Toby Jorrin/Associated Press

Federal inmates gather in a circle to smoke ceremonial tobacco before their weekly sweat lodge at the Torrance County Detention Center in Estancia. The sweat lodge is part of a national movement to provide American Indian inmates a way to keep connected with their culture, though prison wardens say it also helps keep order behind bars.

Toby Jorrin/Associated Press

American Indian prisoners at Torrance County Detention Center in Estancia wait for lava rocks to heat in a wood fire before entering their sweat lodge. Prison officials say the weekly sweat lodge ceremony is a religious service like those offered to inmates of other faiths, but they also consider it a privilege that can be taken away for bad behavior.

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ESTANCIA — The volatile cocktail of anger and frustration mixing in Melvin Martin had reached a boiling point. He felt like he was about to go crazy.

Far from his home on the Navajo Nation and far from his people's ancient healing traditions, he could do nothing but fester inside a Sandoval County lockup as he waited for the justice system to run its course.

Today, the soft-spoken Navajo from Crownpoint says he's a different person. He seems relaxed, respectful and reconnected to his culture.

All that, he says, is thanks to a traditional sweat lodge ceremony held weekly at the Torrance County Detention Center, where he's serving a federal sentence for assault.

"We look beyond these wires," he says, pointing to the pair of fences and rolls of razor wire that separate the prison from the prairie.

"Me and the brothers here, we look beyond all that, even though we know we're within. Once we start this and we get the ceremony going, our minds go back home - they go back to the places of our people, our land," he says. "We can get away from this place."

The privately run Torrance County prison is one of many across the nation that offer the traditional ceremony for American Indian inmates.

The goal, says Chaplain John Moffitt, is the same as the other religious services the Torrance County prison provides for members of different faiths.

He says prison wardens have come to recognize the constitutional rights of inmates to practice their religions and the benefits such practice can have for the inmates and for keeping order.

"The spiritual programming, that's what's going to change lives," the chaplain says.

It's been three decades since the first sweat lodge was built in a Nebraska prison, but American Indian prisoners in some states only recently won access to such religious ceremonies and others are still fighting for it. Security is usually the argument against such ceremonies.

"We have had to pursue litigation, legislation and, more recently, negotiating with prison officials to implement these programs," said Lenny Foster, a Navajo spiritual adviser who works with prisoners across the country and who has testified before Congress and the United Nations on the rights of American Indian prisoners.

"I think for the longest time we've been denied, as Indian people, that right to practice our tradition, our culture," he said. "We were told not to speak our language, we cut our hair, we were told to convert to Christianity. Our sweat lodges, our medicine bundles, our pipes were burned."

Foster, head of the tribally funded Navajo Nation Corrections Project, built his first inmate sweat lodge at Arizona State Prison in 1980. In the time since, he says, he has seen positive effects.

"The intense heat of the steam - what we call grandfather's breath - opens up not only the pores, the physical aspect, but it opens up the mind and the spirit, and there's a real purification and a cleansing of the soul that takes place," he said.

Foster noted that many inmates are locked up because of alcohol problems, drugs and anger issues.

"They need to detox and purify themselves so they have a clarity of mind and realize the mistake that they made that led them into prison," he said.

To prison officials in Torrance County, the sweat lodge is both a right and a privilege for prisoners. As long as they behave, prisoners can look forward to sweating on the weekend.

"Having an inmate spiritually look within themselves and leave their (religious) services a different person, even for a while, that's helpful to us security-wise," said prison spokeswoman Ivonne Riley. "Security is the No. 1 thing, but anything to help anybody to make it a little better, we look forward to that."

Most American Indian prisoners take the lodge seriously and won't do anything to jeopardize their participation, she said.

On a recent Thursday, Foster visited the Torrance County prison for a special ceremony.

In a quiet area on the east side of the prison, inmates tended to a fire surrounded with lava rocks while others draped blankets and canvas tarps over a frame of willow branches to form the lodge.

Foster gathered the group and talked quietly as they rolled tobacco into cigarettes. They took turns puffing, using their free hand to catch the smoke and let it wash over themselves as they prayed.

By then the rocks were hot. One by one the men disappeared into the canvas dome, not to be seen again for about an hour. Guards waited in the hot sun.

The silence eventually was broken by a drum beat and voices resonating from inside the sweat lodge.

When the ceremony was over and the men crawled out of the lodge for the last time, they acted less like prisoners and more like longtime friends, smiling and laughing and jumping in rain puddles from the night before.

"We tell them that they're free when they're out here," Foster says. "They join the sunlight, the fresh air, the wind."

Martin, who was immersed in his culture growing up on the reservation, hasn't seen his family in two years. But he says the sweat lodge helps him maintain a connection to his heritage.

"It really helps out a lot," he says. "It keeps me with a sound mind."

For some American Indians, it has taken a prison sentence to learn about their culture. Foster calls it a "sad fact" that these Indians never had an opportunity to learn the songs, prayers and ceremonies before being locked up.

But Foster is hopeful that a movement across Indian Country to rekindle interest in native traditions and languages will help young Indians regain their pride and dignity so they don't end up like the men and women with whom he works.

Walter Echo-Hawk Jr., a staff attorney with the Native American Rights Fund, said there is a long history of discrimination against indigenous religions in the United States.

But like Foster, he sees education as the key to acceptance.

"We have found that the American people are fundamentally fair-minded people, and once educated about the bona fide nature of native religious practices and the need for native people to have equal access to their religious opportunities, most policymakers have been very quick to act to do the right thing," he said.