Freedom Inside?
Farah Godrej
May 31, 2022 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190070083.001.0001 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Ethnography |
|---|---|
| Population | Yoga and meditation teachers and practitioners inside US prisons and prison volunteer communities |
| Interventions | Yoga Meditation |
| Duration | Four years of immersion in prisons and prison volunteer communities |
| Key findings | Argues that yoga and meditation taught in prisons carry both promise and risk: they may function as palliatives that encourage passivity and compliance with unjust power structures, or as tools that develop awareness and attunement toward injustice and support nonconformist critique and challenge. The book examines both possibilities through ethnographic immersion and interviews. |
Abstract
Freedom Inside? offers a combination of personal narrative and scholarly research in order to examine the role of yoga and meditation in US prisons. It offers a glimpse inside the system now known as mass incarceration, which disproportionately punishes, confines, and controls those from black, brown, and/or poor communities at exponentially higher rates, diminishing their life-chances and creating a vast underclass of disempowered, subordinated citizens. How do self-disciplinary practices such as yoga and meditation work when they are taught inside unjust systems? Do they produce political passivity, quietism, and compliance, if offered as palliatives to accept, cope, and comply with unjust power structures? Or, might they prove disruptive to mass incarceration, if offered as tools to develop awareness and attunement toward injustice, to engage in nonconformist responses that include critique and challenge? The book explores both the promises and pitfalls of yoga and meditation when taught in prisons in different ways. It is based on four years of immersion in prisons and prison volunteer communities, along with ethnographic work inside a detention facility, and many in-depth interviews with those who teach and practice inside prisons. It interweaves academic narratives with personal experiences of collaboration with volunteers and incarcerated practitioners.