In a six-minute interview with Gianluca Fabii, Prem Rawat talks about a June visit to the women's section of Rebibbia prison in Rome, where the Peace Education Program has been running for four years and where his recorded talks sit at the center of the workshops. The conversation moves from the emotional texture of that afternoon, to the bureaucratic obstacles that usually stall rehabilitation work, to a harder question about whether a culture that increasingly treats violence as a political tool will also accept the idea that people who have harmed others can change. It is a short piece of video, but it lays out a clear argument: inner work is not a luxury for people who have everything else, and the people who most need to look within are often the ones who have been given the least room to do it.
Most people encounter a spiritual teacher's talks on a screen in a living room or on a phone in a commute. The Peace Education Program takes that same material into a place where the screen is one of very few tools available. The program's own description names the themes it explores: self-awareness, dignity, contentment and inner peace. Those are not abstract words in a prison setting. Each one points at something a person in confinement has very limited control over, which is precisely why they become useful territory.
The interview opens with Fabii's greeting and then gets directly to the day: "Today you met the female inmates in Rebibbia Prison. How did it go?" [0:35] It is a simple question, but it locates the whole conversation in a specific room with specific people. A program that runs for four years has a history of repeated visits, familiar faces, and a slow accumulation of trust. The video description notes that Prem Rawat met participants in June and was moved by women who are trying to better themselves. That detail matters. The story is not about a famous visitor dropping in to offer comfort. It is about a long-running workshop structure that a visit reinforces.
Fabii then asks what the women understood, and he returns to a repeated instruction: "You told them many times to look within themselves." [1:51] Turning attention inward sounds like a platitude until you consider the constraints. A cell, a schedule, a sentence, and a record all tell a person what they cannot change. The invitation to look inward is an invitation to find the one place in the day that is not controlled by the institution. For a participant, self-awareness is not a retreat from reality. It is a way of reconnecting with the part of themselves that the walls cannot fully reach.
One of the most revealing moments in the interview comes when Fabii relays what he has heard about the prison itself. "Today I heard that the director of the prison invited the inmates to follow educators like you." [2:20] He follows immediately with a blunt observation: "This is important because usually bureaucracy doesn't really care." [2:30] Then he asks Prem Rawat what he makes of that.
The observation is worth sitting with. Rehabilitation programs in many systems depend on a single director, a single warden, or a single sympathetic officer. When that person moves on, the program can disappear overnight. Fabii's remark acknowledges what it takes for a formal institution to say yes: someone inside the system has to decide that a teacher from outside is worth the paperwork. The fact that the director extended that invitation to the women, rather than just tolerating a visit, is the sort of detail that tells you whether a program is likely to last.
"Today I heard that the director of the prison invited the inmates to follow educators like you. This is important because usually bureaucracy doesn't really care."
— Gianluca Fabii, interviewing Prem Rawat, The Prem Rawat Foundation [2:20]
Fabii then turns to the mechanics. "Your Peace Education Program, what are the challenges it faces?" [2:52] This is the question any program director, funder, or volunteer eventually has to answer honestly. A workshop built around videos of talks requires a room, a screen, a facilitator who understands the material, participants who are willing to stay with it, and an institution that does not withdraw access when something goes wrong. Each of those is a point of failure.
Perhaps the most useful thing in the interview is the question that follows, about what happens after a meeting. Fabii asks whether, right after a session, you can feel that a pathway has opened. Prem Rawat's answer is short: "It takes some time." [3:38] There is a lot in those four words. A pathway is not a switch that flips during a single afternoon. It is a direction that becomes clearer slowly, through repetition, through reflection, and through the quiet work that happens between visits. For anyone running a program like this, that answer is a reminder to measure success over months and years rather than hours. It also protects participants from the pressure of expecting an instant transformation, which can itself become a source of disappointment.
The interview then broadens sharply. Fabii describes the current geopolitical moment as one in which "violence and aggression are not extraordinary anymore," where they have "almost become a political approach to resolve issues." [3:58] He asks whether there is a risk that society will adopt that principle as its default. The question is not really about prisons. It is about what kind of example a culture sets, and whether the people inside its institutions are being offered a different one.
A peace education program is, at its core, a bet on the opposite principle. It assumes that a person can learn to respond to their own life differently, that dignity is not something granted or withdrawn by circumstance, and that contentment and inner peace can be cultivated from within. When Fabii asks about the risk of violence becoming normal, he is asking whether that bet still makes sense in a world that rewards force. The interview does not resolve the question, and it does not need to. The point of the question is to make the listener notice how much the program's premise runs against the prevailing mood.
The sharpest question comes near the end. Fabii asks Prem Rawat what he says when someone wonders why he works with "people who have made mistakes and especially people who have done harm." [5:16] It is the question that many people ask of any prison program, and it deserves a direct answer rather than a dodge. The interview's framing suggests that the answer lies in the same principle that runs through the entire conversation: that self-awareness and dignity are not rewards for good behavior. They are capacities that every person has, including those who have done serious harm.
The interview closes on an image that frames the stakes. Fabii concludes with a line describing prison as having "opened the doors to freedom for them." [6:15] Whether that sentence is read as the interviewer's summary or as an echo of what was said in response, it captures the core claim of the program. Freedom in this context is not only a physical release. It is the discovery that the mind and heart have room to move, even when the body is confined. That discovery is what the Peace Education Program is trying to make possible, one workshop at a time.
It is easy to dismiss a short video like this as a promotional piece. But its structure contains a genuine argument about how change happens. Change requires a space that institutions are willing to hold open. It requires teaching that addresses inner life rather than only external behavior. It requires patience measured in seasons, not sessions. And it requires a willingness to believe in the capacity of people whom most of the world has already written off. None of those ideas is exotic. Each is hard to practice, and the interview makes the difficulty visible without dramatizing it.
For readers who are working in education, corrections, or community programs, the most practical takeaway is Prem Rawat's own brief answer: "It takes some time." [3:38] Expect slow returns. Protect the relationships that make a program possible. And keep returning to the simple instruction that runs through the whole conversation, to look within, because that is the one place a difficult environment cannot take away.
To see the full context for this interview, read The Prem Rawat Foundation's account of the visit and the Peace Education Program at tprf.org. That piece covers the June visit in more detail than a six-minute conversation can. If you are interested in the themes the program draws on, start with the four words at its center: self-awareness, dignity, contentment, and inner peace. Then ask yourself where each one could take root in a place where almost everything else has been decided for you.
