support."
"I always play the long game. This person is learning Dharma. It came into them and changed them — and it made them a better, more reasonable person."
He doesn't measure success in immediate outcomes. Some people will practice intensely while incarcerated, then let it go when they're released. Others will carry it for the rest of their lives. "There are the lives to come," he reflects. "Who knows — I might be sitting in a prison cell and one of these people shows up."
What Sustains the Work
At the end of our conversation, Gary was asked what he would say to someone considering this kind of service. His answer was neither a recruitment pitch nor a warning. It was a statement of simple fact, grounded in thirty-five years of evidence.
"There are people in prisons who've suffered enough to want to work with themselves. They know their life has failed — they've had it crushed into their face. And then they start applying the Dharma, and they can hear it. They become very different people. Sometimes they'll say, 'I've got a much healthier life inside this prison than I ever had on the outside.'"
"That affects the people around them. The group craziness of prisons is a pretty intense thing. And this is shining a light into someone's life...I know it works. I've seen it work over and over and over. And it makes a difference in someone's truly lived life, even in a very difficult situation. That's heartening."
About Gary Allen
Gary Allen has been teaching Buddhist practice and mindfulness inside prisons since 1990, with a brief hiatus while living and studying in Korea. He leads sitting groups in Colorado prisons and oversees a correspondence-based study program serving incarcerated people across the United States and beyond. His organization distributes Dharma books, magazines, and study courses by mail, maintaining a personal correspondence with dozens of students at any given time.
Gary is also a presenter on PMI's Edovo course "Breaking the Chains" and "Discovering Sanity"- courses specifically created to bring mindfulness and meditation to prisoners through the Edovo tablet learning platform.
Books by Gary Allen: