Hot Rock Redemption:
Sweat Lodge Ceremony
in Juvenile Prison

By Jan Sturmann
June 2005 - 2137 words

At the prison I exchange my driver's license for what looks like a garage door remote control. "Press the green button if you're attacked," the guard explains, "and we'll come running." I slip the device into my pocket, afraid now I'll cause accidental mayhem.
      The Herman G. Stark Youth Correctional Facility in Chino, CA clings to the eastern fringe of L.A., where creeping subdivisions shoulder out struggling dairy farms. Over 800 young 'wards of the state' are locked up here behind a beauty-strip of dense trees. Once this facility housed over 1400 inmates for crimes committed before the age of sixteen. A 'juvenile offender,' even with a 'life' sentence, would be released - given a second chance - when he turned twenty-five.
     But in 1999 California passed Proposition 22, which dropped the adult sentencing age from sixteen to fourteen and required that juvenile offenders still serving out a sentence by their eighteenth birthday, be transferred to adult prison.
      Armed with my panic button, I walk through the security doors where the prison Public Information Officer welcomes me to her office adorned with Frido Kahlo posters. To me she is the Moses of Prison Bureaucracy who parts the sea of red tape so a curious photographer can take pictures of an Indian Medicine Man sweating in a hut with a bunch of young criminals.
      She escorts me out of the administration building and into the large central courtyard surrounded by cellblocks. I see no inmates, just sense their invisible eyes watching from narrow cell windows. My breath shallows in an atmosphere dense as mattress mold.
      At the entrance to a garden enclosed by a fifteen-foot barbed-wire fence, a man in his sixties with a long grey braid down his back greets us. "Jimi Castillo is the name," he says and we shake. He welcomes me to his garden as he locks the gate behind us. He is the Pipe Carrier for the Tongva and Acjachmen tribes on whose ancestral land L.A. and this prison are built. His business card reads Native American Chaplin. He has conducted weekly sweat lodge ceremonies here since 1989.

Jimi introduces me to the wards preparing the lodge. Some throw canvas tarps over a domed structure made from bent willow saplings. Round, standing 6 feet high and 20 feet in diameter, it sits like an overturned basket over a central shallow 3-foot diameter pit. When they are done, and the low entrance covered, the lodge will be dark as a womb inside. Another young man fills buckets with water and sprinkles in dried sage. Two wards, already sweating, tend a large fire that heats fifty-six lava rocks, each the size of a skull. In a couple hours, when the rocks glow like coals, they will be transferred to the pit in the lodge.
      The sweat lodge ceremony - which includes sprinkling water on hot rocks to create a sauna-like environment - has long been practiced all through Native North America as a way to cleanse and pray. The missionaries and churches, and later the federal government, tried to ban this 'heathen rite.' But in the last couple of decades there has been a Native religious revival, one result of which has been a push to allow sweat lodge ceremonies in prisons.
      I expected participants to have long black hair and brown skin. But around me I see all the human shades. "I don't differentiate between the races," Jimi explains. "Anyone from the two-legged tribe is welcome to sweat with us."
      He shows me the sage, corn, squash and beans the wards have planted here. "I want them to know that when they step through the gate, they leave the prison and enter sacred ground," he says. "This is a safe place, where they can feel the earth under bare feet, where they can experience the sun and rain on their skin. Here they can come to face themselves, and maybe heal." A garden sculpture of a large turtle faces east. In one corner a shrine honors the dead.
      We walk past rakes and pitchforks and spades used to tend the fire. My hand fondles the panic button in my pocket as Jimi catches my worried look. "In adult prison they weld a bar across the fork tines so it can't be used to stab anyone," he explains. "But here, where we sweat, is the only place in this prison where no blood has ever been spilt. Even in the churches, fights break out. The wards know, if they ever spill blood here, I will burn the lodge down and leave."

"How many frames a second does your camera shoot?" asks an Asian man, covered in crude tattoos. I don't know, but it breaks the ice, and he introduces himself as Huy (all wards' names have been changed).
      He was born in Vietnam, but left with his family on a boat in 1974. They drifted through refugee camps before settling in San Diego. Culturally lost, he ran with a gang, did something terrible at age twelve, and has been locked up ever since. He is twenty-three now, hopes to be released in 2007. He never went to a prom, never had a girlfriend, and never walked across a graduation stage.
      "But it's the loneliness that's so hard in here," he tells me as we stand around the fire. "My family seldom visits, and I get a 15 minute phone call a week. You just get past the greetings and it's over and I'm back in my cell. Sometimes I spend 23 hours a day in there alone. It's hard not to go crazy. Some of us do. The pressure gets too much and they lose it, or try to kill themselves."
      He is the only Asian attending the sweat. "I've been to the Muslim services, I've been to Christian church, and I've learned from them all. But here," he says, "is the only place where I feel at home. Isn't that strange?"

A large Hispanic man, with Brown Pride tattooed across his chest, adds logs to the fire. Blinking smoke from red-rimmed eyes, he introduces himself as Pedro. He is the fire tender for the ceremony. His arms and legs are scorched hairless by the flames.
      "I used to tend fires at a prison further north," he tells me. He was released on parole, but a few weeks later got stopped driving drunk, and was sent here to finish his sentence. He contacted Jimi, asked if he could attend the sweat. Jimi soon put him in charge of heating the rocks. Now, every Thursday, he's released from his cell at noon to start the fire.
      The other grounds keepers, finished with their jobs, cluster around the flames. They casually touch each other with arms on shoulders, around necks, joke and josh and relentlessly tease. "Hey Pedro, how many pounds you lost already stoking that fire? Only another twenty more to go. Add some more wood, make it hotter, burn off that fat." Pedro smiles and winks at me. "They talk tough now, but they'll be moaning the loudest when it gets too hot for them inside the lodge."

Two guards - their belts a jingling assortment of keys, mace, nightsticks and radios - escort thirty wards into the enclosed garden. Once safely inside, the guards step back and watch from the periphery. The wards change from blue prison garb into baggy grey shorts. They go sit under the tree on chairs speckled with bird droppings. Two flip through car mags. Five beat a large drum, practicing a new song. Others simply stand, staring into the fire.
     Jimi Castillo calls everyone to attention, makes a few announcements and welcomes two new members. They cover their nervousness with folded arm coolness as Jimi explains the ceremony to them. Next, wards are encouraged to speak, share experiences and struggles. Recently two rival gang members, sitting under this tree, canceled a contract to kill each other.
     The wards line up beside the lodge. Their scarred and tattooed bodies are pudgy with bad prison food and lack of exercise. Jimi, now dressed in shorts, stands before the fire and prays. Crouched low to fit through the small opening into the tarped structure, he enters the lodge with an eagle's wing and a bag of herbs. As Jimi sprinkles a circle of tobacco on the ground, Pedro carries a wooden bowl of tobacco down the line. Everyone takes a pinch. At the lodge entrance each one says a silent prayer, tosses the tobacco into the fire, then turns, kneels, says, "To all my ancestors," and crawls humbly inside. Jimi greets them with the brush of an eagle feather. The guards stand at the periphery fiddling listlessly with their gear.

I'm invited to join and do, shed clothes, glasses and camera, pull on shorts, and find a spot near the entrance. Forty guys squat on the dirt floor, packed in, shoulder-to-shoulder, knee-to-knee, around the shallow pit. The light through the not-yet-covered entrance falls on bodies like a Rembrandt painting.
      Pedro begins transferring the glowing rocks, balanced on a pitchfork, from fire to the lodge. Crouched by the central pit, a young man with a mangled hand, welcomes each rock, and uses two antlers to position them. The heat radiates fiercely, pressing tight against bare skin. Jimi sprinkles the rocks with sweet-smelling herbs that spark and flare, and hands reach out to fan the scent to nostrils.
      Pedro finally pulls the door flap closed. In sudden darkness, eyes stare wide, searching for a sliver of light to cling to, but find only the volcanic glow in the center.
      A prayer and a song begin the ceremony. A clapper stick keeps time. Silence. Then Jimi makes the first splash of sage-scented water bursts upon the rocks. Steam bellows up against the roof and curls down hard against bare shoulders. You hear groans, realize you groan too, as steam scolds nostrils, scorches backs, and forces sweat from gaping pores. The hotter it gets, the harder they sing. You feel yourself anointed by another man's sweat as he sings and prays and sways next to you. Already you're thirsty, feel back muscles cramp.
      Now it no longer matters who is a prisoner, who is free, what tattoos cover skin, or where you're from. In this womb you're simply human, naked, alone and together.
      We sit and pray through four rounds. In the first 'selfish' round pray for yourself; in the second pray for the women in your life; the third round focus on all the people you know; and finally pray for the world.
      At the end of each round just when you can't take the heat any longer, believe your pounding heart and boiling brain will explode - exactly then - mercifully the flap opens for more glowing rocks to be brought in, and an exquisite gush of cool air pulls you back from the edge.
      "No one has ever died in here," Jimi reassures us. "But, on occasion, we've had to carry a few people out. Each one had a life altering experience."
      Three more rounds of darkness and prayers proceed. Three more rounds of hissing rocks, rising steam, and desperate entanglements with one's fragile mortality. As the flap finally opens for the last time, bodies that lay curled on the dirt floor for coolness, now sit up, eyes blinking. Their faces are streaked with mud and fierce tears of gratitude.

The halogen security lights sparkle on glistening bodies as each man crawls from the lodge and stands in a circle around the fire. All link hands and say a final prayer.
      Jimi tells them, "Don't ever forget this feeling of being free, so that when you walk out of this prison, you will never have to come back again."
      The circle breaks up and wards pull tarps from the lodge and fold them away. Standing under showerheads rigged up along the garden wall, they wash away mud and sweat. Words slowly return, but softly now, without the harsh humor and strutting bravado.
      Pedro shows me a medicine bag he is making. An intricate pattern of tiny beads covers the leather. "Each bead is a prayer for my family," he says. "My wife just left me, taking my two kids." He hangs the bag around his neck.
      The guards escort the wards inside the wire cage that transitions from the sweat lodge garden to the prison. Radios crackle, more guards drive up and orders are given. Jimi embraces each ward before he is escorted back to his cell. Despite the harsh light, their eyes stay tender.