The transcendental meditation program and criminal recidivism in California

Abstract

A sample of 259 male felon parolees of the California Department of Corrections (CDC) who had voluntarily learned the Transcendental Meditation (TM) technique while incarcerated had more favorable parole outcomes than statewide CDC parolees (p <.004). By comparison to matched controls, the TM group also had consistently more favorable outcomes as determined from rap sheets from one to five years after parole (p ⩽.05). Finally, with twenty-eight social and criminal history variables controlled by stepwise multiple regression, TM significantly (p <.001) reduced recidivism (with partial correlations ranging from r = -0.0893 to -0.1226) at one year and at 0.5 to 6.0 years after parole, whereas prison education, vocational training, and psychotherapy did not consistently reduce recidivism. Fifty-nine percent of not-yet-released meditators surveyed in prison were still meditating up to seven years after instruction, and TM recidivists were significantly (p <.002) less regular in meditation than the not-yet-released meditators, suggesting that regular TM practice is important for reducing recidivism. Despite the limitations of the retrospective study design, these results all indicate a reduction in recidivism due to TM practice that is of practical significance.