In South Korea, People Check In to Faux Prison for Meditation With a Penal Theme

In South Korea, People Check In to Faux Prison for Meditation With a Penal Theme

Clients at 'Prison Inside Me' Pay to Be Confined to 60-Square-Foot Cell; 'This Is My Third Time'

Wall Street Journal | May 5, 2014 

WSJ reporter JaeYeon Woo spent two nights in solitary confinement at "Prison Inside Me," a jailhouse-themed retreat in South Korea.

HONGCHEON, South Korea—It is still dark. The chilly air leaks in at the windowsill. There's no clock on the wall. Park Woo-sub assumes he needs to wait a bit longer for breakfast to be served through a slot at the bottom of the door to his solitary cell.

"This is my third time in prison," says the unshaven 58-year-old who looks as if he has had a sleepless night. 　He is wearing a regulation blue uniform with an ID number on his chest.

He closes his eyes and tries to meditate. It isn't that there is anything else to do in the 60-square-foot cell whose only furnishings are a toilet, a tiny sink and a table. Many random thoughts swirl about in his head.

"Being confined to a prison can be suffocating, but it also offers time to focus solely on me and spend some quiet time with myself," he says.

In his earlier incarcerations, he was behind bars for participating in the democratization movement that swept across South Korea in the 1980s. This time, he was admitted voluntarily. He walked into the cell and locked himself in.

Park Woo-sub wearing a regulation blue uniform, meditates in his cell at 'Prison Inside Me,' a stress-reduction center with a penal theme. Bae Jong-hwa for The Wall Street Journal

In a country where the social pressure to do well in school and to find highly paid jobs is intense [well, at least we Cambodians can't be accused of this problem withour 24 official holidays and non-functioning state and everything else with it], an industry is attempting to come up with some extreme relaxation.

In the middle of nowhere on the outskirts of Hongcheon, 58 miles northeast of Seoul, Kwon Yong-seok runs "Prison Inside Me," a stress-reduction center with a penal theme. A meditation building, auditorium and management center sit on a 2-acre piece of land.

"I didn't know how to stop working back then," said the soft-spoken 47-year-old Mr. Kwon, looking back on his life as a public prosecutor on Jeju Island in the late 1990s.　"I felt like I was being swept away against my will, and it seemed I couldn't control my own life."

One day, Mr. Kwon asked a prison governor, who was an old acquaintance of his, whether he could spend a week behind bars—for therapeutic reasons. That was out of the question, he was told. Besides, he himself felt that a whole week would be too long a stay.

Although South Korea is slowly inching toward a better work-life balance, with the government and businesses emphasizing the importance of taking longer vacations in a somewhat paradoxical effort to improve productivity, people still work notoriously long hours. The latest available data compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show South Koreans worked the longest hours among 34 OECD members in 2011, after Mexico, with 2,090 hours a year. The OECD average was 1,765 hours.

Too much work is a quality-of-life issue. The country ranked 26th in the Life Satisfaction category of the annual Better Life Index for 2013, an OECD measure of how people evaluate the quality of their lives. South Koreans gave their lives a 4.3 on a scale of 0 to 10, lower than the OECD average of 6.6.

In June last year, the construction of the prison-like spiritual house was completed. It took a year and cost Mr. Kwon and his wife Roh Ji-hyang, head of a theater company, 2 billion won, or $19 million. Parts of the cost were covered by donations and loans from friends and relatives. Mr. Kwon says the goal of the facility, which has 28 solitary confinement cells, isn't to make a profit.

On top of private meditation sessions, paying guests are helped to reflect on their lives and learn how to free themselves from what Mr. Kwon calls the "inner prison," through meditation, spiritual classes and "healing" plays in a group session in the auditorium. A two-night stay costs 150,000 won or about $146.

So far, it hasn't been as easy for the couple to run the place as they had envisioned. They had to cut the length of stays to as little as two days because people aren't willing to, or simply can't, take time off. Also the facility had to make another big concession to modernity—allowing guests to check their smartphones at least once a day.

"People seem nervous without a phone and simply worry too much about an emergency, which seldom happens," said Mr. Kwon.

One recent morning, about 20 people attended a personality analysis class conducted by a Catholic priest, a session aimed at helping participants understand themselves as well as others, one of the essential elements to finding "inner peace," according to Mr. Kwon.

As soon as a short break started, people rushed to grab their phones. "Someone might have called me or left a message," said Park Seong-ho who quickly swiped the screen to see whether any new messages had arrived.

While generally satisfied with the quality of programs, "it would have been more helpful for self-control if the facility had been in poorer shape like in a real prison," Mr. Park said, "it is too clean and warm to be called a prison."

Life in prison, though physically constrained, can be free in that there is less pressure from modern living. Some of the country's intellectuals and political dissidents have said they found inspiration and peace of mind while serving time in real prisons.

Former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, who was an avid reader, once famously said, "I wish I could go back to prison," complaining that he lacked time to read books because of his busy schedule.

The former president, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000, spent six years in prison and nearly 10 years under house arrest for his democratization movements. His writings in jail were later published under the title of "Prison Writings." Another famous book, "Thoughts From Prison" by Shin Young-bok, a political dissident-turned-professor, became a classic for its thought provoking self-examination.

"To be honest, the two-day-three-night program is too short. But the reality is people complain if we make it longer," Mr. Kwon said, "I only wish people could get a rare chance, even if forcibly, to reflect on the past and take it easy."