A meditation on doing time

Jenny Phillips has made a film about inmates practicing meditation.

Jenny Phillips wasn't thinking about making a movie when she visited Alabama's maximum-security Donaldson Correctional Facility in 1999.

A Concord-based cultural anthropologist and psychotherapist, Phillips has long worked with the incarcerated in Massachusetts, using a meditation program called Houses of Healing. When she heard about self-taught inmates practicing it at Donaldson, she had to investigate.

"The Dhamma Brothers," which opened yesterday at Brookline's Coolidge Corner Theatre, chronicles what happens after Phillips sets things in motion to bring a total-immersion meditation practice known as Vipassana to this anything-but-peaceful prison. Phillips (wife of Boston Globe State House bureau chief Frank Phillips) will be among the filmmakers appearing at screenings of the documentary tonight and Monday. We talked by phone:

You went to Donaldson to extend your research on prison culture. You wound up a filmmaker. Why?

Arising out of this atmosphere of despair and violence were these shining, elevated souls asking for some means of help so that they could find inner peace and redemption. I came back up here and put the tapes in my car tape deck and just listened to them . . . these incredible stories of people sincerely searching for a better way to live their lives.

They're amazing storytellers, but did you worry that the inmates might be faking some things?

I wasn't born yesterday. . . . Vipassana involves a lot of courage to look deeply within yourself. As [convicted murderer] Grady Bankhead says in the film, it was more difficult than being on death row for 8 1/2 years.

You've voiced some mixed feelings about reaping the benefits of this film while the men remain in prison.

Yeah, I'm very conscious of that fact. La-di-da, I was out in LA recently with celebrities and pictures being taken, having a wonderful reception and toasting the successes, and [the inmates] don't even know it's happening. . . . They did see a rough cut of the film last May.

What would you say to people who think maximum-security prison inmates don't deserve any perks or inner peace?

I just have to say I question what value prisoners' unhappiness has for our society. If they're unhappy, they're more likely to do harmful things, the psychiatric care bills will go up, people will die. And yet if people are healthy and grounded, we'll have a more peaceful institution and more peaceful streets when the 97 percent that return to society do come back out those doors.

Why do you think these men opened up to you?

Because they wanted people to know their stories so they wouldn't be forgotten. They're in the dustbin of humanity. Prisoners do not want to be forgotten by their families and friends. They also wanted their stories to somehow help other people. As well as a wish to be remembered, there's a wish to be useful.

Your maternal grandfather, Maxwell Perkins, was Ernest Hemingway's editor. You're now helping to protect the author's home and legacy in Cuba. Isn't there a film in there somewhere?

Yeah, I am beginning to see that in my future, as soon as I get this baby well established in the world.