About the Book
An estimated forty million people in the United States regularly practice yoga, and as an industry it generates over nine billion dollars annually. A major reason for its popularity is its promise of mental and physical well-being: yoga and meditation are thought to be spiritual paths to self-improvement. Yoga is also widely practiced in prisons, another large business in the United States. Prisons in all fifty states offer yoga and meditation as a form of
rehabilitation. But critics argue that such practices can also have disempowering effects, due to their emphasis on acceptance, non-judgment, and non-reaction. If the root of suffering is in the mind, as the
philosophy behind yoga and meditation suggests, then injustice (including mass incarceration) may be reduced to a mental state requiring coping techniques rather than a more critical mindset. Others insist that yoga can heighten people's attention to structural violence, hierarchy, racism, and inequity. In fact, some of history's most radical activists, including M.K. Gandhi and Thich Nhat Hanh, traced their ethical and political commitments to their grounding in yogic or meditative traditions.
Yoga and meditation programs no doubt offer crucial respite for those who are incarcerated, but what sort of political effects do they have? Do they reinforce the neoliberal
logic of mass incarceration which emphasizes individual choices, or can they assist marginalized people in navigating systemic injustice? Drawing on collaborations with incarcerated practitioners, interviews with volunteers and formerly incarcerated practitioners, and her own fieldwork with organizations offering yoga/meditation classes inside prisons, Farah Godrej examines both the promises and pitfalls of yoga and meditation. Freedom Inside? reveals the ways in which incarcerated
persons have used yogic practices to resist the dehumanizing effects of prisons, and to heighten their awareness of institutional racism and mass incarceration among poor people and people of color. Godrej argues
that while these practices could unwittingly exacerbate systemic forms of inequity and injustice, they also serve as resources for challenging such injustice, whether internally (via the realm of belief) or externally (through action). A combination of ethnography and political theory, Freedom Inside? reimagines the concept of "resistance" in a way that considers people's interior lives as a crucial arena for liberation.
Table of Contents:
Section I
1. Introduction: Why Prison Yoga and Meditation?
2. Who Was I?: Scholarship, Personal Narrative, and the Testimony of the Unprotected
3. Yoga and Meditation: Historical and Contemporary Debates
Section II
4. The Total Institution: The World of Mass Incarceration, Prisons, and Population-Control
5. "Rescued by Prison" or "Drinking the Kool-Aid?": Practicing Yoga and Meditation While Incarcerated
6. Mindfulness Meditation in a Men's Detention Facility
Section III
7. The World of Prison Volunteers
8. "Making them Better Human Beings" or "Stirring the Pot"?: Interviews with Volunteers
9. Yogic Philosophy, Nonviolence, and Resistance in a Women's Prison, co-authored with Reighlen Jordan and Maitra
10. Conclusion
About the Author :
Farah Godrej is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Riverside. Her areas of research and teaching include Indian political thought, Gandhi's political thought, cosmopolitanism, globalization and comparative political theory. She also studies contemporary issues such as environmental justice, food politics, and mass incarceration. She is the author of Cosmopolitan Political Thought: Method, Practice,
Discipline, and her research has appeared in many journals, including Political Theory, Political Research Quarterly, Theory & Event, The Review of Politics, and Polity.
Review :
Freedom Inside? is far more than a book about yogic and meditative practices in prison. It is a reflection on the neoliberal seductions of self-help and what self-improvement means in the context of an oppressive total institution. Farah Godrej questions everything, including her role as a researcher, a volunteer, a critic of the carceral state. The result is a deeply meditative, careful, and caring book. By resisting the false dichotomies of self-help versus systemic critique, as well as the "violent/non-violent" distinction, Godrej pushes us past the deadly classifications so endemic to the prison industrial complex.
In this ambitious book, Farah Godrej asks after the tensions, ambivalences, and potentially transformative political work performed by yoga and meditation in the gut of the racialized carceral state. Combining decades of first-person experience as a practitioner of yoga, direct research inside the California prison system, and the sensibilities of an accomplished political theorist, Freedom Inside? is an original, boundary-crossing work that contributes to critically important questions about the relationship between individual practices of the mind, heart, and body and quiescence to—or revolt against—broader collective structures of domination and suffering.
Through the lens of a four-year ethnography as a yoga and meditation instructor in prison, Godrej explores the insidious culture of individual responsibility, the widespread acceptance of responsibilization assumptions by people who volunteer in prison rehabilitation programs, and the limited but real possibilities for institutional reform and individual redemption. These are complex, abstract, and often demoralizing arguments, but Godrej brings them to life with real people, described vividly, engaged compassionately.
