Osho said, in his book From Unconsciousness to Consciousness, “Something is basically wrong somewhere. What they are doing is unrelated to the problem. The person who is committing a crime is not a criminal, he is a sick person. He need not be thrown into a jail and tortured, he has to be put into a psychiatric hospital and served there, medically, respectfully. It is not his fault.
You must know there was a time when mad people were thought to be criminals and they were thrown into prison, and there they were beaten. It was only a few hundred years ago that it occurred to anyone that these people are not criminals, they are suffering from a certain disease. By beating them you cannot beat the disease out. You are simply being idiotic. They need treatment, and you are mistreating them. And the same is true about all criminals, because I don’t see that any criminal is born a criminal. The way he is brought up, the society in which he is brought up, makes him a criminal. And once his mind starts becoming criminal, then you have to change the whole way of his mind. It is no use chaining him, throwing him into jail, beating him — it does nothing. It is simply reinforcing in him that when he comes out he will be a confirmed criminal, a graduated criminal.
Your imprisonments, your prisons, are universities for criminals, from which they graduate. So once a man goes to jail, he comes out having learned many things from old criminals with whom he has been there. And all that he learns from your behavior is that to commit the crime is not the crime, but to be caught is the crime. So he learns ways not to be caught.
You have to change the track of his mind which moves into criminality. And that can be done. Biochemistry can be of much help, medicine can be of much help, psychiatry can be of much help. Now we have every resource to make that man a dignified human being.
Service is not needed, what is needed is a sharing of your consciousness — your knowledge, your being, your respect — but first you must have it.
To me the greatest problem of humanity is that they don’t know anything of meditation. To me, that is the greatest problem. Neither the population, nor the atom bomb, nor hunger… no, these are not basic problems; they can be easily solved by science.
The only, basic problem that science will not be able to solve is that people don’t know how to meditate.”
The Dalai Lama said, “If every 8 year old in the world is taught meditation, we will eliminate violence from the world within one generation.”
