The author reviews prison yoga classes

The narrative surrounding the benefits of teaching yoga in prisons is incomplete, according to a UC Riverside professor who taught yoga in prisons for several years and wrote a book about the experience.

“There’s a false narrative that says ‘if you improve, you won’t be locked up,'” said Farah Godrey, associate professor of political science. “In prisons, this idea of ​​self-cultivation is used in an insidious way. This becomes a device for telling the incarcerated that their incarceration is their own fault.

In her just-published book, Freedom Inside? Yoga and Meditation in the Carceral State,” the author argues that the power of yoga and meditation can be taught more carefully by incorporating an awareness of the structural and systemic injustices that drive so many people into the prison system.

Godrej’s first contact with yoga was in her native India, in her 20s. At that time she read the Bhagavad-Gita, one of the canonical texts of yoga, along with the Yoga Sutras and other such texts. These texts teach an inner spiritual search, accepting without reaction and detaching from worldly circumstances. Aided by her study of Buddhist traditions, she initially took the view that the key to happiness was not changing one’s external circumstances, but rather one’s inner state.

But that message also gave her pause: “What about collective suffering? Should we accept inequality and injustice as part of the vicissitudes of life, or worse, as created by our own minds?’

Godrej’s book makes a compelling case for looking at the “prison industrial complex.” This is the term many use to describe the system of interests that profit financially from prisons, including unions and lobbying groups, private prisons, and companies that supply goods and services (including bail) to prisons.

Godrej cited evidence showing that 2.3 million people are in US prisons, 10 times the number of comparable democracies. One in 23 American adults is part of the system in some way, most of them from underrepresented demographics. And one in two American adults has had a close family member in prison. She also cited evidence about prosecutorial discretion and sentencing laws, along with discrimination and structural rules, that tend to trap people from certain communities in cycles of repeated incarceration.

Along with his research on mass incarceration, Godrej learned that many organizations were offering yoga and meditation in prisons. She found that the lessons offered paralleled those of the yogic and Buddhist traditions with which she was familiar: downplaying external causes, focusing on internal ones. Proponents of prison yoga preach non-reaction and acceptance of injustice.

By then, Godrej had become more inclined to a message closer to that of Mahatma Gandhi, who advocated non-violent but destructive action.

She explored the possibility of teaching yoga as a volunteer in a prison while seeking approval to conduct research. Prisons are known to be closed to outside scrutiny, and gaining scientific access for research requires two years of appeals and assurances to prison officials.

Between August 2016 and March 2020, Godrej’s weekly routine included driving to various prisons in Southern California, often traveling long distances, where she led yoga and meditation sessions. During that time, she writes, she “immersed herself in the landscape and logistics of prison life” while getting to know many students.

Godrej’s approach to training was informed by her extensive immersion in the prison landscape, including in-depth interviews with other volunteers and attending training offered by various organizations working in prisons. She gravitates toward approaches that connect yoga and meditation to their potential to address structural and systemic inequalities, including race, gender, and socioeconomic inequality.

Godrej found that many who practice yoga while incarcerated echo the words of Alex, a former incarcerated practitioner who adheres to the concepts of personal responsibility and acceptance of consequences.

“One thing that Buddhism and meditation did for me…no matter what you do, make a decision and everything has a consequence. I accepted it and took responsibility for my actions,” Alex told Godrej.

Another practitioner, Lucas, said, “Maybe through meditation I was able to accept (my sentence) enough that it didn’t bother me so much.”

Godrej emerged from his four years teaching yoga in prisons with a lesson much more nuanced. She said that there are indeed many benefits to the basic lesson of spirituality, of accepting responsibility as a step towards self-cultivation. But she believes that acceptance, while a valuable lesson in prison yoga, should not be the last lesson.

“Too often … I observed how teachers and students in prisons treated acceptance as the ultimate goal of these practices, neglecting to mention that acceptance need not mean acquiescence, reconciliation, or passivity toward injustice,” she wrote.

Her book includes interviews with 36 other prison yoga and meditation volunteers. Godrej writes that most volunteers believe in the need to reform prison into a court of personal change, to make prison time “productive, introspective and redemptive.”

Godrej prefers what she calls a “dissenting narrative.”

“I have found that practices of self-control and self-discipline can help prison practitioners develop an inner strength and sense of agency that defies the institution’s capacity to define their lived experience,” she said.

Or in the words of Michael, another ex-prisoner quoted in the book, meditation “teaches us to see our conditions; it taught me how to think and how to ask, not only internally but also externally.” He said it provides a “moral compass” to navigate the world.

Godrej’s book ends with a call to yoga instructors to think more carefully about the messages they spread in prisons. It also offers beginner classes in various traditions and yoga and meditation classes, and explores prison culture and its volunteer dynamics.

Freedom Inside is published by Oxford University Press. Available through online retailers and at Vroman Bookstore in Pasadena and Skylight Books in Los Angeles.

On January 25, 2023, the Center for Ideas in Society at UCR will host a book launch by Godrej. The center also provided research funding for the book.

Lead photo by John Moore, Getty Images