Terry Conrad - Volunteer Prison Chaplain, Spiritual Counselor, Artist
Inmates are no different than anyone else. They just happen to be in prison,” Terry Conrad says as he sits in his Galveston office, his lanky frame folded easily into an office chair. The 66-year-old is a certified volunteer chaplain’s assistant, and runs regular Buddhist meditations in three prisons in southeast Texas, serving in Beaumont and Rosharon. He’s in Beaumont every week, leading meditation in the Stiles Unit, and meets monthly with inmates in Rosharon.
“The program in Rosharon is less intensive,” he explains. “But I do two programs in Beaumont, a Buddhist meditation program, and thenI sponsor a program called Discovering Ethics, based upon the Dali
Lama’s book Ethics in the New Millennium.” Conrad says the ethics program usually draws two sessions of twenty inmates, and is facilitated by ten others. “I worked with the facilitator group to train them on leadership skills; they wrote the study guide for the program.”
Conrad says he encourages the facilitators to lead the discussion group so each of the main points in the book is made. This class is open and anyone may take it, although facilitators must attend a training session and have to have taken the class at least once, if not twice. “It’s quite a wonderful class,” he says.
Conrad has always been drawn to volunteerism. He spent nearly forty years as a metal sculptor in New Mexico. In going back and forth to Santa Fe, he always drove past a penitentiary and found himself wondering what it would be like to work with inmates. He’s been drawn to Buddhism since he wrote a paper in high school comparing Christianity and Buddhism, and says he was able to see the similarities in their teachings. Growing up in Montana, he didn’t encounter many Buddhists. “But I always had that in my back pocket,” he says.
Conrad concedes that the life of an artist is contemplative and spiritual in its own right. As the years of working with metal took their toll on him physically, he was pulled further toward meditation.
In the mid-1990’s he participated in his first retreat, a two-week silent program in upstate New York, where he says he was “scared to death.” But remembers the structure of the program was very helpful.
“We would start early in the morning,” he remembers. “I would go on a walk; come back and do a meditation. I would eat a meal – all in silence – and do a meditation. I attended a teaching session where I could ask questions. I was anxious, but I very quickly settled in. For the first couple of days, there was all this chatter in my mind. But around the third day, I settled down and it was extraordinary.”
It wouldn’t be much longer before those twin forces, volunteerism and meditation, pulled him into his current role. Following his retreat he says, “I got serious about meditation. And I began working with a teacher. He asked if I would answer mail he sometimes received from prisoners, and I said Yeah, that sounds good. So, I started doing that.”
One of those letters came from an inmate at the Stiles Unit asking if someone could come to meet with them once a month to work with the inmates and sponsor a meditation program on the unit. Conrad took on the task. He participated in extensive training to become a volunteer chaplain, going through various security checks and mandatory hours of work with current prison chaplains. Concurrently, he continued his own practice of Buddhism and meditation, using what he has learned to
help those he serves.
Seven years on, he explains that his program has been beneficial to those behind bars. “The institutional approach to prison is not really about rehabilitation, it’s about confinement,” says Conrad. “But there
are programs that are available to prisoners, recovery programs and spiritual programs and the like. It’s up to the individual to take advantage of those.
”Meditation, Conrad explains, allows people to recognize what is happening within. “We have insights all the time,” he says. “But meditation allows us to clear away the chatter of our minds and recognize them.”
For prisoners, that means being able to take ownership of their actions, and to seek ways to be better functioning members of society Conrad has three goals for his program: giving inmates the ability to experience inner peace while in prison; helping them to re-integrate themselves into society when released; and preventing their return to prison after release. “The recidivism rate of an inmate who’s gone through some sort of meditation or spiritual program is around ten percent,” he says. “The national average is about seventy percent. So that is a significant difference.”
Conrad says that he hears from both participants and prison officials that his program helps to open channels of communication and allows inmates to have a better sense of themselves. He calls meditation a powerful tool for clearing away self-serving and self-grasping behavior.
“We’ve been programmed to think that things will be better if we have a bigger house, or if we have a larger TV,” he says. “But when you meditate, you come to an understanding of the way things are, not the way you perceive them to be. And you come to understand that you can recognize behavior and change it, without having to react to every situation.”
In addition to working with inmates, Conrad also routinely corresponds with three ex-offenders, helping them adjust to living in society. He admits that because he is a volunteer, he’s somewhat limited in what he can do; he can’t meet with them face to face, and he can’t make or take phone calls.
“But I can correspond,” he says. “And I am. I can write and offer them information about resources or centers where they live where they can continue their training, or suggest ways for them to think and reflect on meditation.
”One of those correspondents, Conrad says, is making the transition quite well. He’s found a mediation teacher and he has a family and children. “He’s thriving.”
Conrad knows he is making a difference. He explains that part of the tradition he practices is not only to achieve spiritual awakening for himself, but also to foster a commitment to happiness and well being for all beings on the planet.
“This work is just a natural outgrowth of that tradition,” he says matter-of-factly. “It’s a very natural thing to move in this direction. It wasn’t a difficult choice. In a sense it’s a calling. I felt drawn to this very early on. I think as we get older, we become more responsive to our interests and our talents, and I’ve tried to use those to their fullest.”