Jail break

Youthful offenders are taught yoga to help them relax, meditate, and, perhaps, turn their lives around

A cramped room inside a locked school for juvenile offenders does not seem like the ideal setting to find inner peace.

And yet, five teenage boys, each with a history of violent behavior, have gathered here to focus on their breath, test their strength in yoga poses, and to escape.

"You lose all the worries, you know what I mean?" said Jason, one of the youths, after an hour of yoga. "Come yoga, you're just by yourself basically. You get out of this building - another place."

Jason, whose last name is being withheld because he is a juvenile offender, has been at the Robert F. Kennedy School in Westborough for a year. Like all of the 20 teens who live at the RFK Children's Action Corps facility, he was referred there by the state Department of Youth Services after court adjudication. Originally from Lawrence, Jason was charged with possession of a firearm. He said he joined a gang when he was 10.

Yoga for juvenile offenders is relatively rare, but yoga and similar stress-relieving practices such as meditation have been used in prisons for years. A study last year on mindfulness in Massachusetts correctional facilities, which appeared in an international publication, the Prison Journal, evaluated 1,350 inmates who completed 113 courses. Evaluations were done before and after each course, according to the study, and improvement was found on "widely accepted self-report measures of hostility, self-esteem, and mood disturbance."

Bob Lozoff, author of "We're All Doing Time," which some within the prison system call the "convict's bible," has visited hundreds of prisons around the world since the early 1970s. He tells convicts to use their time behind bars to meditate and get in touch with their spirituality. "There are a lot of kids who have grown up now in a generation where our culture has zero respect for silence, calmness, quiet," said Lozoff, director of the Human Kindness Foundation, based in North Carolina. "Multitasking is the antithesis, like the antichrist, of any spiritual tradition."

Held once or twice a week, the Westborough class began, as it always does, with the students moving a table and chairs out of the bedroom-size space. Then they each unfurled a pink, blue, or green yoga mat.

Instructor Julie Tzipori could not get a CD player to work, so one of the students went to get his as a substitute. A burly supervisor constantly watched through windows lining the room's walls to make sure the boys behaved. He was already tested once that day when a fight broke out just before the class.

"Every time you breathe in, breathe in something positive," Tzipori told her students, as New Age-style guitar music vibrated out of the borrowed CD player.

"As you exhale, just let go, let go of all the stuff you've been holding on to," she said.

As the boys worked up a sweat moving through yoga poses like Plank and Cobra, they seemed entirely focused.

"You guys that play basketball, this is good for your jump shot," Tzipori said as she led the teens through Downward-facing Dog.

Ocean waves filled the room. Jason's arms quivered as he held Upward Dog, a challenging pose that balances all the weight on the palms and tops of the feet as the arms straighten, the back arches, and the head reaches toward the sky.

Breathing, meditation, and yoga can help anyone, but are especially effective for someone who has landed in prison because of violent behavior, Lozoff said.

"Basically you're talking about people who feel so powerless that they commit violence over other people to feel power," he said.

"Violence is an expression of powerlessness."

Spiritual practices can help empower an individual in a positive way, he said.

Massachusetts has not always accepted such approaches, said Lozoff, citing Governor William Weld's axing of a prison yoga program in 1996.

It even became a campaign issue that year, when Senator John Kerry, who was being challenged for his seat by Weld, accused the governor of wasting money on yoga and meditation programs for prisoners. Kerry said Weld took credit for killing the programs, but did not acknowledge that the programs were created under his administration just a few years earlier.

Saying such programs are still criticized, Lozoff rejected the notion that yoga is an extravagance.

"It works," he said. "It's successful all over the place. There are people who change for the better."

The Westborough facility started the yoga class in January, but similar practices have been used there for more than a year. With the cumbersome moniker Dialectic Behavioral Therapy, the approach uses breathing exercises to teach students to control their emotions and stress levels.

Tzipori, who also teaches several academic subjects at the Robert F. Kennedy School, said yoga complements the therapy programs already in place.

"I've seen them coming in tense, and they leave calm," she said of her students.

About half of the 20 residents at the school, the state's most secure type of treatment facility for juvenile offenders, participate in the yoga classes, which are getting good word-of-mouth reviews, she said.

Can it help them keep their violent behavior in check?

"Eventually," Tzipori answered. "I'm not saying it's a cure. I think it's a different option to what has been presented to them before."

Jason, who just earned his GED, said he hopes to attend a community college when he is released, probably in July. Even though he does yoga alone in his room, he said, he is not sure whether he will be able to fit it in between school and work when he gets out.

He speaks quietly, his head bowed - whether talking proudly about his 1-year-old daughter or about his frustrations with being locked up. Yoga is helping him deal with all of it, he said.

It's "good to explore new things," Jason said. "I decided [I] need to change my life."

Lisa Kocian can be reached at 508-820-4231 or lkocian@globe.com.